Rail Trail Flatbread Pizza Ovens​

This was a very unique project for a successful restaurant, Rail Trail Flatbread Co.  The project is a great example of our ability to serve niche customers who have very specific and very unique requests that cannot be met in the manufactured oven market.  

For an expansion, the client wanted two unique oval-shaped ovens.  The ovens have a trough in the middle where the fire is made, and two upper decks on the sides where baking takes place.  The result of this unique wood-fired oven design is that the fire remains front and center, as opposed to many wood-fired pizza ovens where the fire is hidden off to the side.  The other advantage is that the different levels create different cooking zones that make the ovens very versatile.  The chef uses the area in the middle to sear or char a variety of meats and vegetables in pans, while flatbreads are being cooked on the upper decks.

The construction of these unique brick pizza ovens follows our normal practice of designing and building to very tight tolerances to minimize mortar joints.  The dome that results from such precision is beautiful to look at as well as durable.

The inside dimensions of these wood-fired brick ovens are approximately 9 ft wide by 5 ft deep.  The two “wings” are essentially the two halves of a 5′ circle, with a four foot “stretch” between them.

As with many of our large travel projects, we were primarily focused on construction of the refractory cores.  We built the firebrick brick oven cores and then insulated them with ceramic blanket and put a “scratch coat” of reinforced cement. The concrete bases were built ahead of time by local contractors to our specs, and the facade will be completed by local masons using stone and stucco.