Photo by Paula Merritt / The Meridian StarEthan Miller, left, general manager at Nick and Al's, and Paul McKinnis prepare pizzas for patrons at the newly remodeled restaurant.

Customers have been “knocking down the doors” of Nick and Al’s New York Style Pizzeria in Meridian ever since its recent grand reopening, owner Nick Lisi said.

The restaurant, located at 1910 Highway 19, resumed service May 8 after five months of renovations, debuting new decor and updated menu.

“We have gone back and forth for at least five or six years trying to come up with a time to remodel, but nobody wants to shut down and lose money,” Lisi said. “But it came to a point where we just had to do it.”

“It’s been busy. A lot of people have been missing us, and been waiting for us to open back up,” said cook Byron Cross, a Nick and Al’s employee since 2006.

Despite the restaurant’s new look, Lisi assures customers they can still order the same popular classics, such as pizza or pasta with “parmato sauce.”

“You can get anything you’ve always gotten at Nick and Al’s,” Lisi said. “We added a few new pizzas and pastas… but we’ve just made it simpler, you can build your own.

The new additions have gone well so far, with Lisi and his family working 15 to 17 hour days in order to meet the needs of customers and keep the restaurant in order.

Nick’s father, Gus Lisi, the founder and former owner of the eatery, has come out of retirement to help his son manage the restaurant.

“We had to bring my dad out of retirement,” Nick Lisi said. “He’s the brains of the operation. He’s the one who dreamed all this up and showed us how to do it. We didn’t dream it up on our own for sure.”

Gus Lisi immigrated to the United States from Italy at the age of 9. He later opened Nick and Al’s (originally called Luigi’s) in 1999 as a tribute to his grandfather. Many of the recipes, all of which are made from scratch, are more than 200 years old and were passed down from his mother and grandmother.

“When he was growing up, this was considered poor people food,” Nick Lisi said. “Now it’s considered gourmet. It’s just what he grew up on.”

Those same recipes, combined with Nick and Al’s recent facelift, have proven to be a hit with customers, such as T.J. Nance.

“I didn’t know how much I missed the restaurant until it was gone,” Nance said. “Myself, along with a lot of other people, were wondering when they would reopen. But the newly remodeled kitchen and dining areas set a good ambiance for a great experience.”

Nick Lisi is grateful that his customers, who he describes as “super loyal”, have responded so well to the restaurant’s reopening.

“We thank the good Lord, we’ve never struggled for business, and I think it has to do with the way we treat people,” he said. “”Are we perfect? Absolutely not. We burn a pizza every single day. But we do whatever it takes to make it right… And even if we mess something up, it’s still going to taste good.”