Two Boots Pizza grew 10.1% in Q1 2026 while the restaurant industry contracted
In a quarter defined by tariff uncertainty, consumer pullback, and declining foot traffic across NYC — Two Boots didn’t just survive. It accelerated. Here’s the marketing system that made it happen.
The Brand That Grew Out of the Sidewalk
In 1987, two indie filmmakers — Phil Hartman and Doris Kornish — opened a small Cajun-Italian restaurant at 37 Avenue A in Manhattan’s East Village. The plan was to run it for six months, raise enough money to finish a film, and move on. The restaurant had other plans.
Named for the boot-shaped geographies of Italy and Louisiana, Two Boots fused New Haven-style cornmeal crust with Cajun ingredients like andouille sausage and crawfish. The pizzas were given names drawn from pop culture — Mr. Pink, Larry Tate, The Newman — and each location was dressed in murals, mosaics, and folk art commissioned from neighborhood artists.
“Our philosophy has been to open a place we’d want to go to. I want the restaurants to feel like they grow out of the sidewalk of the neighborhood.”
— Phil Hartman, Co-FounderToday, the brand operates four core NYC pizzerias — East Village, West Village, Upper East Side, and Upper West Side — plus locations in Park Slope, New Jersey, and Nashville.
The brand had the soul. What it needed was a system.
How It Works
Primi Digital built a connected marketing engine — six inputs feeding a central system that drives measurable outcomes across every location.
Before Primi: A Brand Without a Marketing Engine
When Primi Digital took over Two Boots’ marketing in January 2025, the brand had strong name recognition and fiercely loyal customers — but its digital marketing infrastructure was underdeveloped.
Looking back at Two Boots’ social presence through 2024, the pattern was one of inconsistency: sporadic posting with no structured cadence across locations, minimal engagement strategy, and no coordinated content calendar. GBP listings were live but neglected — reviews were accumulating without systematic responses, and new review generation was purely organic. There was no paid media program driving incremental traffic, and no SEO infrastructure beyond the base listings.
The opportunity was clear: Two Boots had the product differentiation, the cultural credibility, and the multi-location footprint. It needed consistent execution, data discipline, and a marketing system that could scale across every location.
The Primi Playbook: Five Pillars of Growth
Primi Digital deployed a full-stack marketing system across Two Boots’ four core NYC locations starting January 2025. Every channel was connected to a single operating rhythm: a structured planning cycle that synchronized content, campaigns, and promotions across the brand.
Paid Media
Meta + Google campaigns across all locations
Local SEO
GBP optimization, keywords, citations
Process
Structured workflow & planning cycle
Reviews
Monitoring, response, generation
Influencers
Creator partnerships + UGC content
Scroll down for detailed results from each pillar ↓
Paid Media — Meta + Google
Primi launched location-level paid campaigns across Meta (delivery-focused) and Google (store visits) for all four NYC locations. The system was designed to scale spend with performance, adding locations incrementally as results proved out.
Meta location campaigns drove a CPA improvement from $15.78 to $7.68, while Google store-visit campaigns generated 2,089 store visits in January 2026 at $2.13 per action. On the catering side, Google campaigns generated $84,543 in catering revenue (Oct ’25–Jan ’26) from $2,562 in ad spend — a 33:1 return.
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
When someone in the Upper East Side searches “vegan pizza near me” at 7pm on a Friday, the question isn’t whether Two Boots has a great answer — it’s whether Google knows they do. When Primi started, it didn’t.
Primi took ownership of all six Google Business Profiles and rebuilt them from the ground up — optimized descriptions, fresh photography, weekly posts, and systematic citation building across directories. The goal was simple: make Two Boots the first thing people see when they’re hungry and searching.
The results came fast. In a single month (January to February 2026), Two Boots went from zero tracked keywords ranking to 90 — with 59 of those landing in the top 3 positions. High-value terms like “plant based pizza” and “vegan slice” hit position #1. “Vegan pizza near me,” a term searched 4,000 times a month, reached position #3. Jersey City alone picked up 26 new ranking keywords overnight.
In February 2026, Two Boots’ GBP listings generated 8,518 interactions across all six locations — 1,086 phone calls, 4,275 direction requests, and 2,338 website clicks. That’s over 300 people a day taking action directly from a Google listing.
The direction request trend tells the story best. East Village directions nearly doubled — from 497 in July 2025 to over 1,000 by December, and held there into Q1 2026. West Village climbed from 767 to 1,277 over the same period.
Process Discipline — The Primi Workflow
Primi Digital runs every client engagement through a structured, repeating workflow — eight stages that move from audit to strategy to execution to reporting, then loop back. For Two Boots, this meant every location operated from the same playbook, in sync, with no gaps.
This workflow eliminated the feast-or-famine pattern that plagues multi-location restaurant brands. Every location — East Village to Upper West Side — operates from the same structured process, with enough lead time for review, approval, and optimization. The result: no location falls behind, no campaign launches cold, and every dollar is accountable.
Review Management
Primi implemented a systematic review management program across all Two Boots locations — monitoring Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor; responding to reviews; and proactively encouraging satisfied customers to share their experience.
| Location | Reviews | Rating | vs. Benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jersey City | 1,379 | 4.4 ★ | Above Typical |
| East Village | 972 | 4.4 ★ | Above Typical |
| West Village | 711 | 4.5 ★ | Above Typical |
| Park Slope | 441 | 4.3 ★ | Entry+ |
| Upper East Side | 315 | 4.6 ★ | Entry+ |
| Upper West Side | 310 | 4.6 ★ | Entry+ |
Three locations already exceed the industry benchmark median rating of 4.5★ for pizza restaurants. Three locations (JC, EV, WV) exceed the “Typical” review count of 498 for metro pizza restaurants. The newer locations (UES, UWS) are building review volume rapidly — UWS generated 30 new reviews in February alone, up 88% from January.
Influencer & UGC Program
In a city where food content drives discovery, Primi built a targeted influencer program connecting Two Boots with NYC food creators across Instagram — generating authentic content that reached new audiences beyond paid media. The program ran through 2025 and into early 2026, activating 50 creator partnerships across the portfolio.
The program was intentionally curated around hyper-local NYC creators — neighborhood guides, vegan food accounts, and UES/UWS lifestyle pages — ensuring content reached the exact audiences most likely to visit Two Boots locations. Creators like @storytime_nyc (80.6K followers) generated over 117,000 views in a single post, while vegan-focused creator @nycvegana delivered an exceptional 17% engagement rate — far above platform norms — tapping directly into Two Boots’ plant-based positioning.
Every creator was required to leave a Google Review alongside their post, simultaneously boosting both social reach and local SEO signals. The result: influencer content that worked on two levels at once.
The Results: Growth When It Matters Most
Q1 2026 was brutal for New York restaurants. Tariff-driven cost increases, consumer confidence at multi-year lows, and foot traffic declining across Manhattan. Industry-wide, restaurants were pulling back — cutting hours, shrinking menus, closing locations.
Two Boots grew 10.1%.
This wasn’t luck. It was the result of a marketing system built over 12 months that compounds — paid media algorithms trained on real conversion data, SEO rankings climbing, a review engine generating social proof, and a content cadence that kept Two Boots visible when competitors went quiet.
When the economy tightens, brands without systems cut marketing. Brands with systems gain market share. Q1 2026 is the proof.
— The Primi Digital ThesisThe Foundation: Full Year 2025
The Q1 acceleration was built on a strong 2025. Primi’s first full year managing Two Boots’ marketing generated $4.65M in total revenue across four core NYC locations — a 5.2% increase over 2024, adding $228,000 in incremental sales.
Growth was strongest where the system had the most room to work. The Upper East Side and Upper West Side — Two Boots’ newer locations — saw the most dramatic improvement.
| Location | 2024 Revenue | 2025 Revenue | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| West Village | $1,319,464 | $1,356,074 | +2.8% |
| Upper East Side | $734,047 | $804,498 | +9.6% |
| Upper West Side | $1,354,803 | $1,490,520 | +10.0% |
| Total (3 NYC) | $3,408,314 | $3,651,092 | +7.1% |
The UES delivered +28.8% YoY growth in November 2025 — the single strongest month of improvement across the portfolio. UWS sustained double-digit YoY growth in 7 of 12 months.
Monthly Revenue — Upper West Side (2024 vs 2025)
Year 1 built the foundation. Year 2 proved the thesis: when the economy contracts, a disciplined marketing system doesn’t just protect — it accelerates.
Audience Growth: Social & Email
Beyond paid media and sales, Primi built Two Boots’ owned audience — the channels that drive repeat visits and lifetime value.
Social media views surged from 1.19M in October to 2.16M in December 2025 — an 82% increase in two months. Interactions spiked from 735 to 15,000 in the same period.
This isn’t vanity. The social surge directly coincided with Two Boots’ strongest revenue months of the year — October ($455K) and December ($403K) were the top-performing months across the portfolio. Social reach creates awareness, awareness drives first visits, and first visits convert to repeat customers through the email list of 36,000+ active subscribers. Each channel feeds the next.