Build your pizzeria website in Joliet
Joliet orders pizza at all hours, from family tables on a Friday to workers coming off a late shift. A pizzeria website takes those orders directly, at your menu price, so the money from a city full of regulars stays with your kitchen instead of going to an app.
A tavern-style town on both banks
Joliet sits about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, and it eats the way the Chicago area eats at home: a thin, crisp, tavern-style pizza, cut into squares and shared around the table. Deep dish is for visitors. The local pizzerias that have lasted, like Cemeno’s on Essington Road, open since 1976, are family businesses that have fed the same households for decades.
The Des Plaines River runs through the middle of the city and splits it into an east side and a west side, crossed by a series of drawbridges. Downtown sits in the river valley, around the Rialto Square Theatre and Harrah’s casino. Up the bluff are the older streets of the Upper Bluff and the Cathedral Area, and out past I-55 the newer subdivisions of the far west side keep growing. Each part of town has its own pizza habits and its own short list of places it trusts.
A city that works around the clock
Amazon is Joliet’s largest employer, and the area around the I-55 and I-80 interchange is full of distribution and logistics jobs. Add two casinos, the hospitals, Joliet Junior College and the University of St. Francis, and you get a city where dinner happens at six for some people and at two in the morning for others. That makes ordering ahead important. A worker leaving a shift does not want to call and wait on hold; they want to tap an order from the parking lot and find it boxed when they arrive.
Speak to the whole city
About a third of Joliet residents are Hispanic or Latino, a share that has nearly doubled since 2000. Many of those families are as loyal to a neighborhood pizzeria as anyone. You can write your menu, your specials and your hours in English and in Spanish on your own site, something a generic app listing will not do for you.
On a platform, every order carries a commission, including the order from the family that has called you every Friday for years. Many owners raise their app prices to cover the cut, and their best customers end up paying more than they would at the counter. Your own site fixes that: one price, every dollar to your register, and the customer’s contact kept with you so you can tell them about a game-day special or a NASCAR weekend at the speedway.
Keep the apps for people who have not found you yet. Put your own ordering link on the box, the receipt and your Google profile, and let the second order come straight to you.