Slice Co. may be the first Workshop business to have fully completed the model founder Michael Shemtov envisioned. The incubator food court was created to allow fledgling restaurants an opportunity to develop their brands while operating a small stall with the hopes that one day they could make a go of it on their own.

Now Todd Lucey’s Slice Co. pizza has graduated and he’s ready to open his own brick-and-mortar.

“I took a one year lease at Workshop and set four goals for myself,” says Lucey. “Launch, prove the concept, secure funding, and find a space.”

Before his lease was even up, he’d met his first three goals, then he found 1662 Savannah Hwy. Suite 205. The address is in the same West Ashley shopping center as Five Guys Burgers and gives Lucey not only a small restaurant space, but a commissary kitchen to continue running two mobile businesses. Lucey also owns Comostamos taco truck and is about to buy a trailer wood-burning oven, so in addition to Slice Co., he’ll have two trucks out on the road.

But back to the pizza business. Slice Co. will operate much like the Workshop version with take-out pies and slices, but Lucey is also adding a few seats inside his 700-square-foot space and plans to use Uber Eats for delivery.

The New York transplant moved down to Charleston a little bit before Workshop opened and said he and his wife immediately fell in love with the city. They already had the food truck, but after working in pizza joints for much of his life and working as the GM at Best Pizza in Williamsburg, Lucey says, “That was when realized I need pizza to live, so I said let’s go at the pizza game in Charleston.”

A year later he says, “Workshop was the perfect stepping stone. It was minimal risk. Except time. It required a year of my life.”

A year later, he has a new brick-and-mortar to show for it.

Slice Co. plans to open in West Ashley in mid July. Slice Co.’s last day at Workshop is Sun. June 3.

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