Trigo Wood Fired Pizza

Essential elements for humans to thrive include food, fire, and community. Open less than a year,Trigo Wood Fired Pizza restaurant has them all, and is flourishing in downtown Willimantic, just a short walk from the town’s iconic Frog Bridge. At 5PM on a Friday in November, a string of lights above the door of the historic brick building resembles firefl ies. Tables and seats at the 36-footlong bar are already half-full of early birds, chatting, laughing, eating. Groups of all ages dine under the 15-foot-high embossed tin ceiling. Midnight blue walls contrast stylishly with elegant blonde woodwork. Light and warmth from a massive wood fired pizza oven imbues the room from an open kitchen at one end of the long narrow space. Servers move easily about with colorful craft cocktails, jewel-like glasses of wine, piping hot pizzas balanced on one hand.

Seated at the pizza bar with a close-up view of the glowing fi re, my sister and I enjoy the precise dance of wood fired cooking. Chefs slide pies into the heat with long handled tools, shuffle cast iron pans across a scorching 800°F hearth. I watch steam swirl up from sauce as they pull out perfectly crisped pizza, leopard spotted from intense heat, at the exact moment necessary. My sister and I watch and talk and savor a creative cocktail, a glass of Italian white wine, and our pizza's layered, rich flavors. With both crunch and chew, thin but not floppy, it’s honestly the best crust I’ve had in a long time. By 6:30PM every seat in the house is full. It’s no wonder to me that Trigo is a finalist for the Connecticut Restaurant Association’s 2023 “Best Newcomer” Award.

From top left to right, and down: Nate Gallup preparing pizza dough; Chef Patrick cooking pizzas at the wood oven; crusty cheese pizza and a pepperoni on the bottom; herb hummus with harissa, served with local crudite and house baked focaccia: focaccia being warmed in the oven; enjoying a margherita pizza with a Zero Gravity Green State Lager

Owner, operator, and pizza chef Patrick Griffin is grateful to be a finalist for the CRAzies awards but calls it “icing on the cake.” He feels equally fortunate for the timing, the place, his staff, and being part of a supportive business and dining community. His wife and Trigo co-owner Garnet McLaughlin says, “Building community is a real throughline in our story--from Patrick’s early love of cooking and sharing a meal and creating connections to how Trigo has been received and has created its own place in the Willimantic community. I am so proud of this.”

Trigo features “harvest to hearth” cooking and the only wood fired pizza in the area. They use the freshest local ingredients possible and the only source of heat for cooking is a 55-square-foot wood fired hearth. “We don’t have any grills or fryers. Everything served hot comes out of there,” he says, nodding to the 10-foot by 5.5-foot, 8,000-pound oven. “We use induction burners for small plates, if necessary, but anything roasted or something like mussels is cooked simultaneously with pizzas in that oven.” Patrick’s friend Stanley Gervais of SnG Woodworks in Windham supplies firewood for the oven. He also supplied lumber for the restaurant renovation. “All the wood for the tables, bar and trim was sawn from the same three ash trees from Bluebird Hill Farm in Lebanon. We also source our corn from them,” Patrick adds. Meat is sourced from Kindred Crossings Farm in Franklin, cheese from Liuzzi Cheese in Hamden. They also work with Sweet Acre Farm in Lebanon, but in summer nearly all Trigo’s produce is grown on Patrick’s brother’s farm.

Located on the historic town green in Lebanon, Apis Verde was founded by Patrick’s older brother Phillip eight years ago. Prior to this, Phil worked as a cheesemaker for Beltane Farm, which allowed him to start selling his own veggies on the side at farmer’s markets. The brothers grew up in Lebanon, where they spent significant time outdoors as children and developed a deep connection to nature. “Phil always had a green thumb and an interest in plants,” Patrick recalls. “I remember pushing our parents to let us have chickens, which they obliged and have since been incredibly supportive of our paths.”

“The beauty of this place and our goal,” says Chef Patrick, “is that everybody feels welcome here.”

The brothers left the rural hills of northeast Connecticut for college in Santa Barbara, California, in the early 2000s. They lived there together for several years between the ocean and the mountains on Trigo Road. “Like most college students, we weren’t flush with cash,” says Patrick. So, they cooked meals with roommates and hosted dinner parties for friends. Phil worked for a local beekeeper that contracted with orchards for pollination and honey production and rented space on the mountain for farming. When possible, the brothers used Phil’s farm products in their cooking. Sharing these meals with friends on Trigo Road sparked Patrick’s desire to pair locally grown food with community and eventually open his own restaurant.

Returning to Connecticut after college, Patrick wasn’t sure of his career plan but wanted to travel and worked in restaurants to fund it. He also started helping a woodworker friend build pizza ovens and honed his wood fired cooking skills hosting pizza parties. Just one year at a desk job using his college degree in geography clarified to Patrick that an office wasn’t for him. “I didn’t know if it was because I was in my twenties or that it never was going to be for me, but it wasn’t sticking. I always had my foot in the culinary field and restaurants. I thought if I’m going to do this long term, I’m going to do it for myself, and I am going to go full on.”

Patrick worked at restaurants throughout the state with much to offer (“really cool food scenes, farm-to-table approaches, great cocktails and wine”), but found himself hanging out in Willimantic. “It’s a great community. I love the city, the mix of people, the old architecture, the quaint downtown. I wasn’t setting out to do anything revolutionary, but I didn’t see a nice wood fired pizza restaurant here.” He recognized his niche and started the long, challenging process of buying commercial real estate, renovating a historic building, and opening a new restaurant. Then Covid hit.

“I was trying to open pre-Covid but glad we didn’t. I would have lost my shirt.” Patrick wisely decided to jump-start his brand by running a mobile wood fired pizza oven during the pandemic. They worked at farmers markets, fairs, and private events for two seasons. “Running a restaurant is difficult, but I would trade this for that any day,” he admits. “We’d work in pouring rain, we’d get to the venue and realize we had forgotten something, we had to pack everything up and take it all off, over and over. But it was an effective way to get our name known instead of sitting around saying I can’t open a brick and mortar.”

Renovating the 1887 building was another huge task, involving lots of sweat equity. They tore out an eight-foot drop ceiling to reveal windows, a skylight, and the original pressed tin ceiling. Patrick fell in love with the cavernous space and spent many hours restoring damaged ceiling tiles. He helped source materials, including black slate that now adorns the open kitchen walls, supposedly salvaged from Willimantic’s old train station. They deconstructed other walls to reveal the building’s solid bones of unadorned red brick. Simple pale ash woodwork throughout the restaurant was crafted by Oliver Hoadley of Copper Beech Carpentry in Mansfield, with whom Patrick had built pizza ovens in the past, including the pizza trailer. Patrick also credits his bank, Willimantic’s business development personnel, and industry mentors like David Wollner at Willimantic Brewing Company, for supporting Trigo’s development.with whom Patrick had built pizza ovens in the past, including the pizza trailer. Patrick also credits his bank, Willimantic’s business development personnel, and industry mentors like David Wollner at Willimantic Brewing Company, for supporting Trigo’s development.

The lively interior at Trigo warmly lit by the custom 55 foot wood fired hearth. All of Trigo's warm dishes are cooked in the hearth.

“I am so proud of the way Trigo has been received and created its place in Willimantic,” says Garnet. She started working at Willi Brew her senior year at Eastern Connecticut State University. More than 8 years later, she “shifted from a college student in what I thought was a 'college town' to a member of this quirky community that I now consider my home.” She’s also a proud, new member of the Town’s Board of Finance. “Now that we have opened Trigo and seen a community grow inside these walls, we are excited to be a part of the upward momentum and economic development for this town.”

With over a decade immersed in the restaurant industry, Patrick and Garnet have gathered a skilled staff. “Our bar manager is Leigh Wilde,” says Patrick. “She was a co-worker of Garnet’s at Willi Brew. She’s taken the bar by two reins and driven a great craft cocktail menu.” All are a great fit with Trigo’s small plates including salads, starters, bar snacks, and rotating specials (foraged chicken-fried hen of the woods mushroom with gravy!). “Pizza is our bread and butter,” says Patrick, “but we want to offer a little something more.”

He describes his pizza as a cross between Neapolitan and New York style thin crust. “Because we use high heat wood fire, it gets that nice leopard print crust. But you don’t have to eat it with a knife and fork, you can pick it up with your hands.” Pizzas rotate seasonally, such as a summer farm veg series. One winter special is Kindred Crossings lamb pizza, with spiced lamb sausage, fennel, lots of rosemary, finished with lemony herb yogurt. Patrick likes to add a little something when his special pizzas emerge from the oven … “a crumb or a sauce or a drizzle, a layer of texture and flavor to enhance it.”

Garnet spearheads promotions and social media outreach. Happy hour, every Tuesday to Friday from 4 to 6PM, features “Slices & Vices,” with $5 jumbo slices and pared-down apps and drink specials. Tuesday is half-off wine night. Patrick and Garnet are passionate about wine. “We tried to curate a European focused wine list to compliment food or just for people who like wine,” says Patrick. “There aren’t many options in this area to go out for a snack and a nice bottle of wine.”

“The beauty of this place and our goal,” says Patrick, “is that everybody feels welcome here. Young, old, people who live in Willi, people who travel here. We noticed in our clientele early on—it’s not one demographic. Our objective in menu design and approach is this: someone can come in get a cheese pizza and a High Life beer for $20. Or you can get a few small plates, a few pizzas, a nice bottle of wine and a dessert, and spend a little more money. Both customers get what they want, feel the money’s worth it, sit in a place where they enjoy the experience. There are plenty of great pizza restaurants, but we wanted to do something a little different. ‘Harvest to hearth’ is a little more elevated for pizza, but we don’t aim to alienate anyone. We enjoy doing what we do. We want to share that, and we hope you’ll give us a shot and trust us.”

• Trigo Wood Fired Pizza is located at 744 Main St. in Willimantic – trigokitchen.com @trigo_pizza