Look for the Frog, and You’ll Find Pinyon
In Ojai, the profit-sharing pizzeria-meets-bakery-meets-restaurant is hell-bent on challenging the status quo.
Photographs by David Gurzhiev
Pinyon is a pizzeria specializing in sourdough pies topped with local ingredients and fired over Ojai Valley citrus wood. It’s a bakery known for its dense and chewy bagels, hoagies stuffed with housemade mortadella and barbacoa, and Friday-only challah loaves. It’s a sit-down dinner restaurant with green-speckled plates, natural wine, and daily-changing specials—most of which are featured in an optional tasting menu deemed “a la toad.” And it’s a great vibe. Situated in a former Jersey Mike's on Ojai’s main stretch, the two-year-old eatery glows green at night from a neon toad that hangs on its street-facing wall, one of many frog paraphernalia inside. None of these factors—not the excellent pizza, the distinctive bagels, the cheffy seasonal dishes, nor the playfully laid-back atmosphere—are what owners Tony Montagnaro and Jeremy Alben are most proud of, however.
What they’re most proud of is less sexy and somewhat radical: Pinyon’s business model, which centers profit-sharing for its employees and exercises a holistic approach to caring for everyone involved in the project. “Usually, a restaurant’s priorities, one through ten, are make money, make money, make money,” says Montagnaro, who hails from a pizzeria-owning family in New Jersey. Before landing in Southern California, he lived in Philadelphia, where he was a partner in a cooperatively owned (and now-closed) bar, Win Win. While Pinyon is motivated to make a profit, the restaurant is simultaneously and equally invested in having a net positive effect on its workers, farmers, purveyors, delivery drivers, customers, and owners—not to mention the planet. “I wish there were another word for a business that did all those things because ‘restaurant’ doesn't really speak to the whole story,” Montagnaro says. “We buy food and sell it at a profit, yes, that's true. But there's so much more going on.”
Here’s how Pinyon operates, precisely:
Pinyon is not a co-op like Win Win but is a typical LLC co-owned by Montagnaro and Alben.
Prior to opening their doors at the tail end of 2021, the duo raised $250,000, mostly from friends and family. They agreed to pay investors back double their investment, and after that, 20% of profits in perpetuity.
Until Pinyon reaches 100% reimbursement, 80% of profits go to investors while the remaining 20% is distributed amongst employees based on the number of hours they’ve worked. Montagnaro and Alben participate in the profit-sharing as well, but cap their hours at 40 per week so that they don’t cannibalize the pool given how much time they spend in the restaurant. “Basically, it ends up being an extra paycheck every quarter,” explains Alben.
Once the restaurant pays back investors 100%, the profit distribution between investors and employees will become 50/50. (Today, Pinyon has distributed $135,000—over halfway through their initial payback—a number that is steadily growing every quarter.)
Once Pinyon pays back investors 2.5 times their initial investment, the distribution split will become 20/80, with the bigger piece of the pie going into employees' pockets, amounting to an additional four paychecks per quarter.
The restaurant employs counter service from breakfast through dinner to keep labor costs down and maintains a small team of less than 10 employees.
Food costs are higher than at most pizzerias but are not exorbitant, given that Pinyon buys more flour than anything else. And the average check at Pinyon (total revenue / number of customers) is relatively high.
This level of transparency—with press, with employees, with customers—is rare for a restaurant. Pinyon even shares their P&L statements with their staff, which is practically unheard of. “I think it creates a community where people understand more what’s going on, why they’re being asked to do something a particular way, why we’re trying to get the most value out of each ingredient we bring in-house because, at the end of the day, they see how it contributes to their direct paycheck,” says Alben. For example, Ellie Webb, who mans the register and works the front of the house, has taken it upon herself to learn more about the restaurant’s wine program since she knows that the more wine sales Pinyon makes, the more she’ll get paid every quarter. In an industry that’s notoriously bad at retaining employees, all but one of Pinyon’s founding team members still work there.
“‘Restaurant’ doesn't really speak to the whole story. We buy food and sell it at a profit, yes, that's true. But there's so much more going on.”
Montagnaro and Alben first met in 2015 when Alben booked Montagnaro’s now-wife’s band to play at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate. Montagnaro was playing guitar. They reconnected over the pandemic while Montagnaro was living in L.A. and hosting an Instagram Live show about the intersection of bread baking and social justice. Alben, a chef from Seattle whose resume includes Seabird (formerly Hitchcock) on Bainbridge Island, Fäviken in Sweden, Mexico City’s Pujol, and the storied pizzeria Roberta’s, came on as a guest. He had been furloughed as a cook at Brooklyn’s The Four Horsemen and was baking sourdough at home to raise money for The Okra Project, a Black Trans-led mutual aid organization. That’s when they realized they were politically aligned beyond their shared culinary interests (i.e., pizza, more on that later). The pair started to talk about what it would look like to create a non-hierarchal restaurant rooted in values of comprehensive sustainability and environmental responsibility.
They chose Ojai because of its situation smack dab in the middle of a rich agricultural region. “One of the things that helped make [Pinyon] make sense was being where the food was,” says Montagnaro. “When Chefs’ Warehouse, a publicly traded company, is jacking up prices due to their algorithm telling them there’s certain demand and certain supply, you’re vulnerable in a different way than when you’re buying eggs from the guy down the street. He’ll charge you the same amount no matter what the global economy is up to.” Pinyon gets all of its meat—pork, turkey, chicken, rabbit—from Jeronimo Alonso Brown, the farmer behind Casitas Valley Pastures less than 15 miles from the restaurant, who delivers it himself. “No middleman, no warehouse, no airplane,” adds Montagnaro.
“No middleman, no warehouse, no airplane.”
This level of control over ingredients empowers Pinyon to be upfront with its customers and ensure the utmost quality. “We would never buy a product and serve it to someone if we couldn't tell them how it’s produced,” says Alben. Montagnaro jokes that their “dirtiest little secret” is that they buy peeled garlic. “It’s from California, but we just don’t have time to peel eight pounds of garlic a week.”
Pizza was a natural starting point given their culinary backgrounds—Alben’s time at Roberta’s, Montagnaro’s childhood spent in pizzerias, both of their experience baking—and a nimble template to prove their concept. They bought a wood-fired pizza oven in November of 2020 and operated as a pop-up for a year, serving salads and sweets alongside pies. They sourced sourdough starter from their neighbors at Lebanese-French rotisserie Ojai Rotie, started making hand-pulled mozzarella with curds from San Gabriel Valley-based Gioia Cheese Co., and bought single-origin soppressata from Smoking Goose.
When you have a pizzeria, you also have a bakery, as Montagnaro points out—“there are mixers, there’s flour, there’s yeast”—and so bagels and hoagies came shortly thereafter. As they dialed in their bagel recipe, which Alben describes as Montreal-style in texture and size and Austro-Hungarian in chew and shine, they also had to think about how they could produce the appropriate accouterments, like lox, in line with their ethos. “We don’t want to be buying salmon from Scotland or even from Washington year-round because it’s not the season,” explains Alben. “So we work with Mt. Lassen; they raise sustainably farmed trout in Sacramento, which is a way to have a very reminiscent product that’s not contributing to the issue of salmon overfishing in California.” They buy all of their fish whole, break it down in-house, and utilize every component possible. When the ike-jime vermilion rockfish they source from fisherman Eric Hodge were spawning at the end of last year, they made bottarga, which they’re currently shaving on top of crispy fingerling potatoes during dinner service. Meanwhile, the rockfish is served as crudo with yuzu dashi and pine nut emulsion.
Nowadays, Pinyon has a steady customer base who not only come in for pizza with the family but are also excited to try Alben’s more technique-heavy dishes, like a recent hearth-roasted rabbit ballontine with chanterelle jus. During our morning interview, regulars included the journalist Franz Lidz, Kishu mandarin farmer Mike Sullivan of Churchill Orchard, and a local winemaker. “We have a super dedicated couple dozen customers who are here twice a day sometimes, every day of the week,” says Montagnaro. “I want to know everyone’s name, what their kids are up to, and what they want to eat. De-anonymizing the restaurant experience is something the greasy spoon got right.”
Pinyon is firmly against gatekeeping information—of its business model, its ingredient sourcing, and even its kitchen savvy. “People are like, ‘What’s in the meatballs?’ And Jeremy will literally just take a picture of our recipe and send it to them,” says Montagnaro. “It gets people more excited about what you’re doing if they get brought into the process,” adds Alben. I now know why their tomato pie—a slice I will personally drive an hour and a half just to have for lunch—is so packed with umami: the sauce, made of Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, salt, dried oregano, and Aleppo pepper, is added in two layers and baked twice so that half of it is more concentrated and the other half is more fresh.
The tomato pie is a Pinyon staple. After all, Montagnaro and his brother, Marcello, who also works at Pinyon as a cook, have roots in Philly where the focaccia-like marinara pizza originates. (Cello previously made pizza at Shackamaxon). So is the wood fire-toasted bacon egg and cheese with tamago steamed egg, Casitas Valley Pastures bacon, and aged cheddar. And for dessert, the pistachio tiramisu made of Santa Barbara pistachios and coffee from local roaster Beacon. Yet unlike a greasy spoon, Pinyon changes things up frequently. “We’re always adding stuff, taking stuff away, changing the offering to keep it fresh because it’s a moving target,” says Montagnaro. They have multiple revenue streams—dine-in, take-out, catering, merch, wholesale, pop-ups—because they’re interested in longevity.
Pinyon doesn’t want to jump on trend bandwagons or pop off on TikTok. Rather, the whole team is working towards becoming an institution—one that can be a role model for more sustainable, more equitable, and more responsible-minded restaurants. “Even if another person never walked in here, we would 100% still be able to figure it out. You can plug one hole, but that just means that the other ones are going to get more fleshed out,” Montagnaro says.
For Alben, who bounced around a lot as a young chef honing his chops, ownership is about much more than having a restaurant dedicated to his own cooking style. “It’s cool to be able to learn how to cook in someone else’s style and mimic that, but you never feel like you have ownership over it, so we were thinking, ‘How can we actually have a place where people want to be for a long period of time?’ he says. For Pinyon, the answer was collective ownership by way of profit-sharing. Not only is it good for business since it’s hard to find labor in the restaurant industry, particularly in Ventura County, but it also matters from a political standpoint. “Ethically, we believe that workers have power and should be rewarded for their labor,” Alben says.
“Serving a good plate of food isn’t enough for me anymore,” says Montagnaro. “I’m more interested in whose lives this place is making better. Just the owners? Next. Does your body need to take an L to enjoy some tasty plate? Next. Does the planet need to take an L? Next. If the workers need to take an L? Next.”
“Ethically, we believe that workers have power and should be rewarded for their labor.”

In permaculture, an ecosystem design approach that embraces naturally complementary components such as native plants, water features, shade providers, and insects, it’s well-known that if you hear frogs, it means everything is working together because they’re able to receive enough oxygen to live there. Pinyon operates in a similar manner, but as a restaurant, wherein all of the conditions that contribute to a healthy food and labor ecosystem must be in place in order for it to thrive. The wealth of frogs inside the space—beyond the neon green toad sign and the frog-themed art in the bathroom, every frog figurine and poster was donated by customers—has become something of a metaphor. “I like the idea that there are Pinyons elsewhere,” says Montagnaro. “Look for the frog, and that’s how you know it’s possible.”
Is this the same journalist?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/naples-pizza-original-fast-food-180976992/