Sour Yard Baker Ramy Rainier Leans Into Pizza With Rino’s Pizzeria

When we talked to the mind behind cloud bakery Sour Yard a little over a year ago, Ramy Rainier told us all about how he built his own oven from scratch to house and bake delicious sourdough bakeries - and, of course, pizza - to perfection.

Now, the pizza thing was, at the time, more of a distant vision, something Rainier merely wished to spend more of his time doing. For four years, he would bake pizza for his friends and family, hosting little candle-lit parties and get-togethers in quiet parks. He didn’t think much of it at the time, but continued to do it because his friends simply couldn’t get enough.

Around the onset of COVID-19 and its resulting quarantine, Rainier got distracted by the world of sourdough (literally - every jar is a universe of its own) and lost sight of his pizza-making endeavours, resulting in the launch of his online bakery. Now that Sour Yard has managed to successfully stand on its two feet, though, Rainier found that he was compelled to resume his pie journey with the launch of catering service Rino’s Pizzeria.

Before Rino’s Pizzeria could come to life, Rainier started experimenting with various pizza recipes until he found something that he liked, all the while ensuring that he kept his creation as grounded to its origins as possible. “Making pizza,” Rainier explains, “should be kept as simple as possible. It’s just pie - you show true skill when you deliver something people enjoy at its simplest. There’s no need to complicate everything.”

Rainier’s pizza is just that: simple. However, its beauty is accentuated in every layer it contains; the slightly surprising, always delicious variability of the sourdough base, vibrant freshly made tomato sauce (which Rainier soon hopes to source from his own farm to completely internalise the process), and extra virgin olive oil sourced from Rammah farms, the best in town. Even the flour Rainier uses is one he specifically imports from Italy, to truly preserve the origins of the pizza. The pies are then baked in Rainier’s handbuilt wood fired oven, the Neapolitan way.

“The quality of each individual ingredient has such an integral role in the pie’s flavour,” Rainier says. “I picked Rammah because I visited their fields myself, and saw how meticulous their pressing procedure is. The olives’ taste and fragrance were just astounding.”

The quality of Rainier’s ingredients also keeps his pizzas healthy despite, you know, them being pizzas. “The sourdough, with its delicious airy crust, is full of nutrients which make it easy to digest. My girlfriend can finally eat pizza and bread without suffering afterwards.” You know what that means - the hot girl tummy ache is a thing of the past.

Currently, Rainier’s pizzas are only available for event catering. This way, the pies can preserve their freshness at serving time. “We just started. At this rate, delivery is too much of a risk,” explains Rainier. He has continued to invest in more and more portable equipment to the point where now, if he were stranded in a desert with no way back, he could still make his pizza perfectly.

The catering aspect also enables Rainier to ensure that, when people enjoy his pizzas, they’re not just eating - they’re fully experiencing them. At the speed Cairo is currently functioning, people hardly get to experience their food, and the power of the ambience has been forgotten. Rainier is bringing back the candles. In fact, he would go so far as to conjure up new pizza topics to match the theme of your occasion - for example, if you’re launching a pink product, he’ll find a way to pink-ify your pizzas.

To him, the end goal is that people develop as deep of a connection to pizzas as he does. “I have a connection with pizza, maybe because, to me, bread is one of the best things in the world,” Rainier says. “This is why I think it’s essential that I oversee every step in the preparation of the end-product people receive.”

Eventually, Rainier aims to bring his sourdough bakeries and pizza to the public in a more instantaneous manner, through opening his own walk-in store. For now, though, Rainier continues to experiment.