PRINCE STREET PIZZA'S MAJORITY OWNER IS NOT A MORANO AND THE SQUARE IS IN DALLAS

There is a particular kind of New York restaurant story that keeps repeating, and it is not the one about a beloved place closing. It is the one about a beloved place winning. Prince Street Pizza is the latest, and the details are worth reading closely, because nobody in them did anything wrong.

Frank and Dominic Morano, father and son, opened Prince Street Pizza in 2012 as a mostly by-the-slice counter selling a square Sicilian pie with house made sauces and pepperoni in every bite. Their theory was that if a sauce was good enough for pasta it was good enough for pizza. The Spicy Spring, fra diavolo sauce under a dense layer of cupped pepperoni, became the slice people lined up around the corner for. The line became the brand before anyone had a reason to call it one.

Today the brand has eighteen locations across New York, California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida and Canada, with six more expected this year, including Nashville, Charleston and Baton Rouge.

The majority owner is not a Morano. It is Lawrence Longo, who describes himself as a hustler and a failed TV and movie producer who was living in Los Angeles in the 2010s running an app called Off the Menu about secret restaurant items. A hockey player told him to try Prince Street. He did, built a friendship with Dominic Morano, convinced the family to do a three day run in Los Angeles where people lined up in the rain, and then convinced Frank Morano to let him open a Los Angeles location in partnership with the family.

He had, by his own account, little restaurant experience. What he had was the pitch. The family said yes, and the majority of the company is now his.

The strategically important name in this story is the other Lawrence. Lawrence Kourie was a founding franchisee of Dave's Hot Chicken and is now its largest, with thirty five units and rights to as many as a hundred. Dave's went from a parking lot stand to a nearly four hundred unit chain and a sale to Roark Capital valued at a billion dollars in eight years.

Kourie came in first as a mentor, then as an investor, then as a full partner when growth capital was being raised. His own description of what he brings: knowing how to grow a brand across multiple states while keeping the product consistent. That is the exact skill that turns a counter into a chain, and it is now sitting at the table with a New York slice.

Longo is careful about the narrative. There is no private equity money, he says, and he calls that a potential downfall of the business. Prince Street is not franchising, both men say. Every existing unit is company owned in partnership with local operators, and he hopes to have one or two partners rather than a hundred.

Then the qualifier: at least not yet. The company is setting up franchise disclosure documents. The partner across the table built his career on the franchised model that took a chicken brand to a billion dollars. The stated goal, in Longo's words, is to be the best pizzeria in America. Kourie corrects him: in the world.

Every sentence there is true at once. It is also true that a company drafting franchise paperwork with a franchise operator as its growth partner is describing a direction, not a destination.

The economics explain why this is attractive to everyone involved. The slowest Prince Street locations average two million dollars a year in sales. The best reach eight million. Slices run five to seven dollars and whole pies about forty, in a footprint of fifteen hundred to three thousand square feet. The pizza category more broadly has struggled since the pandemic, when delivery stopped being something pizza owned. A dense, square, expensive slice with a line behind it is the opposite of that problem, and investors can read a line.

The family got a partner who watched people stand in the rain for the product and bet on it, and a company that will now put their pie in front of people in six states and Canada. That is a real win and it is theirs.

The city got a location. The counter on Prince Street is still there, and it is now one of eighteen, with the street that named it functioning as the origin story on a website. The thing New York made famous by standing in line for it is being sold to cities that will never have to.

There is no villain in that sentence. That is the point. The mechanism that turns a counter into a brand does not need anyone to behave badly. It only needs the line to be long enough for someone to notice, and in this city the line is always long enough.

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