Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria now offering national delivery

When the coronavirus forced the closure of dining rooms in St. Louis in March, Katie’s Pizza & Pasta Osteria began delivering frozen pizzas and pastas locally. The venture proved so successful – over 40,000 pizzas in seven weeks – that it has been expanded on a national level.

“We just continually improved the product and the packaging,” said co-owner Katie Collier. “And we decided the next step would be to try to offer it to more people because we were just getting so many requests from people who had moved away or wanted to send it to their family.” 

The pizzas are stretched by hand and baked in the restaurant’s wood-fired oven before being flash frozen and shipped to customers the same day. Using high-quality scratch and specialty ingredients, pizza options change frequently depending on the season. Some highlights of the current menu include a burrata margherita pizza, a morel mushroom pizza, and a sausage and pepper arrabiata pizza, among other options.  

“To differentiate ourselves, we’ve decided to go with our original model at the restaurant to do really unique specialty ingredients with really special seasonal stuff,” said Collier. “The approach we took when we launched national was to kind of go back to that.” 

Products are shipped Tuesday through Saturday with orders arriving in one to three business days locally and two to five business days outside of St. Louis.  

In addition to frozen delivery, Katie’s is also offering its full menu for curbside pickup Tuesday to Sunday from 3 to 9 p.m. but will not yet reopen the dining room.

“It was such a scary time in the beginning, and I think everyone is kind of feeling a sigh of relief that we figured it out, so I don’t want to disrupt that too much since we just got in the groove,” Collier stated. “We’ll definitely wait a couple more weeks, if not a month, before we make any changes or decisions on the dining rooms.” 

Since the pandemic started, Katie and her husband, Ted Collier, created an emergency fund for employees in which all proceeds of the restaurant’s house-made pasta and are matching the donations. 

In addition, Katie’s Pizza and Pasta is resuming its Giveback Tuesday program next week and donating all daily proceeds to a local charity on the fourth Tuesday of the month. This month’s charity is The June Jessee Memorial Foundation, which supports children with neurological conditions and their families.