Don Persons Loves Making Pizzas, So He Opened a Restaurant

In a quote attributed to Confucius, if you "choose a job you love, you'll never work a day in your life."

Don Persons, owner of Personi's Pizza and Grill #7 Village Plaza, Hwy. 61-67 in Arnold, is living by that standard.

"I love making pizzas," he says. "It really doesn't feel like work. I have a lot of fun doing it."

Persons is a postal worker on the night shift at the Lemay Post Office. He runs Personi's Pizza and Grill, which opened Last November, during the day. He says the food he offers makes his restaurant "soon to be famous."

Persons boasts about his staff and their team approach to work and raves about his pizzas, burgers and salads. All of the ingredients are homemade, including all of the sauces and salad dressings. He gets many of the raw materials for his concoctions from the Hill Neighborhood in St. Louis, where he grew up and worked at Riggazzi's restaurant.

Persons calls the fare at Personi's "St. Louis-style pizza and burgers," and that means, for the pizzas at least, plenty of hand-sliced Provel cheese. It's not shredded cheese strewn over the top of a pizza, but generous slices layered on top over the pepperoni and Italian sausage (the two most popular toppings) and melted as the pizza bakes.

It was one of the pizza ovens at Personi's that led to the opening of the Arnold pizza joint.

"I made 1,000 pizzas from my house last year," Persons said. "Then one day I peered in the window of this place, which was vacant, and said 'Hey, that's a pizza oven in there.'"

Twenty-one days later, Personi's Pizza and Burgers was launched.

"So far the food is going over very well," Persons said. "People seem to like it a lot."

Persons said he is always getting requests from customers to purchase a bottle of his salad dressing, to which Persons says "someday."

The menu at Personi's features 9-inch, 12-inch, 14-inch and 16-inch pizzas for carryout or dining in. All burgers are half-pounders and the menu includes, among many choices, a pizza burger.

There also are a variety of pastas, including lasagna, mostaccioli, fettuccine, and cannelloni. A Personi's special sandwich includes roast beef, turkey, salami, ham, cheese, tomato and lettuce.

The restaurant also offers a variety of appetizers including potato skins, which Persons says "are the best."

For more information about Personi's Pizza and Grill, call 636-467-9991.