A pizza pie chart and cover shot

A new Terry's Pizza restaurant is being targeted for an early-2017 opening. (Bob Gathany/bgathany@al.com)

They're using an old takeout menu as a road map.

For their upcoming location of Terry's Pizza across from Huntsville's Grissom High School, Star Market plans on offering 95 to 98 percent of the items that were on vintage Terry's menus. Signature pies like the Chef's Special and Sticky Fingers. Subs. Calzones. Spaghetti. Lasagna.

"If you've been a Terry's Pizza fan in the past, you'll recognize the menu," says Star Market's Mark Tow. A grocery store/pharmacy with locations in Huntsville and Meridianville, Star purchased the Terry's Pizza name and recipes after the beloved pizzeria closed in 2006 following the death of owner Lou Pejza.

Star has been making and selling carry-out and "take-and-bake" Terry's pizzas out of its Five Points store since 2008.

But the new Terry's location, targeted for an early-2017 opening, will be the first standalone Terry's restaurant with a dining room since the Governors Drive, South Parkway and North Parkway locations shuttered 10 years ago. Terry's will take over a cozy Bailey Cove Shopping Center space formerly home to Coffee Tree and, most recently, Lizzy B's Bakery and Deli. The restaurant will seat around 80 people. There will be a drive-thru for pick-up orders and take-and-bake pizzas available. According to Tow, the restaurant's design will likely incorporate booths, brick veneer walls, hardwood floors and a burgundy awning evoking the one from the old North Parkway Terry's.

The classic Terry's Pizza logo of an ecstatic mustachioed chef will also be involved.

Exterior photo of the former Terry's Pizza location on North Parkway. (File photo)

"I think they'll be pleasantly surprised when the building gets done," Tow says. "It's going to have a lot of the old feel of a Terry's Pizza and it's also going to be more of a modern, casual type restaurant. Tow is Star Market's director of pharmacy operations. And the connection between pharmacy and pizza is? "You've got to understand we're a little company," Tow says with a laugh. "People wear a lot of hats." Demolition has begun on the Baily Cove space, and the building permits are in place, Tow says.

Star Market also maintained an embedded, to-go Terry's Pizza at its Bailey Cove grocery store. After that 9020 Bailey Cove Road grocery closed in October 2014, Star kept its pharmacy there open, until moving the pharmacy to Bailey Cove Shopping Center, address 7900 Bailey Cove Road, where it had previously operated for three years or so until 2010.

The return of Star Discount Pharmacy to the shopping center helped bring about the upcoming Terry Pizza restaurant there.

"This one kind of fell in our lap," Tow says. "I put a bug in the ear of the landlord: 'If a place opens up where a Terry's Pizza could come in we would be interested.' And they came to me and said, 'Hey we got one.'" Other business located in the shopping center include Casa Blanca Mexican Restaurant & Cantina, health club You Fit and closeout retailer Tuesday Morning.

Star signed a lease for the Bailey Cove Terry's space this summer. Some of their pharmacy customers have known about this development since around that time, Tow says. "We don't hesitate to tell them we're coming. It's not a secret but we've been low-key because we don't have an opening date. We're going to keep it low key until we're close. I don't want to rush this, I want to do it right."

Ben Otieno worked for decades at the South Parkway Terry's Pizza and for the last eight years he's made those pies at Five Points Star Market. (Matt Wake/mwake@al.com)

According to Tow, the to-go Terry's inside Star Market's Five Points location, address 704 Pratt Ave. N.E. sells "just under 1,000 pizzas a week."

Ben Otieno makes a lot of those pies. Otieno worked at Terry's former South Parkway location for decades, and when Star Market owner Darden Heritage purchased the Terry's name and recipes and opened the Five Points embedded location, Otieno and other former Terry's employees were brought in to work there. After the Terry's restaurants closed in 2006, Birmingham's VR Business Brokers announced the Terry's name, recipes and some equipment could be bought for about $200,000, according to a Huntsville Times report from that year. A former typewriter repairman from the Midwest, Lou Pejza co-founded Terry's original Governors location in 1959 with sister Theresa (for whom the restaurant was named) and brother-in-law Earl Alger. The business was built on Chicago-style pies.

Tow says although Otieno will remain at the Five Points location, he'll play a big role in training employees for the Bailey Cove restaurant. "He is our connection to the past," Tow says of Otieno. "He knows how they made them back then and how we make them now."

So what is Otieno looking forward to most about the return of a standalone Terry's Pizza restaurant?

"Getting the families back together," Otieno says. "I used to enjoy watching the families coming in, having dinner together, chit-chat." He then uses his hand to illustrate the height of a young child and adds, "I saw kids from about this age and they come in here now married with children of their own, still eating Terry's Pizza." Otieno was born in Kenya and says customers will often recognize him by his speaking accent: "You're were on South Parkway weren't you?"

The most popular pies at the Five Points Star Market Terry's Pizza include the Sticky Fingers Special, which features sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and extra cheese.

Otieno says the key to keeping Terry's pizzas authentic is "consistency. If you're not consistent the customers don't come back." The sauce is another key, he says, "There's a secret in it - that one I'm not going to tell."