In 2003, Joe Crochi did something almost unheard of in the business world: he sold his company for millions less than it was worth, deliberately, so the buyers would not drown in debt. CC’s Pizza was the fifth-largest pizza chain in America, and Crochi handed it to a team he trusted, then gave a fifth of the sale money to his church. Over the next thirteen years, four different investment firms bought the chain, squeezed it, and flipped it to the next buyer. None of them had ever stood behind a buffet line at six o’clock on a Friday.

By the time they finished, CC’s had gone from 650 restaurants to a bankruptcy courtroom. The story begins in 1985, with an accident in a strip mall in Plano, Texas. Crochi, an accountant by training, decided he would rather make pizza than balance someone else’s ledger. He partnered with a man named Mike Cole, and the name CC’s came from the simplest place possible: both their last names started with C.

No agency, no branding deck, just two letters on a sign. The first location was 1,200 square feet, takeout only, with no tables, no chairs, and no buffet line. Just a counter and an oven. A couple of years in, someone at a second location tried setting out a lunch buffet to fill the dead hours.

That experiment did not just work; it took over completely. People stopped coming for takeout. They came for the all-you-can-eat line. The patch for a slow Tuesday ate the entire business.

In that moment, CC’s found the one thing that would run the rest of its life: the room was the product, not the pizza. As long as people kept filling that room, the money worked. The price at the start was $2. 99 for all you can eat.

The economics were almost comically simple. Dough, tomato sauce, mozzarella. The food cost on a pizza in bulk is close to nothing. As long as the seats were full, the margins were beautiful.

But the second the seats were not full, the entire equation collapsed, because you still had to keep the buffet stocked and hot whether twelve people showed up or 112. Crochi began franchising in 1987. For many families in midsized towns, a CC’s looked like a golden ticket. There is a story about a repair technician named George Brown who used to fix the ovens at that first location.

Brown wanted to own one, and the founder personally loaned him the money to open a franchise in 1991. That was Crochi’s way: he believed in the thing enough to stake his own cash on a repairman’s dream. By 1997 there were 145 locations, by 2000 there were 354, and sales passed $300 million. For the customer, the experience was the draw.

You pulled into a strip mall between a Dollar Tree and a nail salon, walked through the door, and the smell hit you: warm dough, pepperoni grease, cinnamon sugar from the dessert station. You grabbed a brown plastic tray and walked the line. Pepperoni, sausage, buffalo chicken, mac and cheese pizza, and at the end, the dessert bar with apple dessert pizza, brownies, and those cinnamon rolls. You could also walk up to the counter and request a specific pizza, and they would make it fresh and bring it out to the line.

For $4. 99, you could custom order a pizza. The cinnamon rolls, warm and gooey with cinnamon sugar dusted across the top, had no business being on a $4. 99 buffet, but they were, and they carried a large share of the company’s goodwill.

There was an arcade in the back, the game zone, and for parents it was the best five dollars they ever spent because it bought twenty minutes of peace at the table. This was the place you went on a Tuesday night with four kids after soccer practice, because nowhere else could feed a family of six for under thirty dollars. It was birthday parties, church groups on Wednesdays, college students with twelve dollars and bottomless appetites, and grandmothers who did not eat pizza but came for the salad bar. CC’s never tried to be Pizza Hut.

It was the all-you-can-eat place, and it owned that identity. Its commercials featured a cartoon character named Pazini, a tiny inventor in a flying machine, promoting what they called endless pizza possibilities. The buffet price crept upward over about fifteen years, and then in 2000, CC’s jumped to $3. 99, a real bump for a chain whose identity was being the cheapest option on the block.

They earned it. They expanded the buffet, put out vegetables as toppings for the first time, redesigned the restaurants with a new red and green color scheme, and added a new logo. Sales climbed right through the price hike. Through all of it, CC’s was known as one of the cleanest, most affordable, most family-friendly chains in the country.

By 2009 there were 650 locations in 33 states, making it the fifth-largest pizza chain in America. They won an industry readers poll for best pizza chain three years in a row. But the vulnerability was there from the first lunch buffet in Plano. Every dollar CC’s made depended on people physically sitting in the building.

There was no delivery operation worth mentioning, no takeout model, no backup plan. The room was the product, and in twenty-four years, nobody built a plan for what happens when the room empties out. When Crochi sold in 2003, the trusted team he handed the chain to was backed by a private equity firm in Los Angeles called Levine Leichtman Capital Partners. The price was $41.

5 million for a chain doing over $335 million a year in sales. Crochi priced it low deliberately to keep the debt off the new owners’ backs. The firm took a 28 percent stake. Private equity firms do not buy pizza chains because they love cinnamon rolls.

They buy them to grow the numbers, clean the books, and sell to the next buyer. Levine Leichtman held on for four years, then sold to a Canadian investment firm. Under those owners, CC’s hit its peak of 650 stores by 2009. But that firm’s job was also to make a return, and in 2016 they sold CC’s again, this time to a New York investment group.

By then, the chain had shrunk to about 430 stores. Under Crochi, for the first fifteen years, CC’s never closed a single restaurant. The founder was careful about who he let buy a franchise. But the year after he left, the new owners opened 97 new locations in a single year, their biggest jump ever.

To hit numbers like that, you stop being picky about who runs your restaurants. None of the four owners, not a single one, worried about the people standing behind the buffet line on a Friday evening. In 2009, the same year the chain hit its peak, CC’s largest franchisee went bankrupt. A Dallas-based group called Marwin, with 53 locations, filed Chapter 11 with nearly $20 million in liabilities.

The recession was not the cause. CC’s disclosed that its sales in the first week of 2009 were about 4 percent higher than the same week a year before. When money gets tight, people go to the cheapest option, and that was CC’s. The recession should have been the best thing that ever happened to a $5 buffet.

Whatever was eating the company from the inside was strong enough to overpower a tailwind pushing customers through the door. The wound was self-inflicted. The dough was different. The cheese was different.

The pizza sat on the line longer. The dining rooms were not as clean. The napkin dispensers were empty. The arcade machines broke and stayed broken.

Some observers suspected the pizza was made doughy and greasy on purpose so it could sit out longer, because better pizza dies faster on a buffet line. One national buffet ranking put CC’s dead last for quality, cleanliness, and overall experience. The chain that won best pizza three years running was now last. The regulars noticed first.

The family that came every Friday stopped showing up, not all at once, just one Friday they tried somewhere else, and then CC’s was no longer the Friday spot. Around 2012 and 2013, a wave of fast-casual pizza places began spreading: Blaze Pizza, Mod Pizza, and a handful of copycats. You walked down a line, picked your toppings, and watched them fire a personal pizza in a wood oven in three minutes. Fresh, hot, custom, for eight to ten dollars.

LeBron James personally backed Blaze. For a single person, eating at one of those places cost only a few bucks more than the CC’s buffet, but the pizza was made right in front of you. For a solo lunch, the math no longer favored CC’s, and that was the exact customer base the chain had counted on for decades. By 2019, CC’s had about 420 locations, shrinking but functional, with $177 million in revenue and $14 million in positive operating income.

Then March of 2020 arrived. Every major pizza chain had spent years building delivery operations, but CC’s had a buffet and a dining room full of chairs that nobody was allowed to sit in. Their CFO, Richard Peabody, told a bankruptcy judge in Dallas that digital and delivery had been growing 300 percent faster than in-store dining since 2014, and CC’s had barely noticed. Approximately 99 percent of the company’s revenue came from in-store dining.

The room had been the whole business the entire time. Now the room was closed. Revenue dropped 57 percent in a single year, from $177 million to $76 million. Operating income flipped from positive $14 million to negative $2.

7 million. Total debt sat at about $82 million. They closed 214 locations, 67 of them for good. On January 25, 2021, CC’s filed for Chapter 11 in the Northern District of Texas.

At the peak there had been 650 stores; at filing there were 318. The company itself operated only one location. The top two creditors were a real estate company and a cheese supplier, which tells you everything about the restaurant business. When you go down, you owe the landlord and the cheese guy.

But somebody wanted this thing. Two cousins stepped in. Sunil Dharod, who ran a management company and already operated a pile of Applebee’s and Sonic franchises, and his cousin Anand Gala, who ran the Mooya Burger chain. Through a joint venture they named Smiley Slice, they put up about $11 million, bought $82 million of CC’s debt, converted the whole pile to equity, and pulled the company out of bankruptcy in under two months.

In year one it worked. They reportedly cleared over $10 million in profit. They started modernizing delivery apps and launched a rewards program that hit a million members in eight months. But behind the press releases, the family was going to war.

According to trial testimony covered by the Texas Lawbook, the junior partner alleged that the majority owner started pulling money out through his management company. In 2022, testimony showed the management fee jumped from $72,000 a month to $5 million a month. By 2023, those fees had reportedly hit $15 million for the year, paying for a personal chef and putting family members on the company payroll. Two cousins bought a bankrupt pizza chain for $11 million, cleared over $10 million in year one, and by year three, one was suing the other for $46 million.

The junior partner filed suit in January of 2024. In July of 2025, a Dallas County jury deliberated about five hours and returned a verdict in his favor for $46 million. The other side’s lawyers said the real figure was closer to $23 million. Post-trial motions were pending, and the majority owner still held controlling interest.

Today, CC’s has about 270 locations, mostly in Texas and Florida, down from 650. The company says systemwide sales are up over 50 percent in five years, but those numbers come from the company, and the company is in the middle of a lawsuit with itself. They brought back the original $2. 99 buffet price as a 40-year anniversary loyalty promotion, either a warm piece of nostalgia or a white flag.

Joe Crochi took less money, picked people he trusted, gave a fifth of it to his church, and walked away hoping the company would be in good hands. Then it spent the next twenty years getting bought and sold by people who never once smelled the inside of one of these places. He did everything right, and the thing he built still slipped away, one owner at a time.