Small Town Spotlight: Pizza Stop shines in Malad with ‘best pizza around’
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MALAD CITY — Nestled alongside Interstate 15, about 10 minutes north of the Utah-Idaho border, sits Malad, a city not widely known for a whole lot.
But buying a lottery ticket is far from the only reason to stop off in this town of just over 2,000.
A roadside barbecue joint and a popular steakhouse are not the only noteworthy eateries in town. According to local real estate agent Natalie Paskett, Malad’s Pizza Stop is home to “some of the best pizza around.”
Farmer Ray Davis, who was born and raised in Oneida County, said that he has tried all the pizza chains, and none are as good as Pizza Stop.
“It’s hometown deal, and it’s really good,” he told EastIdahoNews.com. “If it wasn’t really good they wouldn’t have lasted, not in this little town. Everybody around here talks.”
It isn’t just the product served at the corner of 1st Street and Main Street, it’s the people that run the place.
Husband-wife duo Clint and Leslie Brackin have owned the restaurant for nearly 15 years and have operated it with the help of their sons – Clay, Lance and Kyle.
But the Brackin family roots of this small town gem go even deeper.
Clint was born in Ocala, Florida, where his parents owned a pizza restaurant. Then, as a child, he and his family moved across the country, landing in Preston.
The family opened Idaho’s first ‘Pizza Stop’ around 30 years ago. About 15 years ago, the business expanded to Malad, with Clint and Leslie buying it nearly 14 years ago.
“Quite honestly, for the first couple years, I questioned whether that was a good move or not,” Clint said standing over a boiling pot of penne.
Now, more than a decade later, Pizza Stop is a part of the fabric of the Malad community.
As Davis explained, in a town as small as Malad, people talk. They discuss small businesses and whether the people who run them belong. And as he said, the Brackins have a great reputation, both for serving quality food as well as serving the community.
“It’s a big thing,” he said. “They participate in everything that goes on in our little town. … It wasn’t going to fly, it would have been gone a long time ago.”
As Clint recalls, when his restaurant first opened its doors, there were other pizza places in town. They have since gone out of the business, as have others that have made a run at it in Malad.
“There’s been other pizza places come and go,” he said. “None of them lasted very long at all. Most places that come here go out of business.”
So what is Pizza Stop’s recipe to success in Malad? It can’t just be that the family is willing to be part of the community.
As David explains, it is a willingness to go the extra mile with their already tasty food. They will make off-the-menu items to please customers, even if they’ve never made them before, he said.
Clint believes it to be even simpler than that.
“Everything has kinda been built on our dough recipe,” he said. “It’s a crust we believe in.”
The Pizza Stop crust is based on a recipe that sold well in Florida, then in Preston, and now is a hit in Malad — with some minor tweaks.
Clint said he had added just a little bit of flavor to his father’s dough recipe. And that isn’t the only change he made.
“My dad’s always kept more — he doesn’t need many employees because he’s kept a basic menu: pizza, breadsticks, and that’s about it, really,” he said with a laugh.
The approach Clint and Leslie take is a bit modernized. At their Pizza Stop, you can get a deliciously fresh salad to go with your pizza. Or, you can go in a different direction altogether and get a calzone and the famous breadsticks.
And if you want to go entirely off the beaten pizza path, you can be like Steven Smith, who was born in Malad and currently attends BYU-Idaho.
Smith loves the mango-habanero wing — they’re “just right, it’s so good,” he said — so good in fact, Pizza Stop is among his first stops when he is home, visiting from Rexburg. But he also goes further outside the box.
“I really enjoy the Hog-And-Honey pizza, that one’s really good,” he said. “And then the Oreo pizza, I feel like I can’t find a better Oreo pizza anywhere.”
Clint and Leslie have a menu so expansive it forces a need of more employees than Clint’s father’s restaurant in Preston. But he sees that as just another way to serve the community, by offering jobs and by placing the care of his employees above all.
While he grew up working in his father’s pizza restaurants, Clint spent his younger adult years running a masonry business. But he saw the opportunity in the Malad Pizza Stop. That move has worked out, both for his family and Malad City.
“But the community has supported us as well,” Leslie said. “They’ve gotten us to where we are, they really embraced us. Without the community that we have, we wouldn’t be where we are. they don’t let just anyone in.”
“People talk in this little town,” Davis said. “They’ve got a good reputation, and they’re good people, too.”
Check out Pizza Stop’s entire menu on Facebook.
Small Town Spotlight wants to shine a light on all the good going on in small-town Idaho. If you know of someone or something in one of Idaho’s many small towns that deserve to be featured on Small Town Spotlight, email Kalama@EastIdahoNews.com and include “spotlight” in the subject line.