About us · Since 2013
Pogo's is a family-run kitchen on the Greendale strip, cooking food we would want our own children to eat. Twelve years, two ovens, one Sunday off a week.
Pogo's started as a fill-in for a bakery unit that had shut down. It was meant to run for six months while the landlord found a proper tenant. Twelve years later we are the proper tenant.
March 2013. The pizza oven arrived the day before we opened. Nobody who worked here had ever built a dough. Everybody was very hopeful and slightly underslept.
The first Friday we served forty-two pizzas, six roast chickens, and one very confused customer who thought we were a bakery. By the second month the queue started at the pharmacy next door. By the sixth we had put a second grill on the pass.
The playbook has not changed. Buy food from farms we can drive to. Cook it in real fire. Charge a fair price. Rest on Sunday. Every other decision has followed from those four.
We have grown, but only sideways. We still have one restaurant, one flame grill, one stone oven. When people ask if we are opening a second branch, the answer is usually no. When they ask why, the answer is usually a question about how many second branches they know that are as good as the first.
The parts we have added, we have added slowly. A delivery scooter in 2015. The Points card in 2018. A second dough station in 2019. Private-event platters in 2022. Each one had to earn its way in.
If you have been coming here since the beginning, you already know most of this. If you are new, welcome. The Peri-Peri Fire is a good place to start. Ask for medium heat if you have not had it before.
Neither of them planned to be in the restaurant business. Both of them are still surprised, in a good way. If you come by the shop, you will meet one or both of them behind the pass.
Trained as a mechanical engineer. Ran a small welding shop across the road for years, made pizzas at home on the weekend, eventually decided the pizzas were more fun than the welding. The oven you can see through the pass is a copy of one he saw in Naples in 2011, cut and welded to fit through the Kamfinsa loading bay.
"Cook the food the way you would cook it for your own mother. That is the whole rule."
Handles the books, the suppliers, the roster, the deliveries, and most of the small crises that happen between 11am and lunch service. Grew up on a farm outside Marondera, which is why the sourcing list looks the way it does. Has known every one of the farmers on the supply run for at least a decade.
"If we can drive there in a morning, and the farmer will pick up the phone, they can be on the list."
A pizza station on one wall, a flame grill on the other, a prep bench in the middle, and one printer that keeps everybody honest. Same layout as day one, more or less.
Pass A · Pizza station
The oven runs on hardwood from Chegutu, brought up once a fortnight. It takes an hour and a half to come up in the morning. The stone floor is swept out every night with a copper brush.
Pass B · Flame grill
Charcoal from a co-op outside Chegutu, delivered every Monday. The grill is lit at 10am. It is fed hourly. Nothing gets grilled ahead. Every bird is butterflied and marked to order.
Not everyone is on this list, but the anchors are. If you order for delivery, one of the last four gets on the scooter with your food. Say hi.
Every entry here is a Friday that felt bigger than the Fridays around it.
Forty-two pizzas out of the oven. One roast chicken sent back for being under. The under-chicken is now framed above the pass, in photograph form.
A friend of Pogo's needed a lift home with her order in the rain. Two weeks later we had a used Vespa and Blessing had a helmet.
Started as a staff meal. Made it onto the menu after a customer offered to buy the recipe.
Rumbi drew the first template on the back of an envelope. A local printer ran three hundred. We handed them out at the till. The Pogo's Points program has kept the same layout since.
We were losing about eight minutes per Friday order to the queue at the counter. Adding a station shortened tickets by half.
Front-of-house closed for eight months. Everybody kept their job. The scooter fleet went from one to three. Kids drew thank-you cards.
Started because a customer asked us to feed a wedding. Now runs as its own private events service, all handled by Rumbi with two weeks' notice.
The kind of number that would embarrass us if it were higher. We are keeping our head down and cooking.
None of them are printed on the wall. All of them get argued about on slow Wednesdays.
If it can be grown within a two-hour drive, we do not buy it from farther away. If it is out of season, it is off the menu until the season comes back. No shortcuts.
Wood for the pizza, charcoal for the grill. Gas is a rescue tool, not a cooking method. If the fire is not right, we send the order back to the pass and start again.
Priced in USD so nobody gets surprised. RTGS at interbank. Card and mobile fees are on us. The bill is the bill.
Everybody who works here goes home to a family. Sunday is for the family. That has been the deal since 2013 and we have never broken it.
Kamfinsa Shopping Centre, on the Greendale strip. Both Pogo and Rumbi are usually behind the pass at lunch. Ring ahead if you want a tour of the wood store.