Life of Pie
Published June 2025
By Greg Elwell | 6 min read
Even though his shop is surrounded by them, John “Dylan” O’Connor doesn’t hate fast food pizza restaurants. In fact, they’re part of why he opened Heavy D’s Pizzaria to begin with.
“Pizza is like every high school kid’s first job. I know it was mine,” O’Connor says. “I’m a big guy, I like to eat, and working at a pizza place is cool.”
His first foray into the restaurant world was answering phones and taking orders at a Domino’s Pizza location in Oklahoma City, but he soon found himself training to do a bit of everything—prepping the dough, making the sauce, and putting together the pizzas. Before O’Connor knew it, he had been promoted to management, but he found it stifling.
Other pizzas might cower in fear at the might of Heavy D’s 28-inch behemoths—if each oversized slice didn’t disappear into customers’ mouths so quickly. Photo by Lori Duckworth
“If corporate calls and says you’re selling pizzas for a penny, then you’re selling pizzas for a penny,” he says. “But what really bothered me was there was no room for creativity.”
A boss told him he could make whatever kind of pizza he wanted for himself, but they couldn’t and wouldn’t sell them to the customers.
“I told myself, ‘One day, I’m going to have a spot where I can do these things and not be bound by some corporation,’” he says. “And in 2019, I finally did.”
O’Connor took ownership of the former Pizza House building on his daughter’s birthday, but the celebration didn’t last long. Before he could open up shop, COVID-19 hit the scene. Like so many other small businesses, he was nearly bankrupted into oblivion. It was his wife’s job as a neonatal nurse that kept them afloat until he could finally open two years later.
Slowly but surely, word got around about the new shop, though it wasn’t easy. Fast-food pizza restaurants dominate the area around his southside store, and they’ve trained customers to expect rock-bottom prices and middling quality.
“If you take a map, and you go from I-40 across town, from I-44 to I-35, and then go south all the way to 19th Street in Moore, it’s a pizza desert,” he says. “You got your corporates and your chains and all that, but you don’t have any good, wholesome, real pizza.”
O’Connor doesn’t apologize for his prices, which he fights tooth and nail to keep from going any higher, but he’s far more focused on quality and creativity—making the kinds of pizzas he dreamed about when he worked at Domino’s. Around Thanksgiving, that meant putting together pizzas topped with shredded turkey meat he roasted himself, a layer of herbaceous dressing, and cups of giblet gravy to be poured over the top when it’s time to eat. He’s also had tremendous responses to his street taco-inspired pies, with crispy pork carnitas or juicy beef birria, that have become so popular customers have to order them in advance at the beginning of the week. They’re especially beloved as part of Cinco de Mayo celebrations.
O’Connor’s unique flavors have convinced some hard-to-please critics.
“It was probably our fourth day open, and five guys in suits come in, and they all sound like they’re from the Bronx,” he says. “But they told me they don’t expect New York pizza outside of New York and that my pizza was phenomenal. I’m not doing deep dish. I’m not doing authentic New York pizza. I’m making my own recipes, my own style, and people enjoy it.”
That’s true for Phil Mimnaugh from Tecumseh by way of Chicago, who has been known to make the forty-five-minute trek to and from Heavy D’s for one (or four) of his specialty pies.
“I was so critical going in, thinking it wouldn’t work, but surprisingly, every single one I had was great,” he says. “How is a birria pizza even going to work? But it does.”
Mimnaugh says he nearly skipped trying Heavy D’s because they had pineapple on their toppings list, and as a Chicago native, that’s not done.
“But you know what? I went in and got a small pineapple pizza,” he says. “And that’s from someone who was against it his whole life, but I’ll get one from Heavy D’s.”
