Nick’s Pizza and Pub celebrates anniversaries at Crystal Lake, Elgin restaurants

The founder of Nick’s Pizza and Pub says a simple sentence that defines his company’s purpose and core values has been the key to its 30 years of success.

And there’s no mention of pizza, or even restaurants, in it, Nick Sarillo says.

“Our purpose — our dedicated family provides this community with a place to connect with your family and friends, to have fun and to feel at home.”

Sarillo said the “Pizza on Purpose” philosophy is why Nick’s is celebrating a pair of anniversaries, with its Crystal Lake location marking 30 years and the Elgin restaurant commemorating 20 years.

“Purpose, to me, is sustainable,” he said. “It could be around for a long, long time. Our ‘what’ could change, some of our menu items change, our vision could change. But our purpose and values don’t.”

Sarillo grew up in the restaurant business, starting at his father’s Italian beef shop in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood when he was 10, then working with him when his dad opened the original Village Pizza in Carpentersville after the family moved to the suburbs.

But it wasn’t that background that made him want to open a restaurant of his own. It was his experience as a diner.

At the time in the early 1990s, he and his brother owned a construction business and he had a young family.

“My wife and I would go out to eat with our three little ones and I was just getting frustrated with bad experiences,” he said. “Taking the kids out, we had a choice. You could go to a kid place where the kids have fun but the food is bad, or we go to a nicer place where it was better food and servers would be put off by kids.”

He said one night the family was walking out of a restaurant in Crystal Lake when he had an epiphany.

“I could do this better, it doesn’t have to be this way,” he said. “Restaurants are about family, about bringing people together.”

He took lessons from his father about hospitality and treating people, both customers and employees, the right way. That thinking developed and evolved over the years into the more defined “Pizza on Purpose.”

“We put it in our training, we put it in our idea center, when we have an issue or problem we filter it through our purpose and values to make the best decision,” Sarillo said. “To me it’s the business model of the future.

“It’s the way we’ve been able to sustain and thrive for over 30 years.”

The restaurants specialize in tavern-style, thin crust pizza served in a family-friendly setting. Both suburban locations are popular spots for team gatherings, birthday celebrations and family get-togethers.

The pizza recipes have been in the Sarillo family for more than 50 years. The sauce is made from scratch. The sausage is a proprietary, patented recipe made for them.

“What we do is always going to be important, it’s just not the only thing,” he said. “How we do what we do — the hospitality side of it — it’s gotta be both. Exceeding people’s expectation is the game changer.”

He based the rustic, barnlike design of Nick’s after a page he had years ago dog-eared in a home building magazine in his office.

From there he built the business, literally. He and his brother designed and built the Crystal Lake location, using barn wood that Sarillo found by driving around Illinois, looking for decrepit barns that needed to be torn down. Most of the Elgin location came from a farm in Cambridge, Illinois that dates back to just after the Civil War.

They opened at 856 Pyott Road in Crystal Lake in May 1995. In May 2005, he followed it up with the location at Bowes and Randall roads in Elgin.

“What I wanted to do was always about creating that experience that I felt was missing for our family,” he said. “It was just a passion that I knew was missing in the community, and it must have been missing because we were packed from Day One.”

Sarillo said giving to the community has always been part of their values because “it’s the right thing to do.” Little did he know how much that connection would mean when the chips were down for his Elgin location.

Around 2009, coming out of the recession, work on the Walmart and Sam’s Club across the street from the Elgin restaurant caused lengthy road construction that nearly drove it out of business.

After stretching and borrowing as much as he could, Sarillo told his staff at one point that they had about four weeks of runway before they would have to close the location. A team member suggested sharing the news with his email list of frequent diners. The news quickly spread on social media.

“When things did get hard the community came in, stepped up and saved our lives,” he said. “They saved us. We were packed for five weeks straight.”

It all went back to their purpose and values, Sarillo said.

“We celebrate our relationship with our community and our guests and our team,” he said. “Operating from that central system has been the game changer that’s made all the difference in my business.”