Pizza Uncommon brings its unique flavors to Lafayette with new store near Purdue
When David Long opened Pizza Uncommon in 2021, his goal was to offer the best pizza money could buy. After three years of churning out creatively flavored pies in West Lafayette, Pizza Uncommon is celebrating its second location's opening just steps away from Purdue University's campus.
Located at 103 W. State St., beneath the Hub on Campus apartment complex, the new location will offer the same diverse menu as the 1522 Win Hentschel Blvd. store alongside hand-crafted gelato flavors, as well as a dry bar for all ages.
While taking on a second store location for a local business can seem daunting, Long said he isn't nervous or worried. His drive for multiple locations is part of his family's larger goal of adopting children internationally.
"I explain this to my employees is that I am really picky for a reason," Long said. "I see success with pizza as a way of helping as many kids as I can. If our pizzas look perfect here, then they're going to look perfect anywhere we put one of our stores in America."
With three kids of their own, Long and his wife, Holly, are passionate about kids. They volunteer at Logansport's Juvenile Correctional Facility, teaching life skills in an effort to steer them in the right direction. Long said it isn't hard for him to place himself in these kids' shoes, making it easier for them to relate to one another.
"Before I turned 18, I got fired from every job I ever had," he confessed. "I'd been to jail. I failed all my classes and couldn't go to college. I never knew what I was doing throughout my whole life.
"But looking back, I can see that I knew how to figure stuff out, and that's what got me into trouble. I was just a normal teenage boy," he said.
Growing the business in order to grow their family
Alongside his passion for helping at-risk youth find their path in life, Long said he also shared his wife's desire to adopt at-risk siblings from dangerous situations abroad. The couple understood how expensive this dream could be, so they set out to find a way to fund the endeavor.
Having worked in convenience stores for the majority of his life, Long said he understood the model well, so he began searching for store in Indiana that he and his wife could purchase with what little money they had.
"We finally found one out in the middle of nowhere in a town called Deputy, down in southern Indiana, that was around 6,000 square feet," he said. "In 2019, I was able to convince them to let me take over their payments on the store so we could get things going. In the back there was this little pizza oven with a conveyor that barely worked."
Learning how to make pizza
Long and his wife moved their family down to the area and got to work, recalling how he would make the pizzas with Holly taking orders, all while their 1-year-old baby slept in a shopping cart beside her.
"Once I knew we were in the pizza business, I was like, I'd better figure out how to make pizza. I got on YouTube and started watching videos, and this was around the time when I realized I had a gift for figuring things out," Long said.
"I started following famous pizzerias on Instagram, and I found everyone I reached out to were super helpful," he said. "I would send them direct messages asking for advice, and they were always willing to help me, even places with hundreds of thousands of followers. I was messaging people all over the country, and we all still follow each other on social media to this day."
After getting to know the makings of other businesses' pizzas, Long said he knew he wanted all of his product to be made entirely from scratch to separate himself from any potential competition. Word began to spread around southern Indiana about Long's craft pizzas and with it came steady traffic into his store. Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pandemic was actually good for business
"That made our business multiply by tenfold," he explained. "Everyone was looking for take-out options, so we had people coming all the way from Louisville, Kentucky. We were growing so fast we could hardly keep up."
After deciding to partner with a brewery to maintain their southern Indiana location, relocating that operation to Madison, Long said they decided to sell the Deputy store and open a second location in West Lafayette, bringing things closer to home for the couple.
Now with their new campus location, Long said he is planning to continue the from-scratch model, adding gelato and a dry bar to the State Street store's offerings as well. Having crafted the gelato recipes himself, Long said he hopes to continue offering the best product money can buy.
"I'm wanting to create a place where all ages can have a good time, because most students can't drink anyway," Long said. "While we've been working on getting this new store ready, I've been experimenting with recipes for gelato, and I've found a few really out-of-the-ordinary ones that people are going to really love alongside our pizzas."
Pizza Uncommon's grand opening is Monday
When the State Street location celebrates its grand opening on Monday, as Purdue's population returns from winter break, Long said he hopes newcomers will see the effort towards perfection his team puts into every pizza slice and gelato scoop, as it puts his family closer to reaching their dreams of international adoption.
"This store puts us just a few years out financially of being able to adopt our first set of siblings," Long said. "It's been hard to market our business as something that's fueling this dream because then people say, 'OK, where are the kids?' But building a dream with a price tag like ours takes a lot of time, and we're nearly there. When I see a pizza roll out of our store, I can see it coming to life."
Jillian Ellison is a reporter for the Journal & Courier. She can be reached by email at jellison@gannett.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @ellisonwrites.
This article originally appeared on Lafayette Journal & Courier: Pizza Uncommon opens second store near Purdue University in Lafayette
