Before the chain, a local Domino’s popularized pizza in NOLA | Blake Pontchartrain | Gambit Weekly

Hey Blake,A friend laughed when I told them that Domino’s introduced pizza to New Orleans, but it wasn’t the national pizza chain he was thinking of. I remember a local place called Domino’s on St. Charles Avenue. What can you tell us about it?Dear reader,

Sam Domino operated his namesake pizza restaurant and bar at 701 St. Charles Ave. You’re correct in crediting the place with being among the first restaurants in town to popularize pizza. Located at the corner of St. Charles and Girod Street, the building is now home to Herbsaint, which opened there in 2000.

According to a 1958 Times-Picayune article, Domino first started a pizza restaurant in the French Quarter at Decatur and St. Louis streets in 1947. That’s well before the original Domino’s Pizza opened in Michigan in 1960, later becoming an international chain.

Locally, Domino moved his restaurant to St. Charles Avenue in 1953, offering more than 25 different pizza varieties, as well as other Italian food, steaks, seafood and chicken dishes.

In his 1970 book “The New Orleans Underground Gourmet,” States-Item restaurant critic Richard Collin said Domino’s made “some of the best pizza in the city” and added that “the other dishes can be very good but are not as outstanding as the pizza.” The restaurant was “small and cheerful with checkered tablecloths and a jukebox with old opera records,” Collin wrote, calling it “a most pleasant old Italian restaurant with good food at reasonable prices.”

Restaurant critic Tom Fitzmorris wrote about Domino’s in his 2011 book with Peggy Scott Laborde, “Lost Restaurants of New Orleans.” He called the pizza “clearly based on the New York model and it was well executed.” Fitzmorris said the most distinctive pie was the garlic pizza: “a cheese job sprinkled with a great deal of garlic. It was delicious and as long as your date also ate it, you wouldn’t regret ordering it.”

By 1976, when Collin and his wife Rima published an updated version of their restaurant guide, Domino’s had moved to 3901 Airline Highway in Metairie. Collin raved about its Italian sausage pizza, saying it had the “best crust” in town. That location closed around 1981.