The reason you’ll be seeing a lot more of this Dayton food truck

Bella Sorella is celebrating five years, expands by adding a second unit

The sisters who founded of one of Dayton’s most traveled food trucks are celebrating their fifth year in business this year — and they’ve added a second unit to accommodate demand.

Bella Sorella Pizza Co. is the brainchild of two sisters: Elizabeth Corrado Weizman, who started using her first brick oven more than a decade ago in her backyard; and Gail Corrado Okafor, who spent 12 years in the Bay Area in California, where she trained to become a professional chef, before returning to the Dayton area.

“We’re from Dayton and proud to be running a business in our hometown,” Weizman said.

>> RELATED: 2 sisters launch Dayton area’s newest food truck (September 2013) 

The sisters began in 2013 serving local brewpubs and catering small parties. Bella Sorella, translated in Italian as “beautiful sister,” has now added a second mobile unit and has tripled its events.

The bulk of Bella Sorella's business now is catering of private events such as graduation parties, weddings, rehearsal dinners, and business lunches — although it will be serving to the public from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. tonight, May 19 at Eudora Brewing Company in Kettering.

Credit: Mark Fisher

Credit: Mark Fisher

“We just kept getting so many requests and had to turn them down because we couldn’t be in two places at once,” Weizman said. “Now we can.”

The co-founder said she and her sister and their families “take the most pride in our food and the local connection, and service.

“We grow a good part of the pizza ingredients on our own family farm, and our own dough recipe is now being made weekly by Bakehouse Bread in Troy to help us keep up with demand,” Weizman said.

Credit: Mark Fisher

Credit: Mark Fisher

“Almost everyone who works for us is a family member or long-time friend. One of our favorite times is when our parents come to visit on site and our dad just walks right in the middle of the whole operation, grabs a pizza, and says, ‘Looks good, girls!’”

>> RELATED: Two more new pizza restaurants coming, both in Greene County

Credit: Mark Fisher

Credit: Mark Fisher

Bella Sorella’s founders specialize in Neopolitan-style pizzas, thin-crust pizzas that cook in as little as two minutes in the wood-burning brick oven that reaches 800 degrees. In that respect, the sisters were ahead of their time, at least locally: Fast-casual pizza chains such as Rapid Fired Pizza, MOD Pizza and PizzaFire employ a similar fast-cook, customizable pie in their restaurants, which have all opened in the last two years, many of them in recent months.

For more information or to keep up with Bella Sorella's public events, check out the Bella Sorella Facebook page.

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