Jason and Cindy Murray built their first pizza oven in their backyard in 2009 — a way to fund the rest of their way through Southern Utah University. The next year, they rolled the oven on a cart into an Ace Hardware parking lot in Cedar City, and the cart format ran long enough that the operation outgrew the parking lot before it outgrew the SUU customer base. They moved into a brick-and-mortar at 1190 S Sage Drive, Unit B, and the cart became The Pizza Cart, a working restaurant that kept its origin name. A 2025 SUU student-paper profile in suunews.net covers the Murrays as a current Cedar City institution, fifteen years on.

From a Backyard to an Ace Hardware Parking Lot

The Pizza Cart origin story is one of the cleanest small-business arcs in the corridor: build the oven yourself, prove the demand from a parking lot, scale into a storefront, keep the name. Cedar City in 2009 was a college town that didn’t yet have a serious wood-fired pizza option — Centro Woodfired Pizzeria opened in 2012, three years after the Murrays started — and the SUU undergraduate market gave the cart enough volume to test the format before it had to cover lease costs. The 2014 Deseret News coverage tracked the moment the operation moved from parking lot to indoor eatery; the brand has stayed at Sage Drive since.

Wood-Fired Pizza and In-House Gelato

The kitchen has stayed disciplined. Wood-fired pizza is the anchor; gelato is made in house. SUU’s enrollment cycles have carried the restaurant through fifteen years of operation, with regulars from each generation of students passing the room on to the next group of incoming undergrads. The Murrays — no public relation to Fred Murray of Riggatti’s down in St. George, despite the surname coincidence and the shared wood-fired-pizza format — have stayed as the operating owners across the brand’s run.

The Pizza Cart in the 435

For a register of locally rooted Southern Utah businesses, The Pizza Cart is a clean Cedar City independent with a documented origin, active owner-operators, and a fifteen-year track record of holding format and audience. Iron County’s restaurant identity runs heavier on chains than Washington County’s — the 435 north of Kolob Canyon has fewer chef-driven independents per capita than the Springdale and Kanab corridors do — and The Pizza Cart is one of the cleaner counter-examples. Two SUU students built an oven and grew it into a working business; the building they did it in is the same building they’re still running.

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