The club of YouTubers and internet personalities who’ve extended their brands into the restaurant space has recently expanded by one member. This past November, David Dobrik’s pizzeria, called — what else — Doughbrik’s, opened its doors. It joined other food businesses from online creators, like MrBeast Burger and Dylan Lemay’s ice cream parlor, Catch’n Ice Cream.
Although Dobrik has taken a step from back posting content to the YouTube channel that made him famous, his pizza place seems to be an overnight success, with LA Magazine reporting that the business’s opening day attracted lines so long that they spilled out onto busy Sunset Boulevard.
Dobrik, who gained fame from his YouTube channel but is now a star on multiple platforms, including Instagram and TikTok, didn’t just slap his name on a generic pizza place and call it a day. As he discussed with Tasting Table, he’s been involved in every aspect of the restaurant, starting in the earliest planning phases. We talked to Dobrik about bringing his pizza dreams to life.
I’m from the suburbs of Chicago, [and] pizza in Chicago and anywhere in that area is such a big deal. I think my ultimate goal one day is to own a hotel. I want to create places that people could come and hang out in, and a pizza place was a place where people could come hang out, something that we did as kids literally every weekend.
There wasn’t an event where there wasn’t pizza when we were growing up, so it’s a big part of us growing up, and we wanted to make something equally as fun for people to come and visit and to hang out in LA — a cool, fun place when you’re trying to find the next spot to go to. It’s right in the middle of everything. That’s why. We just love pizza.
What was the inspiration behind the doughy-style pizza? It seems to combine aspects of a few different pizza styles.
We tried a lot of pizzas. Originally, we were going for the tavern style, which was going to be our main style, but then with our partner chefs, Allen and Ian, we started experimenting with thicker, focaccia bread styles, and we completely fell in love with it. We wanted to create a specialty pizza. People call it a Detroit-style pizza, or Chicago-style; they’re a little bit confused about it — that makes me really stoked. Maybe it doesn’t have a specific style to it and it feels a little fresh. There’s so much pizza out there, so we wanted to make something that felt a little bit new and you could identify it easily as being ours.