Those Pizza Guys

The name began as directions. When Those Pizza Guys worked the festival circuit as a mobile wood-fired operation, hungry crowds would point each other toward the same trailer — go find those pizza guys — and the phrase stuck well enough to hang over a permanent door. That door is now in St. Jacobs Village, where the kitchen fires personal-sized pizzas, hand-pressed to roughly eleven inches, and names nearly every one of them like a punchline. The format is the point: a single diner can order a whole pie without committing to a group, and a table can split four different ones without negotiating a compromise.

The menu runs on that same instinct — take a familiar idea and push it somewhere specific. Return of the Mac Pizza rebuilds a fast-food hamburger on a wood-fired crust, with garlic oil, ground beef, mozzarella and American cheese, lettuce, pickles, a swipe of mac sauce, and a sesame-seed edge. Aloha Pizza keeps the Hawaiian template but sharpens it with BBQ sauce, prosciutto, and cinnamon pineapple under char. Sriracha Gotcha runs Italian sausage and banana peppers under a sriracha drizzle, and the Greek Freak loads feta, roasted red peppers, artichokes, and kalamata olives. The Hoser Pizza is the straight-ahead classic — tomato sauce and mozzarella beneath pepperoni, mushroom, and bacon — while 3 Pigs Pizza stacks pepperoni, prosciutto, and Italian sausage into the heaviest meat order on the board. Mush Love goes quieter and more composed, with garlic confit, Fiore di Latte, a mushroom blend, pancetta, and fresh parm. Vegetarians get more than a token: a clean Margherita, the pesto-and-feta Green, and the Sunny in St. Jacobs, built on sundried tomato pesto, basil, arugula, and parm.

What keeps the punny names from sliding into novelty is how the pies are actually built. The pepperoni on Pep in your Step is the cup-and-char kind that curls and crisps at its edges; the pulled pork and slaw on the BBQ pie are made in house; Fiore di Latte turns up across the board where a cheaper mozzarella would have passed unnoticed. The lineup reaches past pizza, too — a Donair Dip, Pazzo Sticks, a PLT sandwich — but the wood oven is plainly the centre of the operation. The names borrow from cartoons, video games, and a certain Canadian self-deprecation — Princess Peach, Return of the Mac, The Hoser — but the cooking underneath them is careful. It is a kitchen that wants to be remembered for the joke and trusted for the crust.

The festival history left more than a name. Those Pizza Guys spent its early years as a mobile operation around Guelph before settling into the St. Jacobs storefront in 2020, and the move indoors changed the address without sanding down the personality. Pete Tessaro and Chris Banks, identified in local reporting as the founders, carried the same wood oven and the same hand-pressed personal-pie format into a fixed kitchen. The permanent address mostly bought them a longer menu and a place to keep it.

That history still shapes how the place gets used. It is licensed, with a patio and a rotating fridge of regional craft beer, so an Aloha Pizza or a Hoser can arrive with something cold from an Ontario brewery without the counter becoming a taproom. But the whole operation is paced for a village day trip rather than a long dinner — walk in, take out, or eat on the patio between other stops along Front Street. The personal-pie format does quiet work here, scaling from one diner to a small group without forcing the table into a single shared order. Feature pizzas rotate outside the posted menu, so the regulars have learned to ask what is running before they order.