Lindsey Nair

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Jon Roberts has always loved to play with fire, and Scott Smith has always loved to play with flour.

One night, not long after they first met, Roberts invited Smith and his family up to his Floyd County home to bake bread in his wood-fired oven.

They were waiting for the oven to reach a good bread-baking temperature when they decided to toss in a couple of pizzas. And that's when they had one of those chocolate-meets-peanut-butter experiences.

"We really had an 'Aha!' moment," Smith told me.

That night marked the beginning of a journey for Roberts, 29, and Smith, 39. They decided to create a business selling scratch-made pies topped with local ingredients and baked in a wood-fired oven.

They named the business Dogtown Pizza after the little Floyd County community, once called Dogtown, where Roberts lives.

It isn't just the local toppings that make Dogtown Pizza unique; it's the fact that the 1,800-pound pizza oven is mounted on the back of a flatbed Ford F-250 pickup truck. That allows the guys to take the business to festivals, vineyards and farmers markets around Southwest Virginia.

Just this summer, they have taken their "party on wheels" to Foggy Ridge Hard Cider in Carroll County and to Floyd County's Villa Appalachia winery, Pine Tavern restaurant and Floyd Fandango festival. They will be selling pies at FloydFest this weekend.

Dogtown is also set up every Wednesday at the Blacksburg Farmers Market, every Friday night at the jamboree in downtown Floyd and every fourth Thursday at Valhalla Vineyards in Roanoke County.

This is only their first full-time summer on the job (last year they did just seven events), but Roberts and Smith already have big dreams for their business.

"For the first time," Smith said, "in all of the jobs that I've had, I wake up excited about going to work."

'We are perfectionists'

On a recent Wednesday, I hung out with Roberts and Smith at the Blacksburg Farmers Market.

They had already backed the trailer and truck, with its OVEN 2GO license plate, into their designated slot and were setting up their stall.

The wooden sides came off the truck bed and were turned into two long tables for their stall. Out of the trailer came a stainless steel prep cart and refrigerator filled with pizza dough and some of the toppings they would need.

Two Mason jars stuffed with wildflowers and a little Billie Holiday on wireless speakers completed the atmosphere.

"I used to listen to Billie when I made sourdough bread," Smith said, "and somehow it always seemed to come out a little more blue, a little more sour."

Smith credits his love of breadmaking to his Italian grandfather, whom he called "Pop-Pop." He has been baking for years but started to get really serious about the hobby after moving to Roanoke from Naples, Fla., about three years ago.

At that time, he and his wife, Naomi, were new parents to daughter Amelia, now 4. They now also have an 8-month-old son, Avery.

Naomi Smith told me that her husband was selling real estate in Florida, but the lifestyle just didn't suit them. Florida "would not be a safe place to live through global warming or a really bad economic recession," she said.

After buying a duplex in Roanoke, the Smiths decided to do a green remodel. They met the Robertses while shopping for supplies at the Floyd County couple's store, EcoSolutions, which has since closed.

Both are young couples with young children -- the Robertses have a daughter, River, 7, and a son, Summit, 4 -- so they clicked.

Jon and his wife, Katie, a graphic artist, invited the Smiths up to an "open oven" at their home. They had built their own cob oven, made with a mixture of clay, sand and straw, in their back yard.

Cob "is a sustainable product, but it is so labor intensive," Jon Roberts said. "I don't know if I could build another one. It took me probably 100 hours to do that."

The oven used for Dogtown Pizza was built using a sand mold that was covered in high-heat refractory concrete. Roberts and Smith credit friend Ezra Bret of Floyd County with helping to build that oven. Roberts is working on a fiberglass mold so that he can more easily build and sell wood-fired ovens to private clients.

"My big passion is building ovens," he said.

Becoming pizza gypsies for a living sounded like fun, but Naomi Smith and Katie Roberts said the decision was not made without a lot of thought. Eventually, they all decided that pizza would never go out of style while local food is clearly growing in popularity.

They also couldn't ignore the perfection of a match between a man who makes insanely good pizza dough and a man who can build wood-fired ovens by hand.

"We work on everything together," Roberts said. "We are perfectionists."

Paisans

Each Wednesday at the farmers market, Roberts builds the fire -- he likes locust, oak, hickory or applewood best -- while Smith buys fresh toppings, such as summer squash and basil, from the farmers.

Their 12-inch pizzas range from $10 to $13 and include the Margherita (red sauce, basil and mozzarella), five-cheese, harvest vegetable and a concoction they call the "paisan."

Paisan means "brother" or "friend" in Italian, and Dogtown's paisan pie is topped with caramelized onions and sausage made from pork raised at Bright Farm in Floyd.

"The sausage that we do and the caramelized onions are friends," Smith said. "They go along really well together."

Watching Smith and Roberts work, it was easy for me to see that they go along well together, too.

Smith tosses dough while dancing to his iPod, interrupting himself occasionally to call out greetings to potential customers and poke fun at Roberts. His teammate is a bit quieter -- he's busy watching the fire and shooting a laser thermometer inside the oven to check the internal temperature. But when passers-by stop to gawk at the oven or take pictures, Roberts happily answers their questions.

"Scott could sell ice to an Eskimo," said Diane Flynt, who owns Foggy Ridge Cider and has teamed up with Dogtown Pizza for several events. "He is just a charming, attractive, very extroverted guy. And nobody could be sweeter than Jon. He knows a lot about a lot of different subjects and is very interesting."

At big events, Smith and Roberts bring hired help to take orders and help make pizzas. When the lines get long, they can really kick out the pies.

The pizzas cook in just two minutes inside the 800-degree oven, so Roberts can shuffle them in and out as fast as Smith and his helpers can make them. At Floyd Fandango, they sold 400 pies on Saturday -- the most they have ever sold in one day.

The guys have signed a contract with Across the Way Productions, which puts on Floyd-Fest, to set up a permanent wood-fired oven on the festival site. They also are building an oven in downtown Floyd that can be used not only for their pizzas, but also for community gatherings.

While they enjoy working events, Smith and Roberts would like to do more private catering and start selling their pizzas frozen. Already, they sell parbaked pizzas to customers who want to finish the cooking process at home.

And sometime in the not-too-distant future, Smith said, he could see them running a rustic pizza roadhouse, complete with local microbrews, nestled in a beautiful corner of Southwest Virginia.

As long as they are having fun, getting along well and making money, the future looks pretty bright for these families.

Said Katie Roberts, "We have really moved into a very great time in our lives."

On the Net: www.dogtownpizza.net

Lindsey Nair's column runs in Wednesday's Extra.