East Idaho Eats: Pizza Stop in Preston serves delicious pies with a promise of happiness

PRESTON – Thirty years ago, the Brackin family moved from Miami to Preston and opened a pizzeria that has since become a small-town staple.

Earlier this year, Collin Brackin and his wife, Samantha King, bought Pizza Stop, the restaurant where Brackin was born.

As Brackin explained, while her parents were building their new home, her father ran the restaurant while her mother looked after the children in an apartment the family had built at the back of the restaurant. It was in this apartment – during a lunch rush – that Brackin was born. His sister then took him to a nearby grocery store to weigh him on a scale, Brackin said with a laugh.

“Some people are weird, but to me it’s a pretty cool story – I’ve been here my whole life,” he added.

Earlier this year, Brackin bought the business from his parents – he said – so they could retire and enjoy their golden years.

“They were a little weird at first,” Brackin told EastIdahoNews.com. “They were like, ‘Well, you don’t know how to do this, you don’t know how to do this,’ and I was like, ‘I’ve been here my whole life, let me do it. ‘ … I treated it like I was born into it.

Brackin’s business model has remained the same: to deliver great food with great service. And it starts with Pizza Stop’s cheese breadsticks, which he calls “the best in the world.”

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For our visit, Brackin provided EastIdahoNews.com with cheese breadsticks and barbecue chicken pizza.

The breadsticks are exactly as he described, gooey and chewy on the inside with a crispy, crunchy exterior. Dipped in Pizza Stop’s homemade marinara, they are an absolute delight.

The pizza was a unique mix of BBQ sauce marinated chicken breast with onion and pineapple on a bed of BBQ sauce and cheese. The topping combination was flavorful enough to distract from the perfect crust.

Brackin’s favorite, the BBQ chicken pizza, is one of many menu items that are the product of “bored” employees. Because workers get a free pizza every shift, they often mix toppings for adventurous results.

It was also the genesis of my favorite pizza on the Pizza Stop menu – the hog ‘n honey, which combines pork sausage, bacon, barbecue sauce and a drizzle of honey.

Along with a few additions to the menu, Brackin has a few ideas for scaling the business.

Community involvement, he said, is very important to him and Pizza Stop. The company has therefore sponsored sports teams and sporting events and will continue to pursue these opportunities.

Brackin also wants Pizza Stop to bring something to the Preston community that he feels has long been missing – a family gathering place.

“I plan to do live music this summer,” he said. “For me, community engagement is the most important thing and I want to make an impact. If I can bring a family, a large group of people here to listen to music – there’s nothing like it in Preston right now.

Family, he added, is particularly important, given the history of the company and his place in it.

Before seeing those plans come to fruition, Brackin said his “gourmet pizzeria” would continue to serve the highest quality of food available.

“I’m here to make pizza,” he says. “I’m not saying I’ll make everyone happy, but when you eat this pizza it will make you happy – I promise.”

Pizza Stop in Preston is located at 106 East 2nd South. They are open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

If you want to know more about the restaurant, including the menu, you can see it on the company’s Facebook page – here. They also post videos of their food on a company YouTube page – here.

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