"Nothing Rushed About This Fast Food" - Boston Globe 1999
"Sweet Deal" - The Newton Tab 1999
"Pizza Spin" - The Boston Phoenix
Pizza Today September 2006 - Page 1
Pizza Today September 2006 - Page 2

Cheap Eats: "Nothing Rushed About This Fast Food"
by: Sheryl Julian for The Boston Globe

Hedy Jarras; 23, of Sweet Tomatoes Pizza in Newton, can tell you plenty about the vertical curve of learning on the job. So can Paul Sullivan, 31, of Sully's Sandwich Shoppe in Cambridge. They're part of a new generation of fast-food restaurateurs who are young, energetic, and not afraid of hard work. Their enthusiasm is infectious.

The work is harder than it looks, they've found out, and the service business is demanding. But there are plenty of shoulders to lean on: both entrepreneurs live close to where they were born.
A couple of weeks ago, Hedy Jarras was in the middle of a jam-packed Sunday night at her pizza shop, Sweet Tomatoes Pizza, when an elderly man asked who owned the place. Jarras stepped forward to announce herself. When he saw her, he said, .'But you're too young!

Sweet Tomatoes Pizza is a partnership between Jarras and Christopher Owens, 32; who also owns shops on Route 6A in Sandwich and on Main Street in Osterville.

Jarras who was raised in Boston, and graduated from Beaver Country Day School and Roanoke College, went to work at one of the shops on the Cape after college. "My parents said, 'You can take a month off, but then you've got to get a summer job,' " she says. So she applied to Sweet Tomatoes Pizza and immediately got bigger ideas. She and Owens formed their partnership last year.
The Newton shop sits where Bond & Burkhart once did, which was followed by several other coffee and lunch places all of which failed. Sweet Tomatoes Pizza has a better formula than any of its predecessors: The product is terrific.

With only nine seats, most of the business is carryout. The pizza is nothing like ordinary pizza. The dough has no oil in it and it's rolled very, very thinly, European-style. Instead of a tomato sauce, the crust is spread with chopped canned tomatoes made into an uncooked sauce, which gives the pies a fresh taste. To my mind, the plain sweet tomato pie ($8.95 for a l2-inch and $12.95 for 18-inch) is a perfect pizza. It's light, the cheese is sparingly scattered, and the uncooked tomato sauce tastes like summertime. White shrimp pizza with capers and garlic ($11.95 and $16.95) is another gem.

The teenage boys I feed, who compliment nothing, liked the pepperoni enormously. Calzones ($5.95, plus 95 cents per ingredient) are made in long rectangles, then cut into squares. They're not as good as the pizzas -too doughy, too cheesy. They need a little more work. But the Greek and Caesar salads ($4.95) contain very fresh greens in immense portions. Two could easily split one.

"Nothing's ever worked in this location," a customer told Jarras one day, soon after Sweet Tomatoes Pizza's late December opening. She didn't know what to say. "Well, we're trying," she answered.
And they'll succeed. This one's a keeper.

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For 23-year-old pizza shop owner, a sweet deal
by: Matt Fogelman for The Newton TAB

Hedy Jarras says she wakes up some mornings and has to remind herself of exactly what she does.
At age 23, and with no previous restaurant, management, or business experience besides a few scattered waitressing stints, Jarras suddenly finds herself a partner of Sweet Tomatoes Pizza, a new pizza shop on Langley Road in Newton Centre, off the corner of Beacon Street.

It's been a strange 20 months for the Boston native, who graduated from Roanoke College in Virginia in 1997 with a double major in English and communications and then didn't know where to turn.
"I took a month off after I graduated and went to the beach every day," said Jarras, who now lives in Newton.

After the period of relaxation, Jarras headed to Cape Cod and began working at a new restaurant in Hyannis called Sweet Tomatoes Pizza. Christopher Owens, 32, owned the place, along with two other Sweet Tomatoes Pizza eateries in Sandwich and Osterville. A few months later, Jarras came back to Boston and started working at a Paparazzi's restaurant.

"I was a terrible waitress," Jarras says. "Always frazzled." Bored with her job and missing the enjoyable Sweet Tomatoes Pizza environment, Jarras was struck with an idea she says came out of nowhere. She wanted to run her own Sweet Tomatoes Pizza.

Jarras craved the light, thin-crust pizza, made with all fresh ingredient." with toppings such as artichoke hearts and sundried tomatoes. She was addicted.

She went back to the Cape in May 1998, shrugging off her parents' skepticism, and pitched the idea for a new restaurant to Owens, who fell for it immediately. She followed him around all summer -watching him talk to customers, handle young employees, order food from various suppliers-until she felt she was ready to take the plunge.

A Jarras family friend knew of a commercial storefront opening on Langley Road in Newton, a small space in a popular area of the city where a number of businesses had failed recently. Bill's House of Pizza, a neighborhood landmark, loomed across the street.

Still, Jarras said she'd take it. Friends and family spent the fall setting up the shop-painting, buying stoves, and haggling with the city over various permits and licenses.

"I had no idea what I was doing," Jarras says, laughing. Finally on Dec. 18, Newton's Sweet Tomatoes Pizza opened, with Owens as mostly a silent partner.

It has been a whirlwind two months, Jarras says, trying to stay on top of things that fall onto the laps of restaurant owners. Finding quality employees, many of whom are high-schoolers-has been difficult, not to mention keeping track of payroll, writing schedules, and above all, being responsible for every tiny detail. "It's hard to be a boss because I'm so used to being an employee," syas Jarras, who attended Beaver Country Day School in Newton for high school. "I try to be as cool as possible with my staff…..It makes me feel older than I am, though." Jarras says running her own restaurant is a growth experience whether she succeeds with flying colors or flops with a thud.

"Every day you learn something, how to handle customers, teaching employees," she says, recalling a woman who recently demanded to know why Jarras was only open until 9 p.m. (The reason: Business in residential areas dies at night.)

"This is not Cleveland Circle," Jarras says. "It's drastically different." Because the city's square-footage and parking regulations only permit Jarras nine seats in her shop, most of her business has been take-out. Still, the three tables are packed for lunch and dinner, and take-out orders have been brisk, she says.

Make good pizza and treat customers with respect. That's the bottom line, Jarras believes.
"If people come in, they want a good vibe, they want to see a smiling face," she says, while mentioning plans to open another Sweet Tomatoes Pizza a few years down the road. "I am committed to making this work."

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On The Cheap: Sweet Tomatoes Pizza: Pizza Spin
by: Jessika Bella Mura for The Boston Phoenix

Venture around the bend from the Newton Centre T stop and you'll find the upstart Sweet Tomatoes Pizza, a spunky, nine-seat boutique pizzeria with its own philosophy about what makes a good pie.

"Every pizza should be amazing," says owner Hedy Jarras, who opened the shop in early 1999 after a post-collegiate summer working for Sweet Tomatoes Pizza founder Christopher Owens in Osterville. (One way to deflate the food-service jokes directed at college English majors is just to give in.) With Owens's blessing, she imported his recipes and techniques from the Cape, forgoing a traditional red sauce in favor of chopped, uncooked tomatoes. Sometimes she even drops the sauce (for a "white" pizza) or the cheese (a "red" pizza).

Plain cheese is still an option ($2.25 per slice, $9.95 for a 14-inch medium, and $12.95 for an 18-inch large), but the star attractions are the unapologetically pungent specialty pizzas, which lean heavily on ingredients such as feta cheese, capers, and onions. The popular "Pesto Splash" (medium $12.95~ large $16.95) is lightly adorned with pesto, tomatoes, mozzarella, and fresh, chopped garlic. "People absolutely love garlic," says Jarras, so she includes it on most of the specialty pizzas -although she admits that she doesn't care for it herself.

As for the crust: although made with an oil-free dough, it's topped with a little oil to keep it from getting crackery. It's got enough backbone to support anything you throw on it, and also carries the merest hint of flavorful char. Loyalists from the thin-crust camp will be pleased.

Sweet Tomatoes Pizza, located at 47 Langley Road, in Newton Centre, is open daily from 11:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. for take-out and dining in. Call (617) 558-0222.