First opened in Madison Heights in 1955, the award-winning Green Lantern Pizzeria & Lounge has steadily built its reputation as one of the best pizza joints in the region. And while it still calls Madison Heights home, the restaurant has since opened four additional locations throughout Oakland and Macomb counties.
Get ready for two more.
Green Lantern is prepping a new carry out- and delivery-only location to open in Rochester Hills. The new store will be located at the intersection of Walton and Livernois.
John Spreitzer, a descendant of the original owners of what has always been a family business, says that the Rochester Hills location is about two to three weeks away from opening. A fire suppression system and "city stuff" is all that remains on the to-do list.
In the community of Berkley, a full-service Green Lantern restaurant and bar is planned to take over the now-shuttered Sila Italian Dining & Pizza restaurant on Twelve Mile Road. Expect an early 2019 opening, Spreitzer says.
"Berkley feels like a perfect fit for our style. It has an older feel; it feels similar to Madison Heights," he says. "With replacing Sila, we have big shoes to fill in the community.
"We’ve been watching that building for fifteen years and we jumped at the opening."
Fans of Sila can take comfort in the fact that Spreitzer is considering the possibility of adding some of that restaurant’s more popular and signature dishes to the Green Lantern Berkley location.
Spreitzer says that the company will probably stop adding new locations once the Berkley restaurant is opened--at least for a while. But that doesn’t mean that Green Lantern is done growing. He says that the family could soon begin franchising the brand.
"We’re a pretty small company. It’s just my brother and I running things. But in the past twenty years it’s been snowballing into a faster process of growth," Spreitzer says. "We just keep learning things as we go along. It’s been pretty organic."
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