New pizza restaurant opening in Macon will make their pies in wood-burning oven

Natasha Phillips plans to open a new restaurant in Macon offering Neapolitan pizza cooked in a wood-burning oven.

“We’ll have some classic Italian-style pizzas, a few appetizers and a couple of pastas,” said Phillips, who owns Fountain of Juice, a smoothie and sandwich shop in the Prado shopping center on Forsyth Road.

Her new restaurant, Romo’s Pizza, is located next door in the former Barberitos and is named after her youngest son, Roman, who turns 12 on Feb. 4. His nickname is Romo.

Phillips had hoped to open in time for his birthday but she’s now shooting for the second week in February.

The new restaurant features a Forno Bravo wood-burning oven, an Italian brand made in California, she said.

“It’s a huge oven,” Phillips said. “It gets up to 800 degrees and can cook like five pizzas at once in about four minutes flat.”

Cooking with a wood-burning oven gives the pizza more flavor, she said.

“We’ll do some traditional Italian like the margherita and then we’ll have like the wonderful arugula-prosciutto topper pizza,” Phillips said. “We’ll have Italian sausage and like a white pizza and mushroom pizza.

“We’re trying to stick to traditional Italian style.”

The restaurant is about 2,600 square feet and is designed to “look old school classic,” Phillips said.

“It’s dim, dark like an old Shakey’s and Godfather’s — if you’re old enough to remember that — and then we have lots of pictures of just the city of where my mom is from, Sulmona.”

Natalia del Basso Orsini, her mom, is a native of Italy and founded Natalia’s restaurant in Macon in 1984 — selling the well-known Italian restaurant a few years ago. Sulmona is located in the Abruzzo region of central Italy

“All photos and picture wallpapers in Romo’s are by Daniel Underwood, my mom’s husband,” Phillips said.

The new restaurant has a small area designed for children with a pinball machine and a Galaga arcade game.

Phillips plans to keep the food moderately priced. She’ll offer only a one-sized pizza, a large, with a price range of $16 to $19 a pizza. Salads and appetizers will range from $6 to $8.

Operating hours will be from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday.

“It’s an open-concept kitchen so you can see the pizza oven, which is kind of cool,” Phillips said.

This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 10:49 AM.