Welcome back to Opening Night, our column about hot new restaurants around Seattle. This time, we went to the soft opening of the new Stevie’s Famous location on Phinney Ridge.

If you’re going down Phinney Avenue on a summer evening, there’s a new red neon sign above a bright blue-and-red building serving as a beacon of the hottest new pizzeria around. “STEVIE’S FAMOUS,” the sign reads. That’s right, at long last, Stevie’s has come to north Seattle.

When the first Stevie’s Famous pizzeria opened in Burien back in 2022, the name could be read as sort of ironic. Sure, founders Shane Abbott and Justin Harcus were already known in the pizza scene for Lupo, their Fremont Neapolitan-style pizzeria, but Stevie’s (named for Abbott’s pug) was too new to actually be famous. 

That changed quickly. Stevie’s landed on all the usual best-of lists—some people even drove down from Seattle to get slices—and expanded into the Clock-Out Lounge music venue in Beacon Hill in 2024. By then, the pizza was actually famous. Stevie’s serves big, round New York-style pies with sourdough crust. The crust is on that ideal border zone between crispy and foldable, while the fermentation process gives it a tangy kick that adds an extra flavor dimension to even a plain cheese pizza. But Stevie’s also became famous for one pie in particular, the Normie MacDonald, which combines hot honey, coppa, and burrata for a spicy-meaty-creamy combination unmatched in the Seattle pizza world. The combination of that crust and the Normie led Seattle Times readers to vote Stevie’s as the best pizzeria in the city in 2024.

But for Seattleites in the northern half of the city, Stevie’s seemed like a scarce commodity, and the new pizzeria’s arrival was eagerly anticipated. At the grand opening earlier this month, there was a line that snaked into and around the parking lot, Abbott says. There was no risk of Stevie’s running out of pizza, though, because the team was prepared for that kind of rush. “We definitely made more dough than we’ve ever made for that thing,” Abbott says. “The main challenge was to try to get people through as fast as we could.”

Abbott calls the new restaurant the “first full Stevie’s.” Whereas the Burien pizzeria is a small storefront and the Clock-Out Lounge location is inside a music venue, this Stevie’s features a big indoor space with booths (and a Street Fighter II arcade machine) along with a sprawling outdoor patio suitable for kids and dogs. 

The new pizzeria is big enough that the dough for both Stevie’s and Lupo will be made here. For the past eight years, Abbott says, they’ve had to mix the dough using equipment set up on the hardwood floor of the lobby. It’s “romantic” in a way, Abbott says, but messy, and it can be difficult to control the temperature at Lupo. They aren’t changing how the dough is made—it’s still mostly by hand—just consolidating the operations. 

There are already some regulars who have come multiple times in the first week, Abbott says. At dinnertime, there is still a line out into the parking lot, and online ordering is limited at the Phinney Ridge location for now, though that will change. Abbott notes that sometimes, a hyped-up new restaurant gets a reputation for being too busy that persists long after the hype has died down and it has become easy to walk into. The idea is for Stevie’s to be an easy place to get a pizza from, a neighborhood hub for families. Lupo is where you go when you start to get serious with someone you’re dating, but this new Stevie’s is where you go after the two of you have had kids.

I noticed Abbott said “the first full Stevie’s.” Is he looking to add more? He hopes so—he knows that people north of Seattle, on the Eastside, and in Capitol Hill still have to go a long way to get one of Stevie’s prized slices. He also looks up to In-N-Out and revered local chain Burgermaster as inspirations. “They started with a quality that wasn’t familiar at that time, and they focused on comfort and consistency,” he says. “I’m hoping to build something that doesn’t feel trendy.”