A new pizza restaurant, Potter’s Pizza – which will be located at 1107 Clements, the site of the former Cici’s – is gearing up for a hopeful November opening.

The restaurant will be the third Potter’s franchise with locations also in Graham and Abilene. Shane Potter, who will serve as the general manager, is in the process of moving his family to Brownwood while also preparing the new restaurant.

As for choosing Brownwood as the newest location, Potter said. “We had a customer that used to live in Graham and ate at our Graham location. They started working for Hendrick Medical so they were working in Abilene and started eating at our Abilene location all the time. Then they moved here in October and they reached out through our website and emailed us and let us know about this location. They told us they knew we were looking to expand, they didn’t know where we were going next, but they missed our restaurant and this building was available. That’s how we wound up coming and looking at it. When we made the first phone call and they had someone else that was going to lease it, but that kind of went out of the window, so that’s how we wound up getting this location.”

The Potter’s Pizza slogan is simply fresh, simply better.

“Our goal is to give a very good, quality pizza very fast,” Potter said. “We’re not artisan, we’re not looking at being fancy and taking an hour to make a pizza. We want to give people a quality product quickly in a family friendly environment. One thing we like to focus on is a very fresh, good quality product. We make the dough in house, we do all our own prep, we make our own pizza sauce, we prep our own Ranch and vegetables in house so we can keep it fresh.”

One of the reasons Potter’s Pizza is so distinctive is its dough that contains almost double the ingredients of most – a recipe Shane’s father, Henry, developed in 1991 when he owned a chain of restaurants in New Mexico.

“Normal pizza dough has six ingredients while ours has 11,” Shane Potter said. “We cold proof the dough so we always have plenty of dough ready so we can adjust volume.”

Along with a buffet that will include around a dozen pizzas updated every eight minutes, two types of chicken wings, soup, spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, and soft serve ice cream will also be featured. A 12-foot salad bar is also being constructed as part of the renovations on site, as well as the addition of a party room to hold private meetings, private birthday parties, etc.

The target date for the opening of Potter’s Pizza is in the fall of 2021.

“We’re going to try a soft opening, start with carry out and delivery and then open the dining room after that,” Potter said. “We’re going to hopefully start our soft opening in late September or early October and then officially open all the way in early November.”