Piada Grows Past 60 Units as Chef Matt Harding Rewrites Fast-Casual Italian

Piada Italian Street Food now operates more than 60 locations across seven states, a footprint built from a single Columbus, Ohio, opening in 2010. Chef Matt Harding, who has spent more than 30 years in Italian cuisine, has shaped the fast-casual chain's menu through both concepts of service it has tried: build-your-own and chef-driven.

Harding's résumé frames the story. He served as corporate executive chef at Bravo Brio Restaurant Group before joining Piada, the fast-casual concept launched by Bravo Brio cofounder Chris Doody. The chain's original menu model leaned on customization. Guests assembled their own piadas (flatbread sandwiches) or pasta bowls from a spread of high-quality Italian ingredients.

That model eventually changed. Piada pivoted toward signature menu items, a move that traded the assembly-line format for curated, house-designed dishes. The industry noticed. The chain won the MenuMasters Award for Best Menu Revamp in 2019, validating a menu strategy that Harding says stands apart in the segment.

Why the pivot from customization matters

Customization was the fast-casual playbook of the early 2010s, and Piada's original design followed it closely. Signature items invert the logic: the operator, not the guest, owns the recipe. For a chain scaling past 60 units in seven states, signature items simplify training, tighten food cost control and speed the line — practical economics that a fully customizable board makes harder to manage.

Harding discussed this evolution with Nation's Restaurant News editor in chief Sam Oches in Columbus, in an episode of the MenuMasters Spotlight podcast series, produced by NRN with sponsor Ventura Foods. In the conversation, Harding reflected on how the MenuMasters Award validated the company's unique menu, and on where he looks for R&D inspiration.

A tough climate for chains

The interview lands amid a hard market. The Technomic Top 500 found that chain restaurant sales slowed again in 2025 as consumers pulled back on dining out. Not every segment suffered equally: coffee, beverages and snacks, and chicken concepts thrived while much of the rest of the field fought for traffic.

That context sharpens Piada's position. Fast-casual Italian remains a thinly populated category, and a chef-led menu with a national award behind it gives the chain a differentiation argument that commoditized segments cannot make.

Harding's three decades in Italian food — spanning Bravo Brio's full-service kitchens and Piada's counter-service format — give the menu work a specific lineage. The shift from corporate fine dining to fast-casual required rethinking Italian ingredients for speed and consistency without stripping out quality, the balance the 2019 award recognized.

The chain's next chapter depends on whether signature-driven Italian can keep earning visits in a market where consumers are cutting restaurant spending. Harding's continued menu evolution, and his search for R&D inspiration beyond the category, suggest Piada intends to keep rewriting the fast-casual Italian playbook rather than defend it.