🔒Glastonbury financial exec plans $15M+ pizzeria expansion

Glastonbury financial services executive Jay Maffe first dipped his toe into the restaurant business two years ago, but he’s already decided to dive in.

In 2019, Maffe, CEO of 20-year-old Maffe Financial Group, which provides investment, insurance and other products and services, opened Square Peg Pizzeria just a mile down Hebron Drive from his company’s office, partnering at the time with noted area celebrity chef Tyler Anderson.

While the pandemic hit the restaurant sector hard overall, Square Peg did gangbusters take-out business during the past year, Maffe said in a recent interview.

Now, he’s begun to roll out a major expansion over the coming years, and his vision is to make Square Peg into a veritable Connecticut chain. (Anderson is no longer associated with the business.)

Maffe plans to open seven new Square Peg locations by year’s end, including in Vernon, Manchester, Newington and Orange, but he doesn’t plan to stop there.

In all, Maffe says he envisions 20 Connecticut locations opened in the next four or five years, with an estimated investment of $15 million in the restaurants plus the additional cost of any real estate acquired.

Besides the locations slated to open this summer, Maffe said he also has pizza shops in the works in Berlin and Enfield.

An investment in dough consistency

A key piece of the expansion plan just came together. Last month, Maffe purchased a Wethersfield property at 207 Church St., which he plans to redevelop into a centrally-located commercial kitchen or “commissary” that will make pizza dough and provide other support to Square Peg restaurants.

He’s also planning to turn the newly-acquired, 21,510-square-foot property into a Square Peg location, as well as a brewery.

He says he’s in talks with seven different beer makers — none of which he was willing to identify — hoping to draw one into a partnership at the site, which he anticipates would employ upwards of 30 restaurant personnel, 25 brewery staff and another 25 in leased office space in the building.

Maffe, who paid $975,000 for the Church Street property, said he intends to sink another $2 million or so into renovating it.

“It will make sure the consistency and quality is the same everywhere you go,” Maffe said of the Wethersfield investment. “In order to do that, we have to produce a lot of the main ingredients in one location.”

The most important ingredient is the pizza dough.

“If you make dough in each separate location, it would taste slightly different because of the water,” he said.

The Church Street property was home to Clearing House Auction Galleries from 1980 until about a decade or so ago. Prior to that, the building had a ginger ale bottling factory operated by Gra-Rock. Signs and bottles from the long-gone operation have since become collectibles sold online. Maffe plans to incorporate that history into the re-imagined facility.

”We’re not sure exactly how but somehow we’ll pay tribute to the heritage of the building,” he said.

The pandemic that hit in early 2020 has boosted pick-up business at many restaurants, and Square Peg’s drive-through window at its Glastonbury location — a unique feature at a pizza shop — certainly helped, Maffe said. The unexpected crisis also has mixed ramifications for real estate, he added.

“It’s sort of hit or miss,” he said. “On the one hand it’s good because we’re seeing a lot of vacant properties that are available, but the bad is that real estate has gone up so much in value.”

He said he looked at upwards of 20 properties around Vernon before finally pulling the trigger on a location in that town.