&Pizza, Robots & The Future Of Dining

Meet Michael Lastoria— the unlikely pizza mogul who’s quietly reinventing his industry.

- Sheila Marikar

Michael Lastoria cuts a curious figure on Capitol Hill: black cloak, black jeans, black Wu Wear boots. His hair hangs past his shoulders; his beard brings to mind the Amish. But he sails through the metal detectors of the Rayburn House Offce Building—the hub of the House of Representatives—like a pro, marching down the hall to the cafeteria, where a line snakes around a glossy, black L-shaped structure of screens and glass. This is the 33rd location of Lastoria’s fast-casual restaurant, &Pizza (say: “and pizza”). While it looks like a food stall that would be at home in some terribly hip neighborhood, in this government building, flanked by a carpeted dining room with Formica tables that may have last been updated in the ’70s, it stands out, much like Lastoria himself—who, quietly, has become the perhaps unlikely auteur of tomorrow’s restaurant.

“They actually approached us to build a location here,” says Lastoria. Every &Pizza location has a unique nickname; he toyed with calling this one the Blue Wave. Politics being what they are, he couldn’t. So shop No. 33 is known as the Influence, and a mission statement, of sorts, adorning one of its gleaming black walls reads in part: “Where it all takes shape. Where decisions are made. Where pioneers walk and walls talk.”

If that sounds like a lofty goal for a place that slings $10 pies, it mirrors Lastoria’s ambitions. The chain has 36 locations along the East Coast. Lastoria, who co-founded &Pizza with D.C. restaurateur Steve Salis and serves as CEO, has plans for 47 by year’s end, and nearly $60 million in funding to model a new kind of restaurant: a technologically optimized, partially automated enterprise that endeavors to do good while serving good food. (During the recent government shutdown, &Pizza gave away $300,000 worth of pizza to federal workers.)