An Ogden-based pizzeria conquered Utah’s north. Will it ever come to Salt Lake City?

For a long time, if Salt Lakers wanted Lucky Slice pizza but didn’t want to drive 30 miles to Clearfield, they could have their cravings satisfied only at events like the Kilby Block Party and RedWest.

But now, Salt Lake City-based fans of the Ogden-born pizzeria have to drive only 10 miles for Lucky Slice’s New York-style pizza — to Bountiful.

The Bountiful location opened in mid-April, but the excitement grew on Instagram for months ahead of time. Lucky Slice supporters replied to posts about the coming shop with gleeful comments complete with fire emojis and exclamation marks.

Some people commented that Lucky Slice should keep moving south, toward the Beehive State’s capital and beyond. It’s a sentiment the Lucky Slice owners are used to.

“We’ve been bugged about Salt Lake so much,” said Lucky Slice co-owner and co-founder Mike McDonald.

Can Salt Lakers hope for a Salt Lake City location of Lucky Slice? It’s looking more likely now that the Bountiful location is open.

Snowboard by day, make pizza by night

Nick VanArsdell, William Shafer and McDonald opened the first location of Lucky Slice in Ogden in 2012.

VanArsdell said that since about 2006, he and McDonald had had a dream “to snowboard during the day and run a pizza shop at night.”

The two of them met Shafer through their connections in the food industry, and after discovering he shared their love of snowboarding, “we all gelled around that,” VanArsdell said.

The trio submitted a business plan to the city of Ogden, which loaned them $25,000 to help get Lucky Slice off the ground. But the pizzeria almost didn’t happen.

In the eleventh hour of negotiations, the landlord got cold feet, McDonald said. The three of them also had had other prospects lined up, and were close to taking them.

But a few weeks later, the landlord came through, and they got a lease signed for a tiny spot at the corner of 25th Street and Lincoln Avenue in downtown Ogden.

When it launched, Lucky Slice quickly gained a specific clientele by staying open until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, selling pizza to people leaving the nearby bars.

“We really capitalized on that and embraced the chaos of lots of drunk folks,” McDonald said.

While the daytime customers and nighttime customers were separate contingents at first, McDonald said nighttime folks started coming in during the day because they liked Lucky Slice’s pizza.

He calls those first few years in Ogden “wild times,” because it was essentially a 24-hour operation, with days beginning at 4 a.m. and not ending until 4 a.m. the next morning.

In 2015, inspired by the Davis County residents and many Hill Air Force Base service members who would line up at Lucky Slice in Ogden to grab lunch, VanArsdell, Shafer and McDonald opened a location in Clearfield, at 1246 S. Legend Hills Drive.

The same year, Lucky Slice launched a food truck, at a time when food trucks were just starting to catch on in Utah, VanArsdell said.

He said it was one of his “proudest moments” when Lucky Slice’s food truck got invited to the Salt Lake Twilight Concert Series around 2016, along with “heavy hitters” like Cupbop.

“It was pretty cool to be part of that scene,” VanArsdell said.

In 2017, the trio opened the third location of Lucky Slice, on Federal Street in downtown Logan in Cache County. Last year, the Logan location moved to 37 W. Center St., about a block and a half southwest.

VanArsdell said Logan’s Lucky Slice came about because “we love historic downtown districts, that’s really where our heart is.”

In 2020, they moved the Ogden location across the street to its current spot, at 207 25th St.

Looking back at the early days of Lucky Slice, when they were serving pizza out of their tiny corner shop in Ogden, McDonald said being downtown brought them a huge variety of people, from punk rock kids to attorneys to blue-collar workers.

“It’s just so cool that pizza reaches everyone,” he said. “I think that’s where we meet [people’s] needs is you can get a slice [or] you can get a full pie. It doesn’t exclude anybody.”

‘Gangbusters from the get-go’

Lucky Slice opened its fourth and newest location in Bountiful last month, and looking at the space now, you’d never guess it used to be a shoe store.

Former Bountiful mayor Kendalyn Harris reached out to VanArsdell in fall 2024 and let him know a shoe store on Main Street, DeBoer’s Running Store, was closing and said it might make a good Lucky Slice location.

Since the property at 135 S. Main St. was owned by the city, the Lucky Slice crew was required to submit a request for proposal for the project, and after 90 days, their request was approved.

VanArsdell, Shafer and McDonald worked with contractors to overhaul the inside of the DeBoer’s building over about seven months, redoing the plumbing, mechanical and electrical systems and replacing many of the walls.

The finished space is airy and open, with plenty of seating as well as access to the splash pad and ice skating ribbon in Bountiful Town Square behind the shop. The owners say they plan to add patios in the front and back. And an artist is painting a mural inside the store.

The tables are reclaimed wood from an old high school gymnasium, complete with scuffs and painted lines. And customers can come up to the front and look through the window at all of the by-the-slice pizza available that day, with neon above that says “Hot slices, cool vibes.”

McDonald said that “because of the staff and because of the community, each shop has just a little bit different of a personality,” and now, that includes Bountiful.

He said ever since the Bountiful location opened, it’s been “gangbusters from the get-go.”

“It’s just cool to see that we’ve built a good reputation and that people enjoy the pizza, they enjoy the space, they enjoy our staff,” McDonald said.

NYC style in Utah

After making their pizza for several years, the Lucky Slice owners discovered that they were actually making New York-style pizza with a classic thin crust, Shafer said.

“We didn’t call it New York-style pizza for many years. It was just like, ‘This is what we do; it’s Lucky Slice pizza,’” he said. “More and more people from the East Coast kept telling us, ‘Oh, this is the best thing since I’ve been in Jersey or New York.’”

The three of them say their New York slice is the best in Utah.

“I did a tour of New York, just eating pizza all day, every day,” Shafer said. “I went to probably 10 to 20 shops. ... ”I only had one that was like, ‘They’re probably a little better than we are.’"

In reply, VanArsdell said to Shafer, “You’re going to get some East Coasters that want to fight you.”

“That’s fine. What else is new?” Shafer replied.

McDonald — who had been working in pizzerias for a decade before opening Lucky Slice — brings his classic pizza know-how to the table, and Shafer contributes his culinary background, resulting in scratch-made New York-style pizza with off-the-wall topping combinations.

“Pizza is this blank canvas,” McDonald said. “It’s dough, sauce, cheese. You can do everything under the sun with it if you’re daring enough to give it a try.”

Shafer said they’ve become known for their creative, more “out-of-the-norm” pizzas, with ingredients like banh mi fixings, hot dogs, shrimp, pickles and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Even tater tots showed up on a “Napoleon Dynamite”-themed pie called the Uncle Rico.

This summer, Lucky Slice is doing a theme called Fantasy Quest, where all the pizzas are named after roles in the game Dungeons & Dragons: The Fighter, The Sage, The Rogue, The Druid and The Cleric, which is a delicious pie with garlic cream sauce, mozzarella, ricotta, chicken, caramelized onion and red pepper flakes.

Or during May, you can try The Abomination, with creamy Buffalo sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, sausage, ham, jalapeño and pineapple.

“For that pizza purist that just wants the best pepperoni slice, we’ve got it,” McDonald said. “But we’re also going to really bend their minds with the creations that Will does.”

From Ogden to SLC?

So, can Salt Lakers ever hope for a Lucky Slice to open in the city?

“I’m certain we’ll end up down there, probably sooner than later,” McDonald said. “We just got to find the right spot.”

With their background of opening Lucky Slice stores in historic downtown areas, the three owners said the location of any Salt Lake-area shop would have to be just right.

“We’ve got to fit into something that we feel like we can embrace an actual community,” McDonald said.