Farm-fresh meats raised responsibly at Huhta Homestead
Beyond the brittle: Uncle Tom’s celebrates 50 years
June 2, 2025
SHEBOYGAN – Just two years after the opening of Uptown Slice (1116 Michigan Ave.) – a New York-style pizzeria in Sheboygan – Owners James and Natalie Owen and Jerry Feger are opening a second location.
Uptown Slice Depot, Natalie said, will be located in the former Greece E Spoon (1217 N. Eighth St.) – which closed in March of this year.
She said they had actually been looking for a second location for about a year.
“We opened in June 2023, and we were so busy – it was wonderful,” Natalie said. “We had already started talking about expanding after that first summer, but we wanted to take our time and establish some rapport with the community and build relationships with our staff (first). It was important to us that (staff felt) important and be part of the expansion journey with us.”
Natalie said they also took their time in finding a second location rather than leasing just any space that came along – determining whether they could successfully expand.
“Our current location is a fully functioning restaurant, exclusively serving pizza, with seating indoors and outdoors in the back, in the summer,” she said. “But we’re also working out of this location for all of our deliveries, all of our online orders and orders for anyone who comes in and orders pizza to go. So, we’re bottlenecked right now.”
With the oven space they currently have, Natalie said “we can’t do more than what the oven can (hold).”
“Also, we have a lot of interest in doing larger orders, catering and other things, like weddings,” she said. “We’ve had to turn people away because the ovens just can’t keep up with it, because when you’re putting a whole pie in and trying to heat slices at the same time, it changes the temperature very quickly.”
Having a second location “where we’re going to be doing all of the online and delivery orders” – Natalie said will be a huge help.
“So, all of our big orders will go out of the new location,” she said.
The Uptown Slice Depot, she said, will be used for several purposes to take pressure off the main location, including:
- All pickup/delivery orders placed on the phone or online will be directed to The Depot
- Pickup/delivery orders can be completed much quicker
- Larger orders for parties, weddings, company gatherings, etc., can be accommodated
- A small retail area that will offer for sale such items as craft beer, grab-and-go desserts and other miscellaneous merchandise
- Dough production will be done here, freeing up space at the main location for some new items, possibly including salads, soups and sandwiches
Competing with the big boys
Fully aware there is no shortage of pizza places around, Natalie said with Uptown Slice, they have been able to “create this little niche business that was lacking, not just in Sheboygan, but in a lot of places.”
“Our customers come from all over,” she said. “We have people who drive from Green Bay, Milwaukee, even Chicago to get our pizza. We have very loyal customers who come to us whenever they’re in town, because they know what they’re going to get is always going to be consistent.”
The dough – which is pliable and can stretch to 18 inches, the size of Uptown Slice’s pizzas – Natalie said, is clearly what stands out the most.
It’s thin, she said, so it can fold, as New York-style pizza is made to eat on the go.
Even if asked, Natalie said, Uptown Slice does not cut its pizzas into squares.
“We won’t do it, kind of on principle, because New York-style pizza is supposed to be these big slices,” she said. “All of our pizzas are 18 inches, just one size cut into eight slices – and those slices are big. The way it’s cut, you’re supposed to fold the pizza. The idea is it’s a street food in New York, and it’s eaten on the move. So, you fold it over, and you can walk down the street and eat it. That was the concept or the vision.”
Natalie said they “use very few ingredients” in the dough – “it’s pretty much just three ingredients.”
But those ingredients, she said, are not for public knowledge.
Kindred spirits
Natalie said she and Feger had worked together at a fine dining restaurant – where Feger was the head chef.
At the time, Natalie said, conversations commonly covered New York City, New York-style pizza and Feger’s at-home pizza experiments.
“My husband, James, is from New York, and he had been lamenting the fact that he couldn’t get New York-style pizza anywhere in the Midwest that is close to what he remembers getting when living in New York as a kid,” she said.
Similarly, Natalie said Feger’s father was from New York and would talk about the same thing.
Natalie said when she first introduced James to Feger, besides talking about many different things, including New York, they also ate pizza together.
“James came home and said, ‘I think we’re going to open up a pizzeria,’” she said. “(After getting over the initial shock), I tried the pizza, and it was so good.”
Soon after, Natalie said Feger started selling his pizzas at private events, then at Longhorn Axe Bar on Thursday nights.
She said they kept talking about the possibility of opening up a pizzeria in Sheboygan and, when the right building became available, the three jumped at the chance and, per uptownslice.com, “the path to making this dream a reality began.”
“People love it,” she said. “It’s kind of inspirational that we’re able to do this and give something to our community that was missing, but that I don’t think people even knew they needed. It’s a niche that we filled, and we’re really passionate about it.”
A piece of pie
The trio said they pride themselves on the fact that almost everything they put on the pizzas is made fresh, whenever possible.
During the summer months, Natalie said they even grow their own basil for their pesto.
Per Feger’s recommendation, she said Uptown Slice offers red pies and white pies.
“The red pie has tomato sauce as the base and the white pie has no sauce – only olive oil and garlic as the base,” she said. “That’s a little different because when a lot of people hear white pie, they assume it’s going to have something like an Alfredo sauce, but we keep it just like in New York – olive oil and garlic.”
Though Uptown Slice doesn’t have a signature pizza, per se, Natalie said Uptown Slice does have a signature item – Mike’s Hot Honey – that the team uses on some of their pizzas.
“It was created by a man who owned a pizzeria in New York,” she said. “His name was Mike, and he invented Mike’s Hot Honey. It’s one of our top sellers. It’s an addition that you can add to any of our pizzas. We also sell it in retail in larger containers, as well as smaller ones.”
Natalie said customers can special-order any type of pizza they want, for the most part.
Otherwise, she said Uptown Slice always has six kinds of pizzas in the case every day.
Cheese, sausage and pepperoni, Natalie said, are the three mainstays – the other three are different from day to day for each of the five days a week the pizzeria is open.
Starting up the Depot is different from opening the original shop, Natalie said, because it had already been a restaurant.
The pizzeria’s Michigan Avenue location – just outside downtown Sheboygan – she said, had to be renovated to transform it into a restaurant.
“Everything that we built (on Michigan Avenue) was from the ground up,” she said. “Before us, this was basically an empty room full of (miscellaneous things) – it was pretty much just walls and a floor and ceiling. We built out the kitchen in nine months and got it up and running shortly after, along with all of the seating.”
On the other hand, the Depot location, Natalie said, was already equipped with sinks and a ventilation hood.
“We did have to purchase equipment, like the dough stretcher, pizza ovens, refrigeration and so forth,” she said, “but, it was far less cumbersome setting up the Depot than what we had to do at the Uptown Slice.”
Just like family
In addition to the three owners, Uptown Slice has nine employees – a number Natalie said will grow when the Depot is open.
As the brains behind Uptown Slice’s pizza masterpieces, Natalie said Feger is very hands-on with the staff who make the pizzas.
“He gives so much care and energy out of his own life to our back-of-the-house staff,” she said. “He’s teaching them a lot of skills you wouldn’t get at a place where the pizza just goes into a conveyor belt and it comes out and when it’s baked, then put it in a box.”
Uptown Slice staff, Natalie said, are “learning how to be chefs.”
“One of our (employees) has been with us since the beginning,” she said. “She’s 22 years old and is now in culinary school. She’s going to the same culinary school Feger graduated from.”
Natalie said “it’s inspirational” how a pizza-by-the-slice pizzeria has become so much more than that.
“It’s become like a family – we care for our staff above and beyond,” she said. “There’s no place that I can think of that I ever worked at that was as familial as we are here. That extends to our customers, too. They have made this possible, and we are very grateful for it all.”
Though an opening date for the Uptown Slice Depot has not been set yet, Natalie said the Michigan Avenue location is open from 11 p.m. to 10 a.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays and from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sundays.
