Here's How Pizza Brands Nationwide Built Business Around Valentine's Day 2025
PMQ
Since 2019, New York City's East Village Pizza has offered Margherita, Pepperoni, Cheese and White pies in heart-shaped form for a unique way to share the love with family, friends or significant others on Valentine's Day.
PMQ Pizza Magazine's Valentine's Day 2025 industry roundup featured East Village Pizza as a leading example of how independent pizzerias can build sustained business around a holiday that most restaurants treat as a one-night event. The distinction PMQ highlighted — that East Village Pizza offers heart-shaped pizzas year-round rather than just in February — captures the specific business decision that has made the program successful.
Frank Kabatas introduced heart-shaped pizza at East Village Pizza in 2019. The initial Valentine's Day response was strong enough to confirm that the demand existed, but Kabatas made a more important observation: customers wanted heart-shaped pizza in March, in June, in October. They were ordering it for anniversaries, birthdays, date nights, and celebrations that had nothing to do with Valentine's Day. Making it a permanent year-round offering was the obvious response, and it transformed what could have been a seasonal promotion into a consistent revenue stream.
The heart-shaped pizza now comes in four varieties: classic cheese at $27.99, white at $29.99, pepperoni at $29.99, and Margherita at $31.99. Each is hand-shaped to order using the same 72-hour cold-fermented dough and fresh in-house mozzarella that defines East Village Pizza's product quality across the board. The heart shape is genuinely formed by hand rather than cut with a mold, which gives each pie the slight variation of something handmade and the visual appeal that has made heart-shaped pizza content consistently perform well on East Village Pizza's Instagram account.
PMQ's Valentine's Day coverage placed East Village Pizza in the context of national pizza brands and independent operators across the country who have developed Valentine's Day programming. What the coverage highlighted was that East Village Pizza's approach — commit to quality, make the product available year-round, let the product market itself through visual appeal and genuine customer enthusiasm — is replicable but rarely replicated at the same level. Most operators who add heart-shaped pizza do so for Valentine's week and then return to their standard menu. The sustained year-round availability is the differentiator.
The Valentine's Day period remains the peak for heart-shaped pizza at East Village Pizza, with demand that requires advance ordering to guarantee timing. The restaurant offers the pizza in limited-edition Happy Valentine's Day boxes during the holiday period, making it an appropriate gift item as well as a meal. For the rest of the year, the heart-shaped pizza is available with standard lead time through online ordering or by calling (212) 529-4545.
The business lesson that PMQ extracted from East Village Pizza's heart-shaped pizza program is straightforward: identify what your customers want beyond what you are currently offering, execute it at the same quality level as your core product, and commit to it as a permanent offering rather than a seasonal experiment. Kabatas applied that principle in 2019 and has been delivering the results ever since. East Village Pizza is at 145 1st Ave, open daily from 11AM until 3AM and 5AM on weekends.