My Friend Mike's in San Luis Obispo is the neighborhood sleeper hit that whips up creative pizzas 

A recent chilly and wet late evening ignited my hunger for pizza.

I devoured slices of the wackiest pie I had ever come across and rushed to hang out at my friends' place. They were Bear & The Wren loyalists, who debriefed me on their own pizza dinner.

"That's funny," I said. "I had pizza, too, but from My Friend Mike's."

"That's so nice of your friend Mike to whip up a pizza for you," my friend said.

"No, no," I clarified. "It's a pizzeria."

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• Photos Courtesy Of My Friend Mike's
• FRIENDLY FACES From left to right, Madison East, Ryan Austin, Mike Radakovich, and Kamal Smith make up the current core My Friend Mike's team.

That's exactly the kind of happy misunderstanding San Luis Obispo-raised Mike Radakovich said he wanted when he devised a name for his pizza business. His friends call him "Mike Rad," and his pizzas are, in fact, rad.

"I have a good friend, Russell. He knows a lot of people, and he always says, 'You know my friend Mike?'" Radakovich said. "I didn't want another ampersand name. I thought it would also be good for word-of-mouth and marketing."

That winter night, I ordered the potato, leek, and green garlic pizza. It's a large burnished disc with a thin crust that impressively carries the weight of creamy white leek sauce, golden medallions of young potatoes, and long green threads of garlic, complete with olive oil drizzled on top. You can go whole hog and add guanciale (cured pork jowl, traditionally found in carbonara) sourced from Atascadero's Alle-Pia Fine Cured Meats. But I sidestepped that to try the pie in its original form.

I wasn't disappointed.

Everything was luscious and a perfect counter to the cold weather. The crust was warm and stayed crispy for a long time. The potatoes were moreish, and the leek sauce hit the spot. It was light enough to easily finish three slices in one sitting. I liked it so much that I didn't share. The pizza reheats well (I preferred microwaving over the oven), and doubles as a filling breakfast slice with lots of hot sauce.

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• Photos Courtesy Of My Friend Mike's
• SPUDS 'N' STUFF My Friend Mike's limited seasonal potato pizza comes with a leek sauce, plenty of green garlic, and splashes of olive oil.

The potato pizza is one of My Friend Mike's popular limited offerings. Radakovich and his core culinary crew of Kamal Smith and Madison East concoct such combinations depending on what produce is available each season around SLO County. True to the pizzeria's slogan—"We don't do much, but we do it well"—the pie rotates every so often through their usual menu of 10 pizzas.

Started in April 2022, My Friend Mike's is a small-scale labor of love. It's only open Thursday through Saturday from 4 to 9 p.m., and on Sunday from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Orders have to be placed online, or go old-school and give them a ring. You can pick up pizzas in-store at the 2324 Broad St. location and head out, or grab a seat at one of the wooden tables there to chow down immediately.

Radakovich prepares batches of dough almost every day. Wearing a faded black shirt spotted with flour one January morning, he expertly juggled machinery and ingredient measurements as the shop's pizza mixer and water tap whirred and hissed, respectively.

"I've been making sourdough bread for probably 10 years," he said. "This starter right here that I'm feeding is probably 15 years old."

Radakovich worked for 16 years in the warehouse industry, developing a love for dough in his free time. He was ready for something new but didn't want to enter the networking rat race through LinkedIn. So he leaned into what he knew best: pizza.

He bolstered his bread-making skills with travels to pizza places in Los Angeles, New York, Italy, and France. Radakovich also learned from online bread forums, like The Fresh Loaf, and culinary books.

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• Photos Courtesy Of My Friend Mike's
• UPGRADE IT Make the Loaded Veg pizza a Drunken Veg with the help of Perez Produce spinach, Werdless Farms mushrooms, red onions, tomatoes, stracciatella, and house-fermented chili sauce.

"The first Tartine book allowed me to understand baker's percentages really well. Before that, I was making breads too, but it was clunky," he said. "That book changed a lot of people I think."

The proof is in the pies. Radakovich calls his a cross between New York-style and Neapolitan. His thin crust pizzas have an "open crumb" structure—light with lots of holes from air bubbles.

"It's not flat, we want air in our pizza," he said. "I knew I wanted to do sourdough bases with local ingredients. I knew I wanted to use stone mill flour. All our produce comes from farmers' markets."

Radakovich doesn't have a favorite from his roundup of pizzas—they change almost every day. The week of Jan. 9, he and his team were partial to the Mary Nera: a pie loaded with Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, shaved garlic, Sicilian oregano, sea salt, and many lashings of extra virgin olive oil.

"We've been eating it with a lemony arugula salad on top. We're eating it all the time. No cheese," he said.

Cheese is still on the menu, though. Most of My Friend Mike's pizzas come with aged mozzarella, and some of them feature ricotta too. Take the Loaded Veg, for example. It's packed with aged mozzarella, Parmigiano Reggiano, Bloomsdale spinach, shaved red onions and garlic, pickled sweet peppers, local mushrooms, and lemony olive oil. Radakovich recommended it to his friend and musician Aaron Coyes when he dropped by for a chat.

Friendship has propelled his business. People like Coyes, who worked as a chef, helped Radakovich figure out the menu at My Friend Mike's.

"Aaron and I grew up in San Luis together. He's worked a couple nights here," Radakovich said.

Coyes can't eat pizzas because of a gluten allergy, though his kids still enjoyed the fare.

"I was just a friend helping out. When Mike started this, it was just him and Kamal. I'd eat pepperoni off his fingers," Coyes said with a laugh.

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• Photos Courtesy Of My Friend Mike's
• FUNGI FUN PIE The Wild Shroomies pie features locally foraged chanterelle and porcini mushrooms, and guanciale (cured pork jowl) from Alle-Pia Fine Cured Meats in Atascadero.

Other well-wishers aided Radakovich too. Herman Story Wines' Russell From provided My Friend Mike's with redwood tables that a wine club member made for him. The pizzeria also offers a syrah Radakovich made with From at Herman Story Wines. The rotating wine and beer list at My Friend Mike's has items from France, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and all over California.

Radakovich is mindful of his goals with his restaurant.

"I want to make sure all the employees are making good wages to support themselves," he said. "I want to be more intentional about sourcing our i

ngredients, and being able to play with and produce good food."

For now, he's racing to fulfill an immediate short-term dream.

"I'm saving up for another refrigerator right now," he said with a laugh. "First, I have to pay sales tax back Jan. 31, and then I'm going to get a refrigerator."

Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal promises to share her next My Friend Mike's pizza. Hold her accountable at [email protected].