In 2021, Pete Murdaca was trying to prep meat next to a stack of dirty plates, ready for the dish pit, when he realized that he needed a bigger restaurant.
The parking lot of his ever-popular, Old World Italian restaurant Pietro’s was too small. Customers were jammed in like sardines. “We were getting close to the line of being busy into chaos,” Murdaca says. “It was just time to move.”
Now, four years later, that move is finally underway. Pietro’s in Lodi will close its location on Kettleman Lane on Saturday, November 1 to relocate to 282 Rocky Lane in Reynolds Ranch, reopening the following Saturday, November 8. The new restaurant is a 300-seat, 9,000-square-foot palace, with the exquisite new interior imagined by De la Cruz Interior Design and Arcanum Architects from San Francisco, the same team that worked on the Kettleman Lane location’s 2017 remodel.
While the move felt necessary for growth, it also created an opportunity for exciting new features, such as the region’s first pasta lab. “We’ve almost, quite literally, outgrown the space that we are in,” Murdaca says. “It’s a square peg jammed into a round hole at this point, which is a great problem to have.”…