Moriarty pizza joint featured on ‘America’s Best Restaurants’

The cameras rolled on the afternoon of Jan. 23 at Buttercrust Pizza as owners Sarah and Daniel Wright showed off their Moriarty eatery to the America’s Best Restaurants streaming show.

“Oh, this is so good,” show host Luis Rivera said as he noshed on a section of a Chicago beef calzone. “This is the best. The onions and the green peppers and the beef, dipped in au jus. Oh, you can even taste the sesame seeds. This all comes together.”

Episodes are aired three times daily on the production’s channels on Instagram, Youtube, Facebook and TikTok, said Rivera, who drove in from Dallas with videographer Jacob Robinson to film the segment then will visit several other restaurants in the state.

Buttercrust is the first New Mexico location America’s Best Restaurants has featured, he said.

“The purpose of America’s best restaurants is to travel the country finding independent restaurants that people should dine at on a weekly basis,” Rivera said. “And what led us here today was that this restaurant was nominated by people in this area. And we reached out to feature them on our show.”

Local resident Patricia Gurule-Hernandez got the ball rolling for Buttercrust.

“I saw them on Facebook and they were looking for nominations for your favorite local restaurants,” she said. “Sarah does so much for the community so I went ahead and told the story of how she donates to people in need. And of course, they’ve got great pizza. Great tasting.”

That was just the start, Rivera said.

“We go by demographics and all types of things,” he said. “But normally, five or more nominations are what gets people on our radar typically.”

The idea is to give the small operations a bit of leverage when battling the national companies, Rivera said.

“It is because all the independent mom and pop, local restaurants have to compete with the enormous brands. It is extremely tough,” he said. “So America’s Best Restaurants exist to give these independent restaurants and the mom and pop a platform to compete at the local level and dominate.”

And pretty soon, Rivera and Robinson were packing the America’s Best Restaurants van and heading west to taste test New Mexico.

“When we come in, we typically feature three items on the menu,” he said. “We taste them on camera, but the most important thing is for us to get the story. Why do people come to this restaurant? Where did the restaurant come to be? And what are their goals moving forward? And then we help promote them by letting them tell their story and letting people know where they can be found online.”

The Wright’s story is a pretty interesting one as neither Sarah, nor her husband, Daniel, had any real experience before getting involved with this restaurant, each joining it when it was part of the Pizza 9 franchise. Daniel Wright’s background is in law enforcement and emergency medical services, while Sarah Wright had worked as cashier at local groceries.

“I was hired on as the delivery driver,” Daniel Wright explained. “And my wife was hired as a cashier. I was the delivery driver for two weeks. And then their kitchen manager quit so I got moved in as the kitchen manager and then the assistant manager quit like two weeks after that. So I got moved to the assistant manager and then all the way up to general manager after the general manager left and I was the general manager for four years.”

When the franchise contract ran out, the owner changed the name to Buttercrust, but he quickly realized he did not want to be a pizza joint owner.

“He ran it for just a couple of months, maybe six months tops, and then approached me and Sarah and asked if we wanted to purchase it from him; that he didn’t want to be in the restaurant business,” Daniel Wright said. “So a lot of personal discussions and reflections and we decided to go ahead and make a go of it and purchase the restaurant and we’ve been trying to run strong ever since.”

They took over as owners in 2018 had some big decisions to make.

“We’ve changed a lot of the recipes because everything Pizza 9 had was proprietary, right? So we had to come up with our own dough, our own sauce, everything,” he said. “We had to do it on our own. I know my kids, the wife, all my employees, were so tired of pizza by the time we were done playing around with it. That was like two weeks of non-stop, ‘Hey, try this batch. Try that batch.’ Well, there was some good ones there. And there was some bad ones in there.”

So, in this modern era, the Wrights resorted to experimentation and research.

“Neither one of us had a bakery background or a strong restaurant background, other than fast food back in high school. So everything was a lot of research,” he said. “And I talked to several other pizza companies and hey, how do you make this work? How do you make that work? And just blend everything together until we found our niche.”

Somehow, it all came together.

“I’ve watched so many YouTube videos and recipes and cookbooks and called other pizza owners and see if they would give me any type of knowledge at all,” Daniel Wright said. “And, you know, finally, between all the research I did, we were able to come up with a blend we have now and from what I’ve heard from the community, it’s that we did something right.”

The restaurant sits a little out of the way, tucked into an upscale, but mostly vacant strip mall south of I-25 on the extreme western edge of Moriarty on US 66/NM 333 before it curls up to meet the main drag through town.

Daniel Wright said he thinks the real reason the restaurant has succeeded is the effort they make to create a high-quality product.

“I think the one thing that people don’t realize out here is we do all of our dough, it’s made in-house from scratch,” he said. “Other than our thin crust, we import the thin crust but all of our deep dish all of our hand tossed, it’s all fresh-made daily dough. I don’t buy cheap, generic products. I mean, it raises my food costs, but I don’t buy cheap products. I strive to give quality. And I think that’s what sets us apart from some of our local competitors.”

As Rivera and Robinson did their filming and shooting selfie videos, the Wrights and their workers wore big grins, taking it all in.

“It’s exciting. I’ve never been part of anything like this before,” Daniel Wright said. “I think it’s gonna be a real lot of fun and provide knowledge meant to help the restaurant. We’ve been here personally, five years, almost five years. And we still, to this day, have people in Moriarty and Edgewood, tell us, ‘We had no idea there was a pizza place there.’ So hopefully this will help us get the word out a little bit more and help us get put onto the local map more.”