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Earlier this month, two researchers at the University of Florida unveiled welcome news for pizza lovers: Despite the rise and seeming domination of corporate chain restaurants across the country, in some areas, local pizzerias are actually thriving thanks to the quirks that make them and their pies distinctive—and delicious.

In an age when a Domino’s or Pizza Hut is sure to exist around the corner, the survival of the small local pizzeria might seem unlikely. However, through their interviews with various pizzeria owners in Gainesville, Florida, Paula de la Cruz-Fernández and Avi Ackerman found that local owners’ unique approaches to the pizza scene—whether that’s the artist who decorates his restaurant with old cellphones or the ex-engineer who measures his dough ingredients down to the half-percent—give these pizzerias a “sense of place” that chains cannot match and that keeps customers coming back.

I spoke with Cruz-Fernández and Ackerman about their approach to documenting the history of local businesses in Gainesville, the significance of restaurants with that special sense of place, and why the stories of unique local spots are worth saving.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Lyanne Wang: Tell me about the design of this project. I know it involved oral histories and interviews with local businesses?

Paula de la Cruz-Fernández: So the main component, which we began probably about two years ago, was trying to document the history of the business landscape in Gainesville, where the University of Florida is located. And we did this by doing archival research. We went to city directories, to museums, to the archives of the university. We are creating a very large database of businesses back to 1882. But as we worked on this, we realized that there was a real gap in documentation about businesses, and we thought that the main way to avoid this for the future generations, but also a good way of learning about the past 40 years of businesses in the city, was doing the project using oral history methodologies.

Avi Ackerman: I did the interviews for three of the pizza restaurants that we have in Gainesville. And, having gone to college in town, I wanted to try the different pizzas, and these were places that I had been to many times and loved. So being able to get the more personal stories from the owners through these interviews and understand the history of how they created the restaurant and put their personal touches on it to make it what it is today was important to me. And these are really iconic restaurants. Satchel’s Pizza is one of them, for example. It’s been open for 22 years now. So people who went to UF or worked at UF in the past 20 years, there’s a pretty good chance that they’ll know Satchel’s Pizza, and it has this legacy, and it comes from the owner and how he created the restaurant and put his personality and his experiences into it.

Out of all the businesses you could have studied, what led you to focus on pizzerias?

Ackerman: Well, I love pizza, and I love pizza restaurants. And moving to Gainesville, as a freshman coming into university, you’ve got this new environment that you’re in, and pizza is a comfort food for a lot of people. That’s something that resonates with me as well. And then, looking at the Gainesville pizza industry, there’s so many unique pizzerias. We have 11 or 13, and they all have their own unique style and their own unique way of going about how they conduct their business in the restaurant. I’ve liked being able to go from the customer side and looking at my enjoyment as a customer, and then going to the research side and looking at how it impacts the history of the city and what we can learn from the owners.

De la Cruz-Fernández: Yes, if you hear the interview we conducted with Satchel’s, there have been fires in the restaurant. There has been all sorts of turnover. The owner told us about his mental health struggles. We wouldn’t have learned about that before. But then, if you go to the restaurant, you’ll see how every single meter of wall is different. One wall is decorated with tiles, all this color. The next wall is decorated with recycled bottle caps. The next table is decorated with old cellphones. And for me, the beautiful thing about this project is that as historians we ask, “How did we get here?” These stories really explain a lot of it, explain a lot of what’s behind everything we see every day in the businesses that we really like.

Do you have a favorite story that you’ve heard from a store owner?

Ackerman: That’s a tough question. So with Satchel’s, he went to art school, and he has this very, very artistic background, and he was a local legend when he was in college because he had this car that had a lighthouse attachment on the top of it, like a tower. And he took out the seats and made hay bales as the seats in the car. He’s just a very artistic person. He’s very creative, and he brings all that and this life experience with him. Art and pizza are his two passions, and he was able to combine those into the restaurant. And it’s a one-of-a-kind restaurant. It’s seriously one of one.

And then we also have an engineer who had a completely different background to pizza but then brings all these skills and all these techniques into making pizza, being scientific down to the half-percent of how much ingredient is in the dough, and really a super, super, super unique approach. And engineering the oven to be a certain way. So, basically, you have all these different perspectives and all these different backgrounds and approaches to making pizza. And just by going into a pizza restaurant, you may not know all of what goes into it.

I think another hugely important part about pizzerias is the atmosphere they offer. There’s a sentence you wrote in the article: “Rather than focusing only on speed or price, they compete by offering character, inventive toppings, personal service and a sense of place that chains just can’t replicate.” What does that sense of place feel like to you when you enter these pizzerias?

De la Cruz-Fernández: That’s an important sentence and a good question, because I would go a little beyond pizzerias to say that businesses themselves, exploring the idea of a business becoming part of our life, is one of the goals of this project. Usually, when you think about culture, you think about people reading books or people watching TV. And in this case, it’s how the businesses that you patronize every day are also part of your own growth. But everything goes back to that organization, that business that someone has managed and allowed to become your space. So someone has put labor, has put thinking, has put finances into it. And that makes business part of the history of humanity, to put it too broadly, maybe. But for business historians, that is how we think; what we want is to understand that business also is part of social life and culture.

What do you hope people take away from this research?

Ackerman: I would like people to understand how the food is coming to you and the story behind the restaurant owner. I have these conversations with my friends, my family all the time, like, “Oh, do you remember that restaurant that was on this corner 15 years ago?” And that’s where the conversation ends. We remember, “Oh, there was a great this or there was a great whatnot at that restaurant.” But that’s where it ends. What we’ve done here is, we’ve been able to capture what is going on at the restaurant and what the history of the restaurant is and what the restaurant owner’s background is and the staff and create this memory—so, 15 years from now, when someone says, “Oh, I remember this restaurant,” you can look it up and you can see there’s something more behind it, and you can look into it and maybe even be able to relive it. That’s special to me, being able to preserve the stories of these restaurants for people in the future.