PIZZA PUSH

Lake Forest-based John’s Incredible Pizza Co. is all about being super sized.

The chain’s restaurants offer all-you-can-eat buffets with pizza, salad, soup and dessert. The restaurants are about 50,000 square feet in size with giant game rooms that dwarf those of typical pizza parlors.

“Nothing we do is typical,” owner John Parlet said.

Up to now, John’s Incredible has stayed out of its own backyard,Orange County,with restaurants in Fresno, Bakersfield, Victorville and elsewhere in California’s eastern valleys. The closest one is in Montclair.

Now the company plans to go even bigger with its next restaurant, which is slated for the old Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, which closed last month.

The Buena Park restaurant is expected to be about 62,000 square feet, the company’s largest yet, Parlet said.

Escrow is set to close on the space by the end of December, he said.

“We think Buena Park will be an off-the-chart store,” Parlet said.

John’s Incredible plans to hire about 350 workers to staff the restaurant, he said.

The Buena Park site is part of a plan to nearly double in size in the next five years. John’s Incredible has yearly revenue of about $25 million. It has six pizza parlors and employs about 1,000 workers.

About a dozen people work at the company’s Lake Forest headquarters.

Plans call for John’s Incredible to open seven to 10 restaurants in the next few years in Southern California, from Oxnard to San Diego, Parlet said.

Next year, the company is slated to open a 50,000-square-foot restaurant in Riverside and a 54,000-square-foot one in Sacramento.

It’s also scouting around for other spots in OC, including Santa Ana, Parlet said.

Plans call for expanding beyond California. The company is eyeing two locations in Las Vegas and Oregon, according to Parlet.

“We know ultimately we have to (look) out of state,” he said. “We want to do it in a controlled environment.”

One reason: It’s “impossible” to find a 50,000-square-foot building with 350 parking spots in OC, Parlet said.

“Space is limited and expensive,” he said. “We’re competing with big-box users,” such as CompUSA and Best Buy, for the same real estate.

“It’s challenging,” Parlet said.

John’s Incredible faces other competition.

The chain faces off for customers with everyone from CEC Entertainment Inc.’s Chuck E. Cheese’s to Dave & Busters Inc., and scores of local pizza parlors in between.

John’s Incredible does have size on its side. The restaurants’ entertainment areas are packed with 150 games and rides, such as glow-in-the-dark miniature golf, bumper cars and four lanes of bowling.

The restaurants “have so many moving parts,” Parlet said.

John’s Incredible seeks to get the coolest games, according to Parlet.

“Our core audience is mom and dad and 2.3 kids,” he said.

John’s Incredible also draws seniors, who “love a great value,” Parlet said.

The restaurant charges $6 for buffet bars at lunch and $8 at dinner.

The Buena Park store is set to also have a dining room with wax figures, Parlet said, an ode to the site’s past.

Parlet got his taste for the restaurant business in the 1960s at the age of 21.

He dropped out of college and swapped his job selling life insurance for a manager’s spot at Yum! Brands Inc.’s KFC in his hometown in South Dakota.

“The restaurant industry has a hectic pace,” Parlet said. “Some people like it or hate it. I loved it. It really is a rush.”

Parlet spent three years learning the business.

In 1972, he decided to move to Ridgecrest, near Bakersfield, and opened a small pizza joint. It sat 50 people, had a small game room and was called John’s Pizza Parlor.

Parlet said he chose Ridgecrest because he wanted somewhere remote with little competition.

Friends, who ran their own pizza parlor in South Dakota, gave him tips and spent a week showing him the ropes at his California restaurant.

“They were gracious enough to share their recipes,” he said. “The rest we developed.”

Parlet spent his twenty-something years in Ridgecrest. In 1997, he decided to go a different route,a bigger one.

He opened his first John’s Incredible Pizza restaurant in Victorville, which is 16,000 square feet. The restaurant offered all-you-can-eat buffet and three themed dining rooms for kids and games.

“At the time it was big,” Parlet said. “But now we look down our noses at it.”

Things grew from there.

Parlet continued increasing the size of his restaurants, opening a 26,000-square-foot parlor in Bakersfield in 1998. A 53,000-square-foot one opened in Fresno in 2000.

The biggest: 60,000-square-feet in Montclair, which opened in January and cost $8.1 million to build. That’s the typical price tag to open a John’s Incredible, according to Parlet.

“It was scary. No one had built a 60,000-square-foot pizza place,” he said. “But it worked. We still pack the house every weekend.”

Like other John’s Incredible restaurants, the Montclair site has dining rooms with different themes, such as “Tune Time Theatre,” where cartoons play, “Hall of Fame,” which highlights sports on big screens, and “Fusion,” which goes with a Los Angeles nightclub theme.

There’s also a quiet hunting lodge room for parents called “Cabin Fever.”

The restaurant holds up to 800 people and offers creative pizzas, such as peanut butter and pepperoni pies.

“In eight years, we’ve never had an accident,” Parlet said.

Still, insurance is always “a pricey item,” he said.

The company is getting ready for its restaurants in Buena Park, Riverside and Sacramento.

John’s Incredible is looking to hire some 950 workers, about 300 for each location, Parlet said.

“It’s nothing short of a monumental task,” he said.

The company plans to recruit workers, mostly those who work part time, about 10 days prior to the openings by holding “wild and crazy three-day job fairs” at each spot, Parlet said.

The company promotes the mass hires with banners and radio ads.

“It’s a last minute crunch kind of thing,” he said. “We get mobbed. The key to that is being organized.”

John’s Incredible also needs managers to run the restaurants and steer the chain’s growth, which is one of its “biggest challenges,” Parlet said.

“These are big operations that require a sharp management team,” he said. “To this day, it’s still a learning process.”