PORT HADLOCK — Flutter By Pizza Pie has reopened its Port Hadlock brick-and-mortar location.
The pizzeria is open from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays and is located at 10644 Rhody Drive, Port Hadlock.
Flutter By reopened its doors at the end of July. With a steady flow of customers, the opening was mellow when compared with its first opening, owner-operator Mark Ennis said.
Commissioner Heidi Eisenhour launched her second campaign at the first opening, Ennis said.
“That was complete mayhem,” he said. “This year was really perfectly busy, to be exciting but not to overwhelm my fragile nervous system from just trying to get this thing to the finish line at this point.”
There was time for him to sit down with friends and check in with customers at this year’s opening.
Ennis describes the pizza as a mix between New Haven style and New Jersey bar pie.
“It’s light, crispy, thin crust,” he said. “(Made with) organic ingredients like Washington flours. Everything is heavily considered.”
The flavor profiles are classic, balanced combinations, Ennis said.
“Nothing too crazy,” he added.
The pizzeria purchases vegetables for toppings from local farms and gets its sausage from Sunny Farms in Sequim.
The eight pizzas on the menu currently range from $11 to $15. The “Extra Special” is topped with thinly sliced dry figs, hemplers bacon, caramelized onions and shaved fresh garlic.
The menu has an olive oil-based pie, a white sauce option and a vegan option, too.
Cold, canned beer is for sale, as well as non-alcoholic options.
Ennis said salads and something sweet are likely on the horizon for the menu.
Aesthetic identity at the pizzeria is important to Ennis, and it’s evident upon entering the space.
Ennis utilized skills developed while working in set design for fashion shows in New York City over the years, he said.
The process of building the space up was slow and organic. He’s a big fan of buying half-gallon cans of paint at the re-use store, he said.
Brightly colored geometric shapes inspired by Swedish painter Hilma Af Klint are painted on the perimeter of the concrete floors and over the thresholds. Bands of bold paint wrap the doors and windows.
In the center of the room, a large circular mural — painted by Ennis’ girlfriend Raquel Stokes — was also inspired by Klint. The mural is largely visible in the dining room and partly from the kitchen.
The tables, built by Ennis — based on a design from Italian artist and furniture designer Enzo Mari — are built from reclaimed scrapwood.
The far wall, opposite of the main entrance, is blue with cloudy textured white brush strokes. It is a holdover from a former business. Ennis said he tried a number of color swatches on the wall before deciding to keep it original.
Stokes framed the sections of wall that had colors painted on, then painted different bugs within the frames to create the bug wall.
The pizzeria walls are covered in Stokes’ paintings and collages.
Ennis also has outfitted the dining rooms with Street Fighter II and Pacman.
Now cooking in electric ovens, Ennis’ interest in clay ovens started in Chile where, interested in improving his Spanish, he studied abroad.
“I was kind of like the weird gringo kid, always in the kitchen with the women, trying to understand what they were doing,” Ennis said. “The mom of (my host) family introduced me to this campesina woman who had her own clay oven and made bread and her own jams up on the mountain.”
When he first came to Jefferson County for a farm internship at Finnriver Farm 16 or 17 years ago, before it was a cidery, his interest in clay ovens once again engaged. During his first week at the farm, the farm hosted a clay oven-building workshop.
Making pizza for a living has been stop-and-go for many years for Ennis.
He made pizza when he wasn’t fishing in Alaska, cleaning up trash on the barrier islands, working in the cannabis industry or working on sets in New York, he said.
His pizza arch started when, as a farm intern making $300 a month, he needed a way to eke out a living.
Ennis met baker Ilon Silverman when he came out to see the clay oven at Finnriver. The two became friends.
“I just started selling pizza after this guy taught me some things,” he said. “I started selling pizza because they were still doing you-pick blueberries. Every Saturday or Sunday, at least 50 people would come.”
At first, Ennis’ pizzas were made from ingredients purchased with food stamps.
Ennis went on to work for Dented Buoy, a wood-fired pizzeria at Finnriver, for several years, then as a baker for Pan De Amor for four or five years.
During his time living in the Port Hadlock and Chimacum areas, Ennis said he’s built ovens everywhere he’s lived.
Eventually, Ennis started running into the limitations of clay ovens, he said. Then he started building them from steel.
He started fabricating steel ovens with the help of local metal workers. By the time Flutter By’s brick-and-mortar location opened for the first time, he was on his seventh prototype.
Ennis built a wood-fired oven on the back of a first-generation Dodge Cummins between 2016 snf 2018, which he still uses for catering, though now he brings smaller electric ovens for pizza.
2024 shutdown
Pushing Flutter By to the finish line has been an epic process for Ennis, who opened the pizzeria for the first time in 2024, only to have it shuttered seven weeks later by the Jefferson County Department of Community Development (DCD), following a complaint about his self-built ovens and the car port constructed to house them.
Ennis said he was under the impression that the temporarily screwed together car port, constructed by some locally milled wood and salvaged boat-building wood, didn’t need to be permitted.
He didn’t even consider that his ovens needed permitting, he said.
“It was like a really dark psychedelic trip for weeks,” Ennis said. “It’s just like a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear and like, a lot of confusion. I had just gotten to the top of a mountain, and now I was like, ‘Wow, there’s another mountain.’ I also still have to work to get to the base of that mountain.”
Ennis still had bills to pay and catering jobs with his pizza truck.
Soon, curiosity and the need to move forward compelled Ennis to explore his options. He spent many hours researching and in conversations with pizza oven salesmen, DCD, Fire Marshal Phil Cecere and his insurance company.
Ennis said he’s learned a lot of lessons about the many challenges to starting a successful small business. As he moved through each step, he thought about how he could eventually communicate some of the challenges associated with opening a restaurant.
One part of his work that Ennis hoped to share was his steel-fabricated wood-fire ovens. They were designed to be modular so that two people with a ratchet set could take them apart, he said. Ennis’ design implements refractory materials and borrows from how kilns are built.
The ovens were designed so they could be commercially fabricated, he said.
Open to returning to that project eventually, his focus now is to stabilize Flutter By. With help from EDC Team Jefferson, he’s now focused on making the numbers work, he said.
Ennis said it took a lot to walk away from wood-fired pizza — and the values it represents — for now. Wood is a local renewable energy source, and he had developed relationships with local wood mills to collect their scraps.
The decision to move toward electric was made out of necessity.
“You might have all these dreams, but you are about to have to fully walk away from this and go get a job at the grocery store,” he said. “That’s where you’re at, dude. Nothing bad about working in a grocery store.”
Ennis said he’s happy with the electric oven he’s working with now. Flutter By is using the PizzaMaster by Swedish company Svenska BakePartner AB.
“It’s like the Volvo of pizza ovens,” he said.
Flutter By has always been a meditation and a container for creativity, he said.
“A meditation on beginning, to just try, in a world riddled with gatekeepers, confusion and paralysis,” he said. “The transformation from caterpillar to butterfly became the metaphor for the entire business.”
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsuladailynews.com.
