Chef Waldo Stout has officially moved Waldo’s Pizza beyond the pop-up world and into a permanent kitchen in Downtown Long Beach.
Taking over Unit N inside the ghost-kitchen complex at 222 E. 10th St., Chef Waldo plans to soft open the new home of Waldo’s Pizza on Wednesday, Sept. 2, at 4PM. It marks the first time his celebrated pizzeria has had a dedicated, full-time space—and another meaningful step toward the traditional neighborhood pizza shop he has long dreamed of opening.
“I’ve been truly at it all day, every day,” Chef Waldo said. “You know my goal has always been the same: To eventually have a full-fledged pizzeria. This is one step toward that goal.”
That distinction is important: this might not be Waldo’s Pizza’s forever home. It will not immediately resemble the decades-old, lived-in neighborhood pizzeria Chef Waldo ultimately envisions. But after years of hauling a wood-burning oven around Long Beach, squeezing into parking lots and building a following one pop-up at a time, he will finally have a kitchen he can call his own.
Waldo’s Pizza gets its first permanent kitchen
The setup is intentionally simple.
Chef Waldo is taking over one of several kitchens tucked into the small strip mall at 10th Street and Long Beach Boulevard. He plans to install tables and chairs so customers can walk in, order face-to-face, and wait for their food. Orders will also be accepted by phone, while delivery will eventually be available through DoorDash.
The opening menu will feature seven pizzas, ranging from an unfussy plain cheese pie and vegan red pizza to established Waldo’s favorites like his sausage-and-mushroom and spicy Calabrese pies. His famed Caesar salad—which has earned nearly as much adoration as the pizza itself—will also make the cut.
Chef Waldo eventually hopes to install a stovetop, allowing him to expand into baked pastas and further explore broader Italian cooking, as he did during his year overseeing the kitchen at Due Fiori on 4th Street. But pizza remains the heart of the operation—and dough remains Chef Waldo’s most natural language.
Waldo’s Pizza was born from a lifelong connection to dough
When I first formally profiled Waldo’s Pizza in 2024, the pop-up had just marked its first anniversary at The V-Room. Chef Waldo was working from a mobile wood-burning oven, turning out two-day-fermented pies with blistered edges, delicately charred crusts, and the kind of simplicity that only works when every component is handled with precision.
His relationship with dough, however, stretches much further back.
Stout grew up in Tucson watching his mother and grandmother make massive Sonoran flour tortillas known as tortillas sobaqueras. Those experiences would eventually become central to his culinary identity—even if it took moving to California for BMX and unexpectedly falling into restaurant kitchens for him to recognize it.
“My hands were made to touch dough,” he told me at the time—a line that has always stuck with me.
His résumé backs up the declaration. Stout began his kitchen career at the much-missed Chianina before working at Los Angeles heavyweights Bestia and Bavel. He helped open the latter under Chef Ori Menashe and later worked with pizza programs connected to Beachwood, Little Coyote and Marlena. His career also included stops at Gjusta, Otium, Roberta’s and Pizzeria Sei before he poured that collective experience into Waldo’s Pizza.
Other endeavors paused the Waldo’s Pizza pop-up, but never the larger dream.
After consulting on Due Fiori’s menu and overseeing its kitchen for roughly a year, Chef Waldo departed and returned Waldo’s Pizza to regular rotation this past June. Trademark Brewing, The Grasshopper and his old V-Room stomping grounds once again became temporary homes for his mobile oven.
And the return was not merely nostalgic. Chef Waldo appeared re-centered, creatively energized and ready to build upon the brand he had placed on pause. Collaborations with Got Your Back, Selva, and Hamburgers Nice had already begun hinting at what a more expansive Waldo’s Pizza could eventually become—one informed not only by Italian traditions but also by his Sonoran roots and the deeper culinary vocabulary he developed at other establishments.
Still, the logistics of pop-up life are unforgiving. Every service requires hauling equipment, ingredients and an oven into someone else’s space before packing everything up and doing it again elsewhere. A dedicated kitchen offers him something the pop-up circuit never could: consistency.
More importantly, it gives Waldo’s Pizza the chance to begin functioning as a neighborhood restaurant instead of a traveling event.
Waldo’s Pizza will continue evolve toward the end goal…
Stout has always envisioned a pizzeria that becomes embedded in Long Beach—one where customers eventually reminisce about first trying his pies in The V-Room parking lot, long before there were walls, tables or a permanent oven. He has repeatedly cited the old-school pizza shops of New York as inspiration: places that become worn, familiar and beloved across 30 or 40 years.
Unit N at 222 E. 10th St. may or may not become that decades-long home. It is smaller and more utilitarian than the full-fledged pizzeria living in Chef Waldo’s imagination. But it has a door, an address, and a kitchen that belongs to Waldo’s Pizza.
And after years spent searching for permanence from one parking lot to another, that is no small thing.
Waldo’s Pizza will soft open Wednesday, Sept. 2, at 4PM at 222 E. 10th St., Unit N, in DTLB.
