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Nome, Alaska – January 12, 2006 – Airport Pizza offers delivery by airplane! Nome, located on the south coast of the Seward Peninsula, is best known as the finishing site for the 1,049-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race from Anchorage each March.
But the city is also the commercial hub of northwestern Alaska, complete with 12 churches, two libraries, one museum, one bank, one credit union, one convention center, and one indoor swimming pool. And now you can add one pizza delivery service to that list.
Airport Pizza offers pizza delivery to customers as far as hundreds of miles away, and they’re doing it on airplanes flown by Frontier Flying Service.
"Before we were opened, Nome had to be the last town in America that didn't have pizza delivery," said Matt Tomter, Airport Pizza manager, to the Anchorage Daily News. "So we didn't come up with anything new. We just applied the same concept to Nome."
For out of town customers, Airport Pizza loads their pies on Frontier flights to such remote outposts as St. Lawrence Island or Shishmaref. The price, including delivery, isn’t bad — $16 for a 15-inch cheese pizza, with loaded 19-inch specialty pies going for around $30.
Tomter told the newspaper that while he'd first had the idea about 18 months ago, the plan really got going when his former carpet cleaning business was cleaning up after a fire. In the ashes sat a brick pizza oven.
"I said, 'Hey, how much do you want for that?' And they said, 'If you get it out of here, it's free,"' Tomter said. "And I thought, 'Let's see if we can make some money with that thing.'"
Tomter hauled the 3,500-pound oven over to Frontier’s lot at the Nome airport. They then rented a building, and Tomter's wife came up with the money needed to open a restaurant.
Once a dough recipe was found, the Tomters opened their restaurant Aug. 5, 2005, and Tomter says business has yet to slow down.
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