“Weekly” Newsletter #2: We’re Back (and it wasn’t weekly)

Folks – Happy New Year, what a time in life to be alive! Change is in the air! It's been 11 long months since I last posted a newsletter and promised to be consistent about them (sorry about that). But it’s now 2026, a brand new year, and I'm so incredibly excited to break a few bad habits and start a few good ones. I'll elaborate more on that in a later newsletter but I'm here because there is so much going on in January that I must tell you about.

WE ARE GETTING A BRAND NEW OVEN! It’s a Polin 3-deck electric oven with capacity for up to 8 pies per deck. It’s almost too much oven for us but I'd rather have more oven and less pizza than more pizza and less oven. It's so cool (and so expensive) and unbelievably necessary. We are an establishment that is currently supported by a wood-fired oven and I cannot begin to describe how much of a pain in my ass that thing is. This will be a major upgrade, both for us and for you, in both speed and quality and consistency. Many of you will be apprehensive about us making this change, but I assure you that a wood-fired oven has no benefit on pizza outside of sex appeal. This week (January 7th - 11th) will be our final week of using the current oven. Next week, we will be closed for two days on Wednesday and Thursday (January 14th and 15th) for oven installation and training. However, to make it up to you guys, we will be open for a special Monday service on January 19th. Truly the end of an era, but we are so excited for what's to come.

And now for the other bit of exciting news… we are going to be doing a Slice Pop Up this month. This is an uber casual fun thing that we like to do where we sell slices of our Sicilian Pie and we partner with someone more-talented-than-I to make dessert. We had previously done one of these, back in August 2025, with the lovely ladies at New June Bakery. This time, we will be doing it with my good friend, Siobhan McKenna, who runs an awesome pop-up called “Feels like Sunday”. She also happens to be the pastry chef at Mighty Bread Co. in South Philadelphia. Siobhan is wonderful and talented, her stuff is amazing, and I'm so excited for her to be hanging at Char with us on Tuesday, January 27th from 5pm to 8pm. More details to follow at a later time.

I don’t have much else for you this week, but I am looking to make this a consistent thing in 2026 and to keep all you good people in the loop with the ongoings of Char.

Every day, more better.

Cheers, 

Viraj

Weekly Newsletter #1: The Intro

Alright Folks, here we are. Well over 6 months after I promised to start a newsletter, I’m inside a hotel in Cochin, Kerala (India), writing the inaugural edition during our first break since Char opened. So not quite on schedule but it’s here and that’s what counts. Before I get to the substance, I want to preface it with a few things. 

1. This won't be your typical newsletter. I have no plans to turn this into your ‘run-of-the-mill’ marketing pamphlet. Obviously, this is viewed as an amazing vessel to keep y’all in the loop about specials and changes to the menu but it also is an opportunity to give you guys an insight into the inner process of Char. 

2. Don’t expect this to be particularly well written. The limits of my  formal education are a high school diploma and I can say with utmost certainty that if you roamed around the halls of Springfield High School (Delaware County) and interviewed my former teachers, they would describe me far from a journalist in the making. 

3. This is just as much for me as it is for you. I’ve been given an incredible opportunity to open a restaurant in the city of Philadelphia but, as a 21 year old with a total of 10 months of non-pop-up restaurant experience, I have far fewer answers than one who opened a restaurant could be expected to have. However, this feels like a public way to figure out the answers to take us where we need, and I hope that if we end swimming (instead of sinking) that this can become a resource for others journeying down the same path in the future.

It would truly be a beautiful thing if the past 8 months, since signing the lease, could be conveniently summed up in a simple theme or aphorism but alas that’s not how this game works. So perhaps the easiest thing to do is write about what it is at the moment and what I hope for it to be. At the moment, Char is a fresh new pizzeria in the Olde Kensington neighborhood that makes really good pizza but has loads of kinks to work out.  What we are looking to be is undeniably the best. Not just a great pizzeria but a genuinely great restaurant that stands out in a sea of great restaurants (…cocky perhaps). Sometimes I feel like the mom telling the other parents that her chubby un-athletic kid is definitely going to the NFL when he grows up. At the moment this seems loud and brash, and not quite rooted in reality, but that’s my intention and I’m not typically one for beating around the bush. 

So this is our introductory newsletter — something perhaps a little more intense than our subsequent newsletter will be — but one that lets us set the foundation for what this will be. Hopefully this something y’all are getting even a little something out of but, at the very least, it's an entertaining and possibly mindless read. This will be sent out as a regular email at some point. However, for the time being it’ll be posted on the website as a Tuesday weekly.

Cheers,

Viraj