You'd BETTER Tip Your Pilot!

Does Nome, Alaska's Airport Pizza deliver? You bet they do... and they'll even get your pie to you if you're used to travelling by dogsled.

The out-of-the-way restaurant -- Nome is so far north, it's the finish line for the Iditarod -- is offering its pizzas to customers as far as hundreds of miles away... and they're doing it on airplanes flown by Frontier Flying Service.

"You buy, we fly!" is the motto for Airport Pizza, the first pizza delivery operation in the city -- outpost? -- of 14,000.

"Before we were opened, Nome had to be the last town in America that didn't have pizza delivery," said Matt Tomter, Airport Pizza manager, to the Anchorage Daily News. "So we didn't come up with anything new. We just applied the same concept to Nome."

The strangest thing about this already odd story? While the pizza prices are somewhat steep, relative to what those of us used to having a Domino's around the corner (next door to Starbucks) -- those prices include delivery. Even if it's by Piper Navajo, or one of Frontier's Beech 1900s.

While Nome has restaurants that serve pizza -- DexOnline lists two, and one of them is a Chinese restaurant -- Airport Pizza is the first operation that delivers. And unlike that Domino's, they WILL go outside city limits... sometimes, WAAAY outside.

For their out of town customers, Airport Pizza loads their specially made pies on Frontier flights to such remote outposts as St. Lawrence Island, Shishmaref, Teller, Elim, Golivan, Wales, White Mountain, and Koyuk. While there are no guarantees about the pizza's warmth when it arrives... all things considered, the price is right, $16 for a 15-inch cheese pizza, with loaded 19" specialty pies going for around $30.

Again, with Free Delivery... although you really should tip your delivery person... um, pilot.

"I have eaten there many times," said Kirsten Timbers, 23, director of Nome's Children's Advocacy Center. "It's so good. I love it. All kinds of sauces, good ingredients, like artichoke hearts, sun-dried tomatoes, really fresh, good garlic. It is the latest craze. Everyone's eating it up."

Tomter told the newspaper that while he'd first had the idea about eighteen months ago, the plan really got going when his former carpet cleaning business was assigned the task of cleaning up after a fire. In the ashes of the burned building, sat a bulky brick pizza oven.

"I said, 'Hey, how much do you want for that?' And they said, 'If you get it out of here, it's free,"' Tomter said. "And I thought, 'Let's see if we can make some money with that thing.'"

With a crew of eight friends and a forklift, Tomter hauled the 3,500-pound oven over to Frontier Flying Service's lot at the Nome airport. They then rented a building, and Tomter's wife came up with the money needed to open a restaurant.

Once a dough recipe was found, the Tomters opened their operation August 5 last year -- and so far, according to Tomter, business has yet to slow down.

"We're not as busy as the Moose's Tooth [an Anchorage pizza joint revered by Alaskan natives]," Tomter said. "We don't do 500 pizzas a night, but yeah, it's been good since day one."

FMI: www.frontierflying.com