I definitely don’t have as much experience as I'm sure a lot of the other members might, but IMO it comes down to a few things.
1. Would it primarily be a sit-down or to-go place? Personally, I love seeing wood ovens when I buy pizza, but I’m not sure it’s the best way to cook a pickup/delivery pie. On the other hand, I feel like if you want more of a sit down place, it’s a big attention grabber, and maybe the first thing you’d notice/come to define the pizza shop.
2. What would the employee pool look like? I tend to think of wood ovens as the highest skill/most time consuming to operate. For instance - on a deck oven, you might pop a pizza in, and rotate, or remove from a screen. Conveyers are even easier. But I feel like it might be a full time job just manning the oven, and even then, it might not be a job you could work interchangeably with different employees. It kinda creates a bottleneck unless you’ve got a good pool of experienced workers.
3. What style of pizza - I’d probably only go for a wood oven if I was doing more craft/Neapolitan pizzas. I don’t know if it would lend itself to lower margin/higher volume business - but others probably have more experience than I do here.
4. What’s important to you as an owner? I see wood burning ovens as being analogous to driving a super car. They take a lot of training, there’s a lot of risk, they tend to be more expensive. But when everything comes together there’s really no way to replicate it. Do you need a super car? It depends - absolutely if you’re competing in a race, but maybe not if you’re driving to work. At the same time - maybe there’s something about cooking on a wood oven that’s just satisfying - knowing it’s hard to do and you’ve mastered it, I feel like that’s a valid reason to do things too, even if you don’t strictly need it.
