The garage is a quintessential symbol of home–grown innovation. An extra appendage to the house, that if you simply make the inconvenient decision to park your car on the street, becomes the perfect “no–rent” storefront for young entrepreneurs. You, of course, have the classic example of Steve Jobs and Mark Wozniak, but even Barbie was a garage baby.
Then you have Philly’s very own Viraj Thomas—a 21–year–old pizza maker who just opened his first brick–and–mortar restaurant, Char, this September.
“I probably worked a little over 100 hours last week, not including driving time and all that nonsense. And I wouldn’t want to do again. But I’m happy it happened,” Thomas says. It’s Labor Day, his first day of rest after the soft opening of Char. Thomas came in early to clean the kitchen and take notes on the successes and mistakes of the past five days of service after serving somewhere in the range of 200 patrons.
The airy and modern space formerly belonged to Eeva, giving Thomas the benefit of working with a fully outfitted kitchen—even though that included an inconveniently small oven that, according to Thomas, “doesn’t make any sense.” Part of the seating area is shared with Reanimator Coffee, though the two operate on divergent schedules, avoiding overlap.
Thomas signed on the space on May 30, 2024, but it wasn’t until Aug. 28, 2024, that Char hosted its first full night of sit–down service. The soft opening primarily served friends and family. After having spent years hosting pizza pop–ups around Philadelphia Char had collected somewhat of a cult following—bringing in somewhere in the range of 150 to 200 patrons over the course of the five days of soft opening.
Still despite having far more experience hosting pizza pop–ups than probably any other 21–year–old could claim, Thomas admits that hosting full service was unlike anything he had ever done. Still, he sees running a brick–and–mortar as easier than running pop–ups because of the structure it provides, without all the time required to drive and unload a U–Haul in order to effectively set up a new restaurant each day. Prior to the soft opening, they operated a take–out business as a means of financing themselves.
Running a sit–down restaurant is about the service—calculating the amount of time to allocate between people ordering and getting their pizza to the nitty gritty of greeting people with the perfect level of friendliness. “I’m like, oh shit, I didn’t know any of that. And I still don’t really know any of that.”
In the rush of it all, Thomas ended up sleeping at his restaurant the night before the first day of soft opening. “With the nerves somehow 10 p.m. ended up being 1 a.m. and I knew I had to wake up at 6 a.m. and I lived 35 minutes away, so I had a towel and I slept on that, right over there,” Thomas says, pointing to a booth towards the front of the restaurant. “I just hoped that when the coffee shop folk came in at 6:30 a.m., they didn’t think I was a homeless person.”
“I’ll probably get a cot for the restaurant just in case,” he adds right after he claims that he won’t be making that a habit, “I keep saying that as a joke, and now I’m like, oh maybe it’s serious.”
Char sold its first pizza out of Thomas’ parents’ garage in December 2020. Thomas had purchased a pizza oven that August, saving up for the Tom Gozney Roccbox by working at Target. “I wanted one of these ovens before that, but it was 500 bucks and that was, like, too much money for me, but I was like, I hate this job so much, I’m going to buy this oven.” It arrived on Aug. 15, 2020, right before his 17th birthday and senior year of high school.
The dream had been years in the making.
It’s 2017, and Thomas likes pizza, but not more than the average guy. He’s on your typical YouTube rot watching the Buzzfeed series “Worth It” where three guys go around New York trying pizzas that range from two dollars, to $2,000. Suddenly, though we’re at Mario Batali’s kitchen, Eataly, and he makes a Neopolitan pizza. Batali burns the crust—but not actually, it’s more akin to a char. Thomas recounts the full video with stunning precision. He can name all the restaurants in the video. He even quotes Batali.
“And there’s like one visual and it’s in a video, where after he launches the pizza and it puffs up and you can kind of see through the crust, and, like, that got captivated in my head,” Thomas says. Not long after that, he eats a Vetri pizza—and he knows that he wants to make something just like that.
“That senior year of high school, it was an obsession. Sometimes I forget it. It was a lot of talking to people on Instagram, sending them DMs, and talking to them, and asking them questions and how they do this. Also a lot of forums and YouTube videos and eating other people’s pizza,” Thomas says. “Before I was, like, guzzling every piece of information that I could get. Now, it’s a little less of that because there’s a little more to do and you’re tired. There’s the initial passion and there’s still the passion of creating something great.”
The first pizza he made was straight out of the Mastering Pizza cookbook by Vetri. “It was a margarita that was a little small, that probably looks better on the picture that it was,” Thomas says. “I got buffalo mozzarella from de Bruno’s and tomatoes from who knows where and like—it’s fine. I think there’s also a little hole in it.”
He scrolls through his phone and finds a picture of it on Char’s Instagram—it’s the very second post—and reads the caption aloud: “first pizza out of the oven, better than expected, worse than I want.”
He started making so many pizzas that it felt intuitive to start selling them. Since he couldn’t drive, people from his school would come to his parent’s garage to pick up his pizza. “It wasn’t popular, but the kids in my grade knew about it,” he says. He still has a notes app of all the people who picked up pizza on his first day when they sold 15 to 20 pizzas.
His school year side–hustle soon transformed into his post–grad plans. His parents phrased his decision not to go to college as a gap year, but Thomas had already committed himself to Char. “In my head, it was like the pizza might not work out, but there’s an opportunity for the pizza right now,” Thomas says. “It was like an opportunity of my passion for the thing—or I could go to college, because everyone said that, like me and my family argued all the time.”
“I don’t think it was that one day I was like, ‘Oh my God. I got this realization that pizza is my life’s goal.’ It was more just like at the time, this seemed the better of two options, and I thought I could put a lot of effort into this at that time, instead of just going to college,” Thomas says. “I was thinking about it all the time. I was like pizza, pizza pizza. But even now I’m not like—this is my true life’s passion. Maybe it is. It could be. We’ll see how it is, this is a new endeavor. If I have to work 100 hours a week every week, it’s not gonna last 20 years.”
Nov. 17, 2021, marks the start of Char as Thomas’ professional career. “And that was like actual selling. The other stuff, it was there, but I knew most of the people so even when we really messed up we got slack,” Thomas says. “Like, what are they gonna say to a high schooler selling out of his garage?”
He graduated, went to Senior Week, came back the following Saturday, and started working at Chicala as a pizzamaker on Thursday. “I was a personality hire through and through,” Thomas says. “Like I wasn’t good at the job and I probably could do a lot better, but they let me stick around because I talked a lot of shit. But I was a loss on the payroll.”
Soon, though, he started to make friends in the industry eager to support his burgeoning business. For example, a coworker he had while he worked at Taco Heart connected him to one of his first residencies at Mish Mish.
“And so a lot of it is lucky and a lot of it is talking to people and sending them DMs. That’s like 90% of it.” He reached out to Ellen Yin (W ‘87, WG ‘93) to ask how Fork had managed to stay open, who recommended that Char get a line of credit. Alex Kemp, who runs My Loup, taught him about the importance of the employee–boss dynamic.
In a way, Thomas sees his age as an advantage in building connections. Though he’s well aware that with his full beard, it’s easy to forget the fact that he’s only 21. “You get a little more support when you’re young,” Thomas says. “Like, if there’s someone who's passionate, enthusiastic, and like not a dickhead—like this person is a nice person, people typically try to support that.”
Thomas is not looking to push the bounds of pizza with inventiveness—he’s a little defensive about the idea. “There’s one time I’ve done Indian pizza … It tastes good, but I also hate forced fusion,” Thomas says. “I just don’t know how to cook Indian food. So if I don’t know how to cook Indian food, why would I screw it up even more by putting it on pizza?”
Thomas is focused on the details, all the way down to how the flour on the crust feels between your fingers. “Sometimes, I still f**k it up. Where, like, I don’t want to launch too heavy with flour. Like, after you’re done eating, you’re rubbing your fingers, and there’s three fingers of flour. It’s just a textural feel for me—a delicate crisp.”
He likes talking about pizza as much as he likes eating it. He pauses himself, aware that if given the chance, he could easily launch into a full diatribe on the snap of a perfect crust. (“It’s not enough to cut the roof of your mouth, but it’s enough to be like, ‘Oh there’s texture.’”)
Despite the fact that he’s already opened a restaurant at only 21, Thomas is hard on himself—claiming that he doesn’t work as hard or fast as he should. He demands a certain level of artistry from his pizzas. “Most of the time when I eat my pizza … I spit it out like, ‘Oh, this sucks’ and then sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m better than everyone else,’” he says. “I don’t know if that’s because the dough changes or that’s because when it’s like your own things, it’s very hard to be content with it. A lot of people have good pizza. Good pizza doesn’t really mean anything.”
Viraj Thomas is looking for great.
