LYNNWOOD — Zeeks Pizza opened in Lynnwood this week in a restaurant designed to have the feel of a public house with a wide selection of craft beer and cider on tap.
It’s the second location for the Seattle-based pizza place in Snohomish County. Zeeks Pizza already has a site in Bothell. The move to the north end of the Puget Sound has a lot to do with following their customers, said Tommy Brooks, director of operations for the business.
“There’s a lot of people from the Seattle proper area moving up to this area,” Brooks said. “A lot of those people are looking for food and drinks they grew accustomed to in Seattle.”
The restaurant at 4309 196th Ave. SW will employ about 40 to 50 people, Brooks said.
The pizza place started in 1993 in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. Founders Tom Vial and Doug McClure took a small loan from one of their dads and started with a take-and-bake pizza company.
The company expanded to offer cooked pizza including vegetarians pizzas, unusual at the time, and other uncommon combinations like the Thai One On pizza with chicken, bean sprouts, carrots and a peanut sauce.
In their early days, Zeeks Pizza delivered some pizzas by skateboard.
The company has grown to 13 locations. Lynnwood seemed like a good fit for the business, because the community needs more alternatives to the national chain delivery pizza places, Brooks said.
The Lynnwood location will deliver in an area roughly between 228th Street SW to the south and 148th Street SW to the north and Puget Sound and Edmonds Way on the west and I-5, I-405 and the Zeeks Bothell boundary along Locust Way and Logan Road to the east.
In the restaurant itself, the business aimed for a public-house feel where the community can get together over pizza and enjoy a wide variety of beers including exclusive-to-Zeeks brews like Reuben’s Hop Tropic from Ballard. The restaurant will also feature Lynnwood’s Big E Root Beer on tap.
And the restaurant will offer wine from Washington and Oregon boutique wineries on tap as well.
In keeping with the public-house theme, Zeeks will offer growlers for all of their beers. The one thing that the business can’t do is deliver a growler with the pizza.
Currently, state liquor laws prohibit the delivery of beer. And that’s something that Zeeks Pizza hopes to lobby to get changed in the future.
“We currently cannot, but we’re digging deep with the (Washington State) Liquor Control Board,” Brooks said. “We’d love to be the first to do that.”
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