HELL was spawned by Callum Davies in the year 1996, location: the Kelburn squash centre in Wellington. First floor, no street frontage, dodgy access and a tiny kitchen – fundamentally wrong in so many ways, but it worked. This was the birthplace of HELL and we operated out of here for 8 years. We then moved the kitchen to the top of Cuba St in 2004.

Customers often recall their first experience being in the original store, walking up the back stairs through the kitchen, avoiding banging their head on the shelf (look out fool), jostling with staff during the chaos of a big night, and some even remember when we had a dine in section with views over Wellington (or if you worked for HELL the place we got trashed and launched firecrackers out the window).

In the early days we tried everything, rice tandori pizza, delivery milkshakes, curries, mud cake, all in search of the wicked menu that is HELL today. Callum was joined by Stu and together they opened the Hataitai store in 2000. We loved this earthquake hazard of a building from the collapsing floor, home made counters and menu boards, early morning paint job and tiling, and memories of excellent staff and customers that made it an institution in Hataitai.

We opened another store in Northland the following year and set up a prep kitchen that serviced our 3 stores. Delivering around Wellington in the Escargo with occasional brakes and handling like a 4 wheeled sailing ship in the wind, we started honing our systems and product. We then opened in Petone – our first ‘’quality’ fit out.

The early days of HELL was about living our business every day, working damned hard and making tasty pizzas. These were some of the best times of our lives and helped shape the business into what it is now.

In 2003 Warren (Otis) came along and completed the unholy trinity. With experience in franchising and his little bit of crazy, we started to open stores around NZ. The first store out of Wgtn was Grey Lynn, Auckland. Unsure how we would go being a Wellington brand we soon found out that Aucklanders loved our food and that we had created a monster. One customer remarked on his first delivery “about fckn time” to which we said “ah…the delivery is on time” and he said “no…..about fckn time you came to Auckland”. We knew we were onto a good thing.

Our 4 plus 10 in the first year, 16 in the second, 21 in the third year and 15 in 2006. We finished 06 with 66 stores, wicked franchisees and NZ loving HELL. Then came the dark days when we sold the business to the then owners of Burger King. We left NZ and went in search of new countries for HELL and ended up in London where we opened a store in Fulham, with stores now in Clapham and Shepards Bush. HELL also opened in Australia in 2008 and now has 9 stores in Brisbane. A pilot store was opened in Dublin last year and Vancouver in Dec 09.

In 2009 we were approached to buy our NZ business back, as the owners struggled to operate it the way we had. We were gutted with how HELL was being run so we made an offer and the rest is history.

In May 09 we started the resurrection of HELL. We opened 2 new stores, took out the trash, had fun with our marketing, improved ingredients and launched some new products. HELL is once again 666% owned by kiwis and committed to giving you the best damned pizza in this life or the next.

Evily yours
Callum, Stu, Otis