The beloved Fini Pizza made quite the impact during its debut in Utah City.

Just days after opening, the pizza joint sold out of everything by 5 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. The demand for the delicious New York-style pizza was higher than expected.

Owner Sean Feeney and the rest of his team worked late into the night to prep for the week, building pizza boxes, slicing pepperonis and doing all they could to prevent that from happening again.

Feeney said he has three goals with Fini Pizza:

1. “Make something that is excellent and delicious and cravable.”
2. “Do it in a way where you’re making others feel like they matter and you want their days to be better.”
3. “How do we then go outside of these doors and really show people how proud we are to be a part of this neighborhood?”

For the first time, Fini Pizza also opened up Fini Cafe, a charming little cafe that serves up bagels, sandwiches, coffee and pastries.

“You can start your days with us,” Feeney said. “And we can start our day together on a good foot.”

Choosing Utah

This is the first location of Fini Pizza outside the New York City area. Why did Feeney choose Utah? It goes all the way back to his childhood.

Feeney visited the Beehive State to participate in the AAU National Basketball Championship at 11 years old in Salt Lake City. During that trip, he met Jazz legend Frank Layden and former players, like Luther Wright and John Crotty. He also said he “fell in love with Utah” on his first visit.

His family kept coming back to the state they fell in love with, and Feeney said he always wanted to plant some kind of roots in Utah.

“I just resonated with the family-first values-driven environment,” Feeney said. “When I visit Utah, I feel like there is a strong sense of family. There’s a very values-driven environment that I just love. I think about the mountains. I think about the active lifestyle people live here.”

So when a friend showed him some renderings of plans for Utah City, an up-and-coming neighborhood in Vineyard, he figured this was how he could bring Fini Pizza to the state he loved so much.

“I saw the mountains, and I got very excited about building a community from the ground up. And we start with pizza,” Feeney said.

A history of Fini Pizza

Plans for Fini Pizza started taking shape at the end of 2020.

“I’ve always loved pizzerias,” Feeney said. “I grew up in New Jersey, and most of my greatest memories of meals and birthday parties, and after soccer practices or even after funerals and wakes, we would go to our local neighborhood pizzerias growing up.”

Feeney had already found success with two Italian restaurants and decided it was time to try out his pizza dream. He noticed at the time that his neighborhood in Williamsburg in New York City was getting more and more polarized. He thought, why not open a pizza place to bring people together?

“I thought, that would be an exciting thing to try to do and add a pizzeria that was really focused on bringing people together and delivering good days,” Feeney said.

He opened four more Fini Pizza establishments in Brooklyn over the span of six years.

Now, in the Utah City cafe, illustrations of the four restaurants decorate the walls, reminding customers of the history of the place.

“I thought the concept of Fini would resonate with just kind of what I love about Utah,” Feeney said.

Growing up around food

In New Jersey, Feeney grew up having the dinner table as an important part of his days. His mom is Italian and his dad is Irish, and he recalls having their entire families come down to their house on the Jersey Shore.

“We would have these big Sunday suppers and cookouts,” Feeney said. “And I saw my Italian aunts and grandma and my mom and her sisters cooking all day and everybody else just having the best time. And I would get to see my dad be so proud to host everybody in his backyard.”

His family also made the restaurant experience special for him and his siblings. His dad would make reservations for the family at “incredible restaurants” in New York City, and then he would study up on them and share the history of the restaurant and what to order.

“It was all ingrained in me from an early age,” Feeney said.

In 2003, Feeney moved to New York City from New Jersey to work in finance. He loved trying out new restaurants after work, and he would take clients, friends and co-workers out almost every night of the week.

“Over the course of 16 years doing that five nights a week, sometimes six, I started becoming just really great friends with people in the industry,” Feeney said.

He became friends with a neighbor who was a chef, and they ultimately decided to open a restaurant together — Lilia in Williamsburg. Two and a half years later, he left his day job to pursue the restaurant industry full time.

Feeney said the hospitality industry “kind of found me. I just kept feeding the passion for it. And then it turned out that the people I loved most were like, ‘You should do this. You seem really happy, and you love it.’ And I haven’t really looked back since.”

The ‘magic’ of owning a restaurant

The best part of owning a restaurant is the people he gets to work with, according to Feeney.

“They’ve changed my life in a big way,” Feeney said. “The people that I get to work with every day and having this amazingly awesome responsibility of being in their charge, I truly am grateful. I never thought I would be in that position ever. And it’s just changed my life forever.”

He called what his employees do in the hospitality industry “noble” and says when they help make a person’s day better by serving up delicious food that they create “magic.”

“What they produce every single night, what we do together, it’s bigger than the sum of its parts,” Feeney said. “And that’s what I’ve loved. And I’ve loved being able to just witness people doing this for others.”

Fini Pizza giving back

Fini Pizza offers 25% discounts year-round to firefighters, police officers and educators. They also have a program where children under 17 can read three books, share the title and two sentences about the books, and then receive a free pizza for them and their family.

“I just wanted to continue to find creative ways to invest in the community, make the neighborhood more together, more stronger, and more connected,” Feeney said.

Another way Fini Pizza is getting involved with the community is through a program called Fini Hoops.

The Fini Hoops program hosts basketball teams on its own court — he tried it out in New York and loved it, so the Utah City location is also getting its own court, which is currently being built up. It will open up in June.

At the court, Fini Hoops will host basketball tournaments, camps and clinics to get more kids playing ball, and then afterwards, they can enjoy some pizza. Winners of the Fini Hoops tournaments receive free pizza for life.

“I just wanted to create moments for youth in basketball and connect it to pizza as well,” Feeney said.

What I ordered

When I stopped into Fini Pizza on a Wednesday night, I was greeted by smiles and friendly hellos from the staff. The aesthetic of the place is beautiful, with wood accents and a woodsy green color.

Here’s what I ordered:

The Sicilian Pizza: I ordered a slice of the Sicilian pizza, which has a thicker crust, sweet crushed tomato sauce, chili oil, garlic breadcrumbs, freshly shaved parmigiano and pepperoni. There was a little heat that I really liked, maybe from the pepperoni and chili oil? This was a very good slice of pizza.

The White Pizza: I ordered a whole box of this one to share with my sister, and I’m glad I did. The crust is classic New York style crust. The pizza comes with three cheeses — fresh mozzarella, parmigiano and fontina — and on top is drizzled olive oil and lemon zest. I wasn’t sure what I would think of the lemon, but it surprised and delighted me in the best way. It’s refreshing and a beautiful final note to the overall taste.

Storefront information

• Address: 875 N. Main St. Suite A, Vineyard, UT 84059
• Hours: Monday-Sunday, noon-10 p.m.
• Price: $

An 18-year-old who was shot and wounded in Northwest D.C.’s Tenleytown neighborhood on Thursday afternoon has died, authorities say.

Brady Flowers Jr., of Southwest, was the victim, police said in an update Saturday.

Flowers was found shot in the 4500 block of Wisconsin Avenue NW, behind the CVS store. Jackson-Reed High School and American University are nearby.

Flowers was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening injuries and pronounced dead a day later, police said.

Police said 10-15 teens were seen running after the gunshots.

An investigation is underway. Anyone with potentially relevant information is asked to contact police.

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Wyoming Sun Bucks is a net gain for children, families

Dear Casper,

Rep. Ken Pendergraft’s recent column opposing the Sun Bucks program raises concerns about cost, but it does so in a way that risks giving readers an incomplete picture.

It is true that the Department of Family Services requested approximately $3.5 million for startup and operations. However, that figure represents a combined state and federal investment, split evenly. Wyoming’s share is half of that — and more importantly, those dollars are not intended to purchase food directly. They fund the administrative framework required to deliver federally funded benefits to eligible children.

Those responsibilities are not trivial. They include verifying eligibility, processing applications, maintaining technology systems, preventing fraud and ensuring benefits are accurately distributed. Without that infrastructure, the program simply cannot function, and no child would receive assistance.

The initial startup cost of $1.6 million covers one-time expenses such as building the IT system, setting up application processing, contracting with the EBT vendor that issues and loads benefit cards, and establishing temporary staffing and support systems to serve families statewide. This is not “an office for one person,” but the foundation of a program designed to reach roughly 32,000 children.

Once operational, the ongoing cost to Wyoming is estimated at about $483,000 per year in state funds. In return, the program would deliver approximately $3.84 million annually in federal food benefits to Wyoming children. That is a significant net gain for families across the state.

While the article emphasizes administrative expenses, it overlooks the scale of the benefit those costs unlock. The question is not whether administration exists — it must — but whether the outcome justifies the investment. In this case, a relatively modest state contribution enables millions in direct food assistance to flow into Wyoming communities.

Reasonable people can debate the role of government programs. But that debate should be grounded in a full accounting of both costs and benefits. When viewed in that light, the Sun Bucks program is less about bureaucracy and more about whether Wyoming chooses to participate in a federally funded effort to help ensure children have access to food during the summer months.

Mike Thompson, Chairman of the Department of Family Services Oversight Council
Evansville

Wyoming GOP endorsement of candidates

Dear Casper,

I have read about the plans for the Wyoming Republican party to endorse specific candidates in the upcoming primary election. It is my understanding that the state law currently prevents the Wyoming Republican party from officially endorsing a candidate. I agree with the party’s position that this is not in keeping with the party and its members’ First Amendment right to free speech.

However, I think that the party should be careful in exercising this right. As the purpose of the primary election is to select the candidate that the majority of the registered Republican party members feel is best suited for the position, it feels like there could be a conflict of interest in explicitly endorsing a specific candidate without receiving the input from all of the registered members of the party.

Without seeking the input of the entire Republican electorate, how will the party itself provide a fair and accurate endorsement of a candidate? I certainly hope that the party leadership is not intending to offer an endorsement on behalf of the entire party based simply on what they (the leadership) might believe. To offer such an endorsement without seeking the input from all of the party members would be anti-democratic and would invoke Orwellian images of the party which, rather than listening to and responding to the input from the party members, would tell the party members what they should think.

If the members of the party leadership wish to offer an endorsement, they should do so as individuals and should not presume to speak for the entire membership of the party, at least not before the entire Republican electorate has had a chance to provide input regarding a party-level endorsement.

To circumvent this problem, I would recommend that the Republican party hold a vote among all of its registered members to determine whom the party ought to endorse. Maybe we could hold an event where polling places are established, where party members can go to indicate their preference for that endorsement. This would provide a fair and democratic method to ensure that the Republican party’s endorsement reflects the will of the party members.

I think that there might be an event similar to what I have described scheduled for Aug. 18. Maybe the party could do more or less the same thing for their endorsement event — or just wait until then.

Carlos Buckner
Casper

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