Grabbing a bite with Joey Wright
Each week, we chop it up with the folks responsible for dishing up food around the area. What restaurant should we try next? Let Joey Wright know at jwright@news-gazette.com.
Roy Treece has been cooking for most of his life.
So when the opportunity came for him and his wife to open Oakwood & Fire Pizzeria in Paxton, they jumped at the chance.
“I always wanted to open a restaurant,” Treece said. “We’d just been eating some wood-fired pizzas all around the country and other countries, and we just decided that was the best pizza.”
Oakwood & Fire has been open since June 2025 and is the second iteration of a pizza restaurant that started a few years ago in Buckley.
“We ran it in Buckley for a couple years, but Buckley only has like 500 people,” Treece said. “We more or less depended on people to drive there, and it just didn’t sustain itself. We decided to sell that building, and we wound up moving to Paxton and buying the old Pizza Hut.”
Business is picking up for Treece, who saw a line stretch out the door for the first time during a busy Saturday rush.
Handmade dough and made-from-scratch sausage are part of the equation for the restaurant, which can cook pizzas in roughly one minute in a wood-fired oven from Italy that heats to more than 800 degrees.
“The place is warm and welcoming,” Treece said. “We pride ourselves on cleanliness. We’ve gotten 100 percent on our last two health inspections. If we’re sitting around doing nothing, we’re cleaning.”
