The short version: Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax were federal prosecutors turned criminal defense attorneys when they borrowed a quarter of a million dollars against their law practice and signed a personally guaranteed lease in Beverly Hills — with no name, no menu and no restaurant experience. Forty‑one years later California Pizza Kitchen has a category, a color and a culture to its name. Rick tells me how the nightly sales report settled the menu argument for good, why the best real estate strategy he had was answering the phone, and why ROCK — respect, opportunity, communication, kindness — is the reason 14,000 employees could carry the brand without him in the room.
Guest: Rick Rosenfield, co‑founder of California Pizza Kitchen and author of The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza (Amplify Publishing). Brands and companies discussed in this episode: California Pizza Kitchen, Spago, Chez Panisse, Chin Chin, Hamburger Hamlet, La Scala Boutique, Baskin‑Robbins, Tony Roma’s, The Mirage, Cheesecake Factory, P.F. Chang’s, In‑N‑Out, Remanco, Wood Stone, Simon, Taubman and General Growth. Read the full episode transcript here.
I have been going to California Pizza Kitchen since I was a kid in Southern California, and I have told the barbecue chicken pizza story secondhand more times than I can count. So sitting down with one of the two men who actually built it was a treat, and you can hear it in my voice on this one.
What I did not expect was how much of this conversation would end up being about people. Rick came in with a book about pizza. He spent the back half of the episode talking about culture — and he was the one who steered it there. If you run more than one location, that is the part of this episode I would rewind.
Who founded California Pizza Kitchen, and how did two lawyers end up in the restaurant business?
Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax co‑founded California Pizza Kitchen in Beverly Hills in March 1985. The two met as federal prosecutors and spent twelve or thirteen years together as criminal defense attorneys. They borrowed roughly $250,000 against their law practice, signed a lease with personal guarantees, and only then went looking for a name, a menu and a chef.
The path there was not a straight line. They tried to become Tony Roma’s franchisees back when the concept had one unit, and got turned down — Clint Murchison, who owned the Dallas Cowboys, did not want lawyers as franchisees. Years later Murchison’s son found Rick at a conference and told him he thought his dad had made a mistake. They kicked around a rib concept. They developed menu items for a hotelier friend, Burton Goldberg, at the Mutiny at Sailboat Bay in Miami. And it was Goldberg who finally shoved them off the ledge, inviting them to Saint‑Tropez for the summer and calling them chicken lawyers when they said they had a trial.
“Are you going to practice law your whole life? Or are you going to go do what you want to do?”
Burton Goldberg, as told by Rick Rosenfield, co‑founder of California Pizza Kitchen
They went to trial, came back, and decided to do it.
What is California‑style pizza, and how did CPK define it?
California‑style pizza existed before CPK, but only at the top of the market. Alice Waters created it at Chez Panisse in Berkeley with goat cheese, fresh vegetables and the idea of a single‑serving pizza. Wolfgang Puck took it to celebrities at Spago with duck sausage and smoked salmon. Rick and Larry’s contribution was deciding what a national audience would actually order.
They hired Puck’s original pizza chef, who built the first menu — rabbit sausage, lamb sausage, radicchio, pine nut, grape leaves. And barbecue chicken pizza. Rick says the two of them got along with that chef like oil and water, and he lasted about a month. Gary Beauregard, who came over from Spago, ran the kitchen and stayed fourteen years.
What Rick had already written down, before there was a menu, turned out to be the thesis of the whole company. In the business plan he typed on a word processor to get the bank loan, he predicted California‑style pizza would become the third great American pizza style alongside Chicago, where he grew up, and New York — and that California‑style pizza would be defined by whatever California Pizza Kitchen said it was.
How did Rick Rosenfield know barbecue chicken pizza was the hit?
He read the sales report every morning on his run. Rick lived five blocks from the original store and ran past Beverly Hills High School, stopping to look at the previous night’s Remanco printout. On a night when they sold about 200 pizzas, roughly 150 were barbecue chicken, about 20 were mushroom/pepperoni/sausage, ten were traditional cheese, and one — or none — was rabbit sausage.
“It’s pretty easy to understand what the world’s interested in.”
Rick Rosenfield, co‑founder of California Pizza Kitchen
Rick’s read was that there was no national market for Spago pizzas. Nobody outside a narrow slice of Los Angeles cared about duck sausage or smoked salmon on a pizza. What they cared about was barbecue chicken, Thai chicken, BLT — and mushroom, pepperoni, sausage and plain cheese. He describes it as the Baskin‑Robbins problem: Jamoca almond fudge was number one, but two, three and four were vanilla, strawberry and chocolate. So CPK ran both halves of the menu at once, and never used the word gourmet.
The test for a new item was whether a guest could taste it in their mind before they ordered it. Thai chicken pizza came from the way you dip naan into leftover satay sauce — anything that tastes good on bread should be good on a pizza with mozzarella and a good crust. Larry loved mayonnaise, so the BLT went in as a cheese‑and‑tomato pizza and came out topped with chilled chopped lettuce, mayo and tomato; it later became the California Club with avocado. Rick and his wife Esther came up with the Santa Fe chicken, guacamole and salsa, which evolved into the tostada pizza.
The misses are as instructive as the hits. Rick killed Larry’s cheeseburger pizza on the spot — it made him want a real cheeseburger, which is a mouthfeel problem no topping fixes. Peking duck pizza never sold, but stayed on the menu for years because people loved to talk about it. That instinct for what a guest can already imagine is the same one Chad Offerdahl described building a breakfast menu around at The Big Biscuit, and it is the same discipline behind Farmer Boys’ scratch‑made, no‑freezer approach with John Lucas.
Why did California Pizza Kitchen open inside malls instead of freestanding buildings?
Because the developers came to them. Rick is blunt that CPK’s real estate strategy was opportunistic rather than analytical — no demographic study, no clustering model, no spreadsheets. Store two was Beverly Center, 1.8 miles from the original. Store three was Topanga Plaza next to Nordstrom. Then Lenox Square in Atlanta offered them a three‑level site in the center of the premier mall in the Southeast.
That Lenox space is what set the template: open kitchen, no walls, yellow smokestacks running straight up through the roof of the mall, shoppers looking down at the restaurant from above. Rick calls it Centre Court at Wimbledon. From there the strategy wrote itself — put these in the best shopping centers in America — and relationships with Simon, Taubman and General Growth followed.
Two details worth sitting with. First, CPK argued to Taubman that restaurants would become the mini‑anchors of the future, and got disputed for it; they were right, though Rick admits nobody predicted the collapse of the department‑store anchors that made it true. Second, Steve Wynn became their biggest investor when they still had one restaurant, and when he built The Mirage he asked to be a franchisee. They did not want domestic franchising, but they made the exception. Rick calls the Mirage store a billboard that paid us. I remember the two lines — VIP and regular — every time I went to Vegas as a kid.
And when he did not know a market, Rick chartered a helicopter and flew over the malls at five o’clock to see whose parking lot was full. That is a franchise‑growth instinct that shows up again and again on this show — Michael Montagano made a version of the same argument about footprint flexibility at Dog Haus, and Surcheros built a whole thesis on the markets everyone else skips.
Where did the term “wood fired pizza” come from?
Rick says he coined it. Sitting with CPK’s logo designer, he suggested putting “wood fired pizza” on the original diamond logo. The phrase did not exist before that. It went on the logo, the category went mainstream, and their oven maker — Wood Stone, in Bellingham, Washington — became the largest wood‑burning oven manufacturer in the world, partly because CPK let them brand the ovens in full view of every guest. When CPK later switched to gas for efficiency, Wood Stone followed and became the largest gas oven manufacturer in the world.
The other piece of brand discipline is a color. “We want to own yellow” was a mantra from day one, from the original logo forward. Four decades later, it worked.
Why does an open kitchen change how you run a restaurant?
Because it removes the option of hiding anything. Rick’s framing is that the open kitchen has a good side and a bad side, and both are permanent: employees love not being confined to the back, and cleanliness and product freshness stop being policy and become mandatory, because every guest can see the line.
The origin of it is not what you would guess. The concept started as a pasta cafeteria — Rick’s brother showed him one in Chicago while Rick was running marathons and carb‑loading, and fresh pasta in a case was the rage in the mid‑eighties. Bob Mandler, who owned Chin Chin, pointed them at a similar place in Glendale Galleria. They went, saw everybody walking out with a slice of pizza, and put pizza in the concept. Somewhere on the drive back to the law office they scrapped the cafeteria line entirely: do Chin Chin instead, put the wood‑burning oven in the center of the room, and build a casual version of it.
“They’re not confined to the back kitchen.”
Rick Rosenfield on why staff loved the open kitchen
What does ROCK stand for at California Pizza Kitchen?
ROCK is respect, opportunity, communication and kindness — the four values CPK evaluated every employee against. It was not written as a mission statement. It came out of a 1985 problem: the front of the house and the back of the house did not get along, and Rick and Larry concluded they could not run one restaurant that way, let alone hundreds.
Rick is candid about how bad the start was. The night they fired the first chef, he and Larry and Rick’s wife Esther sat on the floor of the law office and cried. That was the moment he understood CPK was not a concept, it was a business — and the business had a people problem. In 1985 the back of the house was primarily Hispanic men and the front of the house was primarily Caucasian men and women, and under the pressure of service they did not naturally get along. Their answer was to say it out loud to everybody at once: at CPK we are colorblind, gender blind, religion blind, education blind. We care that you can carry our brand.
Then they made it physical. Larry, a big guy, stood as expediter between the front and the back in a small restaurant. Esther worked the host stand. They forced the barrier down rather than waiting for it to erode, and Rick and Larry learned to delegate.
“The issue is really not, can you talk the talk. Can you walk it? People believed in ROCK because Larry and I believed in ROCK.”
Rick Rosenfield, co‑founder of California Pizza Kitchen
The numbers he uses to prove it are the ones I would put on a wall. When they sold the company fifteen years ago, CPK had 32 regional directors who had been with the company an average of fourteen years and averaged about 36 years old — and many of them had come up out of the kitchen. The company had 14,000 employees. Rick also says training was hard enough to be a filter: servers had to know every item on the menu, and a friend’s son studied harder for his finals at CPK than for his finals at Harvard. People still talk about ROCK to him on LinkedIn today. If you want the leadership version of this same argument from a different industry, Steve Black’s five rules of leadership in grocery retail is the closest companion episode we have.
Can you build a culture that scales past your own reach?
Rick’s answer is yes, but only if you stop expecting people to care the way an owner cares. He heard a restaurateur claim online that he could not expand because nobody would ever care like he does, and Rick’s response was direct: then you should not expand. You will never get anybody to care like you do. That does not mean you cannot get people to care.
What they care about, in his experience, is working for an ethical company, being paid fairly, and being part of a winning team. CPK made that literal — the best operators who were free to travel would spend a month in a new city opening a store and meeting other CPK people, which turned a growing company into an extended family instead of a set of outposts.
This is the part I would press on if you are sitting at two or five or fifteen units and telling yourself you cannot let go. The tension is not really about whether your people will care. It is about whether you have built something clear enough for them to carry.
What’s in The California Pizza Kitchen Story?
The book is out now — it published on July 21, 2026 through Amplify Publishing, and Rick points people to rickrosenfield.com for ordering options. It is structured around the CPK story, with Rick’s law career — prosecuting and defending major organized‑crime figures, growing up on the south side of Chicago — moved into a prequel so it does not interrupt the main narrative.
He is clear about why he wrote it. The anecdotes were fun. The message is the culture, and how you grow a business on top of one. The book also covers the parts that are less fun to retell: the Pepsi period, the private equity years, the bankruptcy, and what it took to hold on to the things that mattered most.
My favorite answer of the episode came from asking Rick for the strangest thing he ever ate at CPK. Larry — who loved mayonnaise and egg salad — created an egg salad pizza, launched it right before the cholesterol scare, and it came off the menu almost immediately. For years afterward Larry called it the biggest disaster in CPK history. Rick’s response: Larry, throwing away a couple quarts of egg salad is not a disaster.
Chapters
- 00:18 — Sponsor and welcome
- 01:57 — Who Rick Rosenfield is and how CPK started
- 02:55 — From federal prosecutors to a Beverly Hills lease
- 07:13 — How barbecue chicken pizza created a category
- 10:50 — Steve Wynn, The Mirage, and the mall strategy
- 13:40 — The business plan and the nightly sales report
- 19:10 — Turning pizza flavors into signature salads
- 22:49 — The pasta cafeteria that became the open kitchen
- 26:19 — Owning yellow and inventing “wood fired pizza”
- 29:02 — ROCK: the culture that made CPK scalable
- 36:39 — Why “nobody will care like me” is the wrong reason not to expand
- 37:55 — Why Rick wrote the book
- 41:24 — The egg salad pizza
Want every word? Read the full, speaker‑labeled transcript of episode 352 here.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded California Pizza Kitchen?
California Pizza Kitchen was founded in Beverly Hills in March 1985 by Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax, law partners who met as federal prosecutors and practiced together as criminal defense attorneys for twelve or thirteen years. They funded the first restaurant by borrowing about $250,000 against their law practice and signing the lease with personal guarantees before they had a name, a menu or a chef.
What does ROCK stand for at California Pizza Kitchen?
ROCK stands for respect, opportunity, communication and kindness. Rick Rosenfield says it was the standard CPK evaluated every employee against, and that it grew out of a 1985 effort to break down the hostility between the front of the house and the back of the house. By the time the founders sold the company, CPK had 14,000 employees and 32 regional directors averaging fourteen years of tenure.
How did barbecue chicken pizza become California Pizza Kitchen’s signature item?
Barbecue chicken pizza came from the first menu, built by Wolfgang Puck’s original pizza chef. Rick Rosenfield read the previous night’s sales printout every morning, and on a night of roughly 200 pizzas sold, about 150 were barbecue chicken. That data killed the high‑end items and set the pattern for future menu development: create items a guest can taste in their mind before ordering.
Who invented the term “wood fired pizza”?
Rick Rosenfield says he coined the phrase while working with California Pizza Kitchen’s logo designer in 1985, and it went on the original CPK diamond logo. The term did not exist before that. CPK’s oven supplier, Wood Stone of Bellingham, Washington, went on to become the largest manufacturer of wood‑burning ovens in the world, and later of gas ovens.
Takeaways for multi‑unit operators
- Let the data kill your favorite item. Rick and Larry loved the high‑end pizzas. The sales report said barbecue chicken, and they listened. Read your mix every morning, and be willing to be wrong in public.
- Build items a guest can taste before they order. Not gourmet — identifiable. Thai chicken worked because everyone has dipped bread in satay sauce. The cheeseburger pizza failed because it made you want a cheeseburger.
- Your build‑out is a promise. An open kitchen makes cleanliness and freshness non‑negotiable and gives your team a reason to be proud. Decide which of those you are ready to enforce before you design the box.
- Name your culture before you need it. ROCK was four words that let 14,000 people make decisions without the founders in the room. Whatever yours is, say it out loud, and evaluate against it.
- Stop waiting for someone who cares like you. Nobody will. Plenty of people will care a great deal, for reasons of their own — ethics, fair pay, being on a winning team. If you cannot accept that, do not open the second store.
Huge thanks to Rick Rosenfield for coming on and for writing this one down. Grab The California Pizza Kitchen Story at rickrosenfield.com, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Thanks as always to our sponsor, Restaurant Technologies — you can hear the whole closed‑loop cooking oil story in our conversation with new RTI CEO Alissa Partee.
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