The new Edwardsville location of Peel Wood Fired Pizza was slated to open last Wednesday, on February 2. “It would have been an easy date to remember, but it didn’t happen—it couldn’t happen,” says co-owner Patrick Thirion of the snow-delayed 2/2/22 opening date. Instead, the restaurant welcomed its first guests on Saturday night.
Located at 100 Quartz Knoll, the new space is adjacent to One57, a five-story luxury condominium building featuring two units per floor and an unusual amenity: its own private entrance to Peel.
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Thirion says the pandemic-delayed project grew out of the need for more room at the Edwardsville location. “We needed more bar space, event space, dining space—more space in general,” he says. Having become accustomed to far larger footprints at locations in O’Fallon, Illinois, and Clayton, the 7,000-square-foot space felt comfortable, says Thirion.
The new facility seats 150 inside and an additional 100 on a patio “with a view,” as well as 40 in a semi-private room with a see-through wall. Lower, less cavernous ceilings, a soffit above the bar, more booths, and various seating areas and upholstery choices make the large space feel more intimate.
The new location was built around two wood-burning ovens. “Just about every pizza guy has a crazy story about what modifications had to be done just to shoehorn their oven into place, and we had two,” says Thirion. Having a larger kitchen and an additional oven opens the door to even more menu options going forward.
The Peel story began in 2008, when two former pastry chefs decided to approach pizza dough like they were research scientists. After a year of experimenting, Patrick Thirion and Brandon Case developed what they called a neo-Neapolitan pizza and opened the flagship Peel Wood Fired Pizza in an attractive center that boasted a babbling creek just off its shaded patio. The wood oven–fired sandwiches and smoked, oven-finished wings developed a following of their own, with devotees from across the river regularly making a 45-minute trek to get their fix.
In 2014, Thirion and Case acquired a 102-year-old brick-and-clapboard building in O’Fallon, Illinois, which once boasted a roller rink on its second floor. Knowing that asking locals to climb a flight of stairs to eat a meal has long been a tough sell in the area, the duo converted the second floor into an attraction—a microbrewery—and Peel Wood Fired Pizza & Brewery became location No. 2. (It wasn’t long before the second floor became more popular than the first.)
Four years later, responding to the pleas of St. Louisans, the chefs leased a large space at 212 S. Meramec in downtown Clayton. “We felt we needed that much space to properly execute the concept,” Patrick Thirion told SLM at the time, “so we took the entire ground floor.”
More space meant more menu flexibility. The salads were tasty and huge, the desserts were memorable (Thiron and Case were pastry chefs after all), and the soups were amazingly good. “I always thought we’d rotate the soups, because I thought we’d need to,” says Thirion, “but the smoked tomato bisque and the wild mushroom became so popular, they became permanent items.”
Thirion is proud that Peel’s team and the 8,800-square-foot behemoth could weather the pandemic. “By the time it hit, Clayton had a solid customer base,” he says. “Fortunately, they all stayed with us.”
