The Rise and Fall and Resurrection of California Pizza Kitchen

On Wednesday, March 27, 1985, just before 5 p.m., attorneys Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax felt terrified. After taking out $200,000 in loans, getting second mortgages on each of their houses, and raising an additional $350,000 from 22 friends, the two were getting ready to do something they’d never done before. A few months earlier, Flax and Rosenfield had signed a lease (which they had to personally guarantee) near the intersection of South Beverly Drive and Charleville in a part of Beverly Hills that was something of a restaurant graveyard. Now, they were taking a gamble with their personal finances and legal careers, and the moment of truth had come.

At 5 p.m., Rosenfield and Flax opened the doors of California Pizza Kitchen, and as fate would have it, the very first person to enter was actress Shirley MacLaine. It seemed like a good omen. “Her agent’s office was right upstairs,” Rosenfield tells Eater. MacLaine came in, ordered a coffee, and left. Luckily, she wasn’t the only customer that day. The space quickly filled up and remained that way for several months. “We didn’t take reservations,” says Suzanne Goin, the James Beard Award-winning chef and restaurateur behind AOC, who worked as a hostess at the original location the summer it opened. “I remember I would basically gauge by looking at the person how angry they would be if I told them how long the wait really was, then give them a glass of wine and have them drink on the sidewalk.” Almost immediately, California Pizza Kitchen became a hit. Rosenfield and Flax opened two more locations the next year, and by the early 1990s, the brand had dozens of outposts nationwide. Just seven years after opening, CPK (it had almost immediately become known by its acronym) received an offer from PepsiCo, which owned Pizza Hut, KFC, and Taco Bell, to buy a controlling share.

The rocketship to success had lifted off, and it was fueled by slinging a very different kind of pizza than the ones baked in New York City, Naples, or Chicago. From the start, California Pizza Kitchen played with what pizza could be, using familiar flavor combinations — think tangy Thai Chicken Pizza with a sweet peanut sauce, julienned carrots, and crunchy sprouts; the barbecue sauce-based and smoky Gouda-topped Barbecue Chicken Pizza — to forever reshape the way Angelenos eat, and understand, pizza. Pizza could be more than a fixed set of traditional Italian ingredients arranged in a traditional way: It could be capital-F fun. Inventive. A container for big ideas. Any modern restaurant — think Diego Argoti’s former Poltergeist — experimenting with toppings, dough, or just further broadening our understanding of what pizza and pasta can be, follows, in some small way, the revolution that CPK started 40 years ago.

Illustration by Lille Allen/Photo via Getty Images

Before they ever opened a restaurant, Rosenfield and Flax were federal prosecutors who left government service to start their own law firm. The practice was doing well for several years, but both men were growing tired of the legal profession. The duo “loved to cook and loved going to restaurants,” says Rosenfield. Could that be their new career path? (Flax was unavailable for comment due to an ongoing health issue.) In 1984, Rosenfield’s brother introduced him to a pasta cafeteria concept that was popular in Chicago. “I told Larry about it, and we got really excited about it as something we should do in LA,” Rosenfield says. They pitched the idea to their friend Bob Mandler, a fellow lawyer who owned Chin Chin in West Hollywood. Mandler told Rosenfield and Flax that something similar to what they envisioned already existed at the Glendale Galleria, and the three decided to go try it for themselves. “We see literally the same concept [as the pasta cafeteria], but there’s this god-awful looking pizza that they’re selling by the slice that’s sitting under a hot lamp, and people were eating the pizza with their pasta,” says Rosenfield. Almost as an afterthought, they decided to add pizza to their casual pasta joint, but as they continued discussing, they realized they might be onto something with just a pizzeria. Then, as if in a flash, Rosenfield exclaimed to the Flax and Mandler, “Wait a minute, forget this. Let’s do Spago for the masses.”

In the early 1980s, Spago was the pinnacle of glamorous fine dining in Los Angeles. While Wolfgang Puck focused on whipping up his “nouvelle California” cuisine, he brought on pizzaiolo Ed LaDou to dream up his own inventive California-style pizzas for the menu. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the time in Los Angeles, the most prevalent style of pizza was large New York-style pies with toppings limited to little more than pepperoni or black olives. If you wanted a slice, you could get it at Pizza Hut, Dominos, or a small mom-and-pop New York-style spot.

So to try one of LaDou’s duck breast and hoisin sauce pizzas, or a rabbit sausage pizza, or one with pate, ricotta, and mustard, was a revelation. LaDou was seeing pizza differently than other chefs. Pizza to him could be the entire canvas, not just one item on the menu. And diners agreed. “I remember coming back from college and all you wanted to do was try Spago and try whatever this pizza was,” says Goin. But Spago was still very much an expensive, exclusive restaurant that few outside of celebrities or the wealthy could experience. For Rosenfield and Flax to bring this new style of pizza, in a more affordable, approachable format, to the general Los Angeles public seemed like nothing short of a lightning strike. According to Goin, “They saw that train, jumped on it, and took it to a whole other level.”

Wonho Frank Lee

“Three weeks before our opening, we make this deal with LaDou,” Rosenfield says. LaDou designed an opening menu that was similar to Spago’s, with ingredients like lamb sausage, radicchio, pine nuts, grape leaves, pancetta, and more. The opening menu was emulating Spago’s gourmet sensibilities, but it didn’t work. “We saw right away — and it’s true to this day — that there is no such thing as Spago for masses,” says Rosenfield. Diners wanted familiar ingredients and flavor combinations, not esoteric, inaccessible ones. To most, LaDou’s pizzas just weren’t appealing, except for one: the Barbecue Chicken Pizza. If CPK sold some 200 pizzas on opening night, about 180 of them were the Barbecue Chicken. Rosenfield can recall how customers raved about the item as they walked out the door. By the end of its first weekend, word had gotten around so fast that the actress Jane Seymour, a friend of Rick’s wife, Esther, came to the restaurant “with 10 people and they had 10 Barbecue Chicken Pizzas,” says Rosenfield. It has remained the most popular item on the menu for the last 40 years. LaDou himself worked for about a month in CPK’s kitchen before parting ways with the team, and was never a partner in the business. (LaDou died in 2008; Eater reached out multiple times to his widow Carrie LaDou but did not receive a response.)

As Rosenfield saw it, Barbecue Chicken Pizza was the hook that got people in CPK’s door. “But we were actually defining more than pizza. We were defining a category of upscale, full-service dining,” he says. The restaurant used well-sourced, high-quality ingredients; offered a deviating-from-the-usual menu; and sat diners in a comfortable atmosphere with a well-trained staff — all at a much lower check average than the white-tablecloth, fine dining restaurants around town.

California Pizza Kitchen opened its second location barely a year after its first, this time at the Beverly Center. This mall location would come to typify the brand over the coming years, appealing to higher-income Angelenos and positioned next to premium retailers. As Rosenfield says, the growth strategy was simple: “Tell us the best malls in America, and give us a spot next to Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, or Saks.”

The Beverly Center location also led to what may have been the restaurant’s most important partnership. Brian Sullivan, who was general manager there during its early years, recalls a night when Rosenfield and Flax came in for dinner with Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn. “I knew who he was because I’d seen him in a commercial for the Golden Nugget with Frank Sinatra,” says Sullivan. Wynn had met Flax in a social setting, and became an early investor in the restaurant. He was also starting plans on a project in Las Vegas — one that would completely reinvent the city — called the Mirage. In 1989, Wynn opened the hotel and casino, with the first franchised location of CPK inside of it next to the sportsbook. “That restaurant was huge,” says Sullivan. “It was a huge marketing component for the brand because of the amount of people who were visiting not only from the United States, but [from other countries], and experiencing the menu for the first time.” It was still novel in the late ’80s and early ’90s to eat a BLT pizza or a Thai Crunch salad. “I can’t tell you how many people were like, ‘This is amazing, we need one in my town.’”

Wonho Frank Lee

Wonho Frank Lee

Wonho Frank Lee

By 1992, the company had grown to 25 restaurants in seven states. The 22 original investors had swelled to 300, with more clamoring to get in. Rosenfield and Flax considered taking the company public when PepsiCo offered to buy 50 percent of the company for an undisclosed price. Some of the earliest investors made 21 times their initial investment.

In the deal, PepsiCo agreed to leave control of the company to Rosenfield and Flax, but the company’s main objective was to accelerate the pace of expansion even more. PepsiCo effectively gave CPK a blank check to spend on experimentation and put California Pizza Kitchen restaurants into various new markets, including in college towns, suburban areas, and lower-income neighborhoods. In the first year of the deal, CPK opened 15 new locations, followed by another 28 the second year, all to mixed results, according to Rosenfield. “The best centers did great and bad centers didn’t do great,” he says. Meanwhile, Pepsi tried to cut costs, like replacing fresh mozzarella cheese with the frozen cheese they used for Pizza Hut. They subbed fresh zucchini and eggplant for frozen versions. Sullivan, who eventually ran the restaurant’s culinary research and development, says thawing the frozen ingredients led to moisture problems in the final product. Quality fell, and seats became harder to fill. Around 1994, Sullivan called up Rosenfield and Flax to right the ship, and by the next year, CPK brought back the fresh ingredients.

The rapid expansion was the company’s first major misstep. At the same time, Pepsi was also quietly looking to exit the restaurant business altogether and ultimately cut the flow of money for CPK’s growth. (The company eventually spun off KFC, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut into Yum! Brands.) “It was a horrible period in terms of morale, and a blow to the brand when they pulled the plug on expansion,” says Rosenfield. In 1997, PepsiCo sold its stake in the brand to a private equity firm, Bruckmann, Rosser, Sherrill & Co (BRS).

BRS quickly replaced Rosenfield and Flax with their own CEO, Fred Hipp, who ran day-to-day operations, but the founders stayed on the board and continued to be the faces of CPK — it was them on the pizza boxes and menus, and them talking to reporters and media. But just like PepsiCo before, Hipp’s strategy was aggressive expansion. In the winter of 2003, “CPK missed its numbers big time, and [Hipp] blamed it on the weather, the snow storms,” says Rosenfield. He investigated the sales figures and realized that the company was being dragged down by underperforming new locations. The discovery led to Hipp’s departure and Flax and Rosenfield regaining co-chief executive officer roles.

From 2003 until Flax and Rosenfield sold the company to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital for a reported $470 million in 2011, the duo worked to restore the use of fresh, higher-quality ingredients in CPK’s kitchen and strengthen the company’s ethos — much of it about shaping a work culture that encouraged people to stay. “Rick and Larry were amazing with that,” says Sullivan. “There were so many 20-, 25-year-tenured employees at that time when it had not even been a 30-year-old brand.” That loyalty of employees is central to what Rosenfield and Flax built. “There is no way we could have had our success from the beginning if we didn’t have the right people,” says Rosenfield. “If we didn’t have the morale, if you didn’t have people that love coming to work and were very proud of themselves, we’d have nothing.”

Wonho Frank Lee

The decade or so between the Great Recession and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was ultimately a period of slow decline for California Pizza Kitchen. Golden Gate Capital took the company private after acquiring it. Golden Gate attempted to modernize the brand, even introducing new menu items like gluten-free pizza and cauliflower crust, but customers didn’t seem to respond. Locations started to close at a quicker clip. CPK eventually filed for bankruptcy in July 2020; it was saddled with more than $400 million in debt. (Golden Gate Capital declined to comment for this story.)

Following the bankruptcy, a group of investors purchased the company. California Pizza Kitchen’s current CEO Jeff Warne, who was instated in 2022, worked to reenvision the company’s future. “We really want to grow the brand in two ways,” he says. First, the company is refocusing its efforts on new restaurants both in the United States and overseas, but with a heavy emphasis on franchising rather than company-owned locations. Second, consumer packaged goods will continue to grow — Warne considers them a marketing tool and a major driver of the brand. CPK sells 29 million frozen pizzas a year out of grocery stores while serving 20 million guests a year in its restaurants. “So, you can draw a power comparison there — it’s huge,” Warne says. “Our brand punches well above its weight in terms of brand recognition.”

That brand recognition may be California Pizza Kitchen’s saving grace, but it is also a testament to its impact. Today, restaurants like Pizzeria Sei are lauded for the innovation they bring to pizza, but it was CPK that first taught Angelenos how thoroughly unexpected pizza could be. And while New York-style, Detroit-style, Chicago deep-dish, and even Neapolitan pizzas are all largely defined by their doughs, CPK helped define California-style pizza by using the crust only as a vehicle — for imaginative, multicultural, and often genre-bending toppings.

“Pizza doesn’t have to have tomato sauce on it. That was the whole idea to begin with. That opened up infinite possibilities,” Rosenfield says.

Update: March 26, 7:15 p.m. PST: An earlier version of this story suggested Los Angeles restaurant Pijja Palace may have followed the pizza experimentation style of California Pizza Kitchen. Pijja Palace actually follows in a long line of Desi pizza makers, including at Artesia restaurant Julio’s, in its practice of making pizzas with Indian flavors.