A popular pizzeria expanding to Clayton will specialize in authentic Neapolitan pies
The oven at Luna Pizza hovers around 1,100 degrees, enough to blister a pie to perfection in under two minutes.
This popular Greenville pizzeria is continuing its westward expansion and opening a new Johnston County restaurant later this year.
The new Luna will open on the edge of downtown Clayton as part of the new Spinning Mill Lofts development, a project turning a vacant cotton mill into loft apartments. Located on Front Street behind the Clayton post office, that project will add 255 new apartments.
Luna will be built as a new free-standing restaurant on Front Street, with construction scheduled to begin this month, said restaurant owner Richard Williams. The 2,300 square foot restaurant will serve the same popular menu as Luna’s original location in downtown Greenville, built around authentic Neapolitan style pies. There will be seating for 50 inside, plus a side patio.
Williams left a tenured faculty position teaching recreational therapy at East Carolina University to pursue his pizza dreams, which included traveling to Italy to learn the craft. The move, he said, was driven by a craving for a restaurant beyond those catering to students.
“There were so few options in town for post-college adults,” Williams said of Greenville at the time. “It was hard to find a place to go for a nicer dinner with a wine list. I thought, there have to be other adults looking for a different kind of place to go. I believe you can’t be everything to everybody. We found our specific target and people really responded to it.”
The Greenville Luna opened in 2018 and more recently locations have opened in Selma’s Old North State Food Hall and, improbably, in Salt Lake City’s The Local food hall.
“I went to Italy and learned how to make pizza; it was really eye opening, it’s all about the dough and the crust,” Williams said. “Ours has a really great depth of flavor, a great chew.”
Luna Pizza’s menu
Clayton will be the brand’s second full service restaurant, serving pizzas, pastas and meatballs alongside wine, beer and cocktails.
He said the secret to Luna’s pizza is an extremely slow cold ferment on its dough.
“The pizzas served on Friday were made from dough mixed on Monday,” Williams said.
The pizzas are mostly authentic and familiar, like a margherita or mushrooms and Italian sausage, but Williams carved out space for his favorite combination, bacon and jalapeno. Hawaiian pizza fans take note, there’s no pineapple in the building.
“We try to stay traditional with the toppings but there are a few Americanized options,” Williams said. “But we don’t have ranch. We don’t have pineapple.”
Opening set for fall 2023
The new pizzeria continues a run of development in red hot Clayton, which in the last five years has added numerous apartments and houses and a handful of new downtown restaurants, including Crawford Cookshop from Raleigh chef Scott Crawford.
“Clayton is just on fire right now,” Williams said. “(Crawford) gave me the confidence that this could work.”
The new Clayton Luna will take several months to build, but Williams expects to be open by fall 2023.
“I’m really excited about the energy in Johnston County right now,” Williams said. “I feel it in Selma and I definitely feel it in Clayton. We’re excited to get the doors open and show people what we can do.”
