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It’s not every day that a beloved restaurant from the past, closed for more than a decade, returns.
It’s even less often that the restaurant comes back to its original location, the one where it first opened more than 35 years prior, in the same room in the same old building offering up the same recipes made by some of the very same hands that made them and served them decades earlier.
Those things almost never happen. Next week, however, they will.
Cable Car Pizza, a restaurant that was popular in the late 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s but closed in 2015, is set to return to its original location at 1830 N. College Ave in Fayetteville.
Longtime local resident TJ Claggett, who worked at the restaurant for years after he moved to town from Little Rock for college in the 1990s, is behind the project to bring the pizza restaurant back.
“I moved to Fayetteville in the fall of 1992 and worked at this original location,” Claggett said. “I have so many memories in this building.”
Those memories, as it happens and fortunately for fans of the restaurant, include the recipes for the San Francisco-style crust that the restaurant was known for back in the day, and the process of stretching and throwing the dough.
“That’s just muscle memory,” Claggett said. “Though I did almost throw out my shoulder trying to toss the dough behind my back the other day.
“But making pizza is art. There’s an art to it,” he said. “The way the toppings are arranged to make every bite the same.”
The restaurant opened in 1988, he said, and was originally owned by John Leonard and family. The restaurant moved from the College Avenue location to the Dickson Street area in the building currently home to Theo’s in 1996. The Leonard family sold the restaurant to Ray Reynolds, who moved it to a location on Citizens Drive in the Kantz Shopping Center. The restaurant has been closed since 2015.
Cable Car will reopen in its original location more than 30 years later
Claggett said he began researching the idea to bring back the restaurant and found that nobody owned the rights.
Since word of his plans to reopen started getting out, he has heard from several members of the Leonard family, who he said are more than enthusiastic about the return of the restaurant.
“The family is blowing me up,” he said. “I think they are as excited as I am.”
The menu centers on the crust, made from dough fermented for 24 hours, hand-tossed, and topped with fresh ingredients. Menu items include an “Uncle John’s” pizza, a tribute to the original owner, a “Chester’s Hawaiian” that nods to the famed Dickson Street music venue and a “Dark Star Vegan” named for longtime local shop Dark Star Visuals.
Everything, from the pizzas to the ranch and Italian dressings served in the restaurant, is made as closely to the original recipe as possible.
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