I’m a Boston punk rocker from the class of ’96, and the spirit of that scene still shapes everything I do. From 2003 to 2007, I lived in and ran a punk house known as 3516, where we hosted more than a hundred bands in the basement. It taught me that DIY doesn’t mean sloppy. We enforced fire exits, monitored capacity, deep cleaned after shows, and somehow kept four bands on schedule with one drum kit and one monitor. That house burned down a few years after I left, but the lessons stayed with me: take care of people, run a tight ship, and build community through consistency.

Pizza came later. After moving from Boston to Washington, DC in 2009 and later spending time in Costa Rica and Ecuador while my former partner pursued graduate studies, I found myself in Lexington, Kentucky in 2012. At the time I was working in restaurants and doing SEO work that I absolutely hated. In 2013, after waiting an hour for a disappointing pizza from a newly opened food truck, I had a simple thought: I can do this better. Instead of jumping straight into pizza, I started by learning bread. I created my sourdough starter on May 5, 2013 and began working overnight bakery shifts later that year to learn fermentation and production baking from the ground up.

In 2014, I returned to Boston and worked at Fornax Bread Company, where I learned what professionalism in food service actually looked like. The owners operated with accountability, discipline, and calm leadership, and that left a permanent mark on me. I became obsessed with dough and fermentation. Everyone buys similar toppings, but dough is where personality lives. Dough reflects patience, repetition, engineering, and care. That philosophy still defines Rise Up Pizza today.

In 2016, I started doing small pop-ups under a tent with a portable oven while designing a trailer and researching food truck markets across the country. Turns out, Lexington is a fairly favorable market for me. Later that year, I sourced a burned-out work trailer in Massachusetts and rebuilt it with my father, a union pipefitter. We rebuilt the structure from the frame up and designed a custom pellet-fed rocket stove oven system that balanced high heat with low weight.

In March 2017, I drove that trailer back to Lexington through a snowstorm with almost no money to my name and launched Rise Up Pizza. The early years were a cycle of growth, accidents, rebuilds, redesigns, and constant refinement. Every setback pushed the business forward instead of ending it.

During the pandemic, when events and bars shut down, I pivoted into bread delivery and frozen pizza sales to survive. In 2021, I opened my first brick-and-mortar location. We won awards, but the location never generated the foot traffic it needed. In 2023, I took another gamble by moving downtown into a shared kitchen arrangement that ultimately wasn’t the right fit. That transition pushed me to completely reinvent my style, shifting from a hybrid New England/Neapolitan approach into the Detroit-style pizza I serve today. That evolution earned another award and helped me finally solidify my voice as both a chef and a baker.

Now, in 2026, I’ve purchased a new restaurant and entered a new phase of Rise Up Pizza. After years of building, rebuilding, experimenting, and learning, I finally feel like I fully understand who I am as an operator. My focus now is simple: run a great restaurant with discipline, consistency, and integrity. Rise Up Pizza has never been about trends or shortcuts. It’s about dough first, systems that hold together under pressure, and the belief that when life knocks you down, you rise up stronger.