Sep. 21—A new pizza shop with Sicilian-style pies, pizza by the slice and more is expected to open in mid to late October on Brown Street.

The Wizard of Za will be located at 1200 Brown Street Suite 150 in the former space of Zombie Dogz.

"Our pizza is made from focaccia crust," said Dylan Jones, founder of The Wizard of Za. "It's very pillowy and spongy, but the way we cook it in the pan allows the crust on the bottom to get very crisp and caramelized."

Jones said they will have a variety of pies including the Rainbow Pie, a pizza with stripes of vodka sauce, house red sauce and house pesto sauce on top of the cheese, and the Wicked Cheese Pie, a pizza with vodka sauce, thick slices of provolone and house red sauce smothered with garlic oil and a pecorino and parmesan cheese mix.

"We have a pretty unique pizza for Dayton," Jones said.

The pizza shop's Dayton location will be its first in the Miami Valley. The Wizard of Za has a spot on N. High Street in Columbus, about a mile north of the Ohio State University campus.

"I'm excited to be a part of (the Dayton) community," Jones said. "It's going to be a cool culture change for us to see the difference between the two spaces."

He explained their Columbus location doesn't get a lot of foot traffic from students walking in front of the restaurant. He said since they've been working on the Dayton location, he has already seen a lot of students walking by their new spot.

The Wizard of Za began in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic when Jones and his friend, Spencer Saylor, were taking orders via Instagram and making pizzas out of a garage.

"The hype around it got really big and we had a waitlist of 4,500 people," Jones said. "People were waiting months to get a pizza."

The team partnered with Paceline Restaurant Partners, who also owns FUSIAN Sushi and Hunny Bee's Chicken, to launch their brick-and-mortar in Columbus.

Jones explained they were ready to grow and decided to expand their restaurant to the Dayton area, where the owners of Paceline Restaurant Partners have roots.

"We have an amazing staff here in Columbus and we're eager to push ourselves and learn what it takes to go from one to two," Jones said.

He said they are still growing and expanding in terms of their menu and are looking forward to seeing where the Dayton community takes them.

Jones said the pizza shop could be open anywhere from Oct. 15 to Oct. 24.

"We serve the warmest possible experience through kind people, handcrafted pizza," the shop's mission statement says. "Magic happens wherever kind people gather around delicious pizza."

For more information about The Wizard of Za, visit the shop's Instagram or Facebook pages. The pizza shop also has a website, www.thewizardofza.com, but Jones said they are in the middle of a rebranding project.