Our Story

The name comes from a nickname. Guido’s is named for Papa Guido — the father-in-law of the woman who runs it today. He came over from Italy, and he brought the recipe with him.

Before Arizona, the family ran restaurants in Michigan. The first was called Calabria, after the town in Italy he grew up in, and the ones that followed were named the same way — for the places back home. The recipe traveled the way he did: handed down, tweaked over the years, still his.

In 2008, after Papa Guido passed away, the family came west and opened the first Guido’s in Dewey. Her late husband Rich and her mother-in-law were the two who opened the doors with her. About a year later the Prescott Valley store followed. Somewhere in there “Papa Guido” got shortened to just Guido’s, and it stuck.

It has been family the whole time. Her kids worked the Dewey counter alongside her and Rich. A sister-in-law has worked here too, and a nephew spent his winters learning the kitchen before going home to open a place of his own. The employees were never really just employees either — that is the part she brings up first.

The pizza was never the whole of it, either. Over the years Guido’s has sponsored softball and baseball teams, run fundraisers, and backed a bowling league — and for a while it fielded a team of its own that played every Sunday. The dining room has been remodeled twice since then and the old plaques may have come down, but the habit never did.