“I wanted good bread before, so I had to make it. Now I want good pizza, so I’ll have to make it,” Fallen says, half-joking.

Aziza’s will add pizza to the menu in late April or early May when the new bakery is finished. The Shockoe Bottom restaurant also plans to expand its hours to serve dinner seven nights a week, Fallen says. (The restaurant is currently open for lunch or brunch every day and dinner Thursday through Saturday.) The pizza will be Neapolitan-style, baked for less than two minutes, with thin crusts and mozzarella made from fresh cow’s milk and Buffalo milk.

While it won’t seek official Italian-government-granted D.O.C. (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) status, Fallen — poking a bit of fun at those who take such things too seriously — intends to institute his own mark of quality: R.G.P. (for Really Good Pizza). “I think a lot of people put emphasis on brand and recognition,” he says. “I put more emphasis on quality.”

Besides serving the adjoining restaurant, the bakery will market Aziza’s multigrain sourdough bread and frozen pizzas to grocery stores and natural-food markets in the Richmond area, Williamsburg and Charlottesville, Fallen says.

In the meantime, he’s been experimenting with dough, cooking his pizzas on a grill or in the oven. He's also been doing some testing in a friend's backyard brick oven (the same friend Brandon Fox wrote about for her “Brandon Eats” column in the March issue of Richmond magazine).

Fallen promises, “It’s going to be very authentic.”