Enzo’s Pizzeria and Italian cafe is nestled in a small strip mall on Horizon Drive. The smells, the music and even the lighting are all reflective of Italy.

Though the restaurant specializes in gourmet style pizzas and calzones, Enzo Fazale, the owner, prides himself in his culinary taste. He offers everything from pasta dishes to hand made gyros with real feta cheese to mouth watering desserts.

Fazale opened his restaurant back in 2009. Originally, he was an electrical engineer, but his passion for good Italian cuisine drove him to want to open his own restaurant. Both of his parents were from Italy, and he grew up around his mother’s cooking. He moved out when he was only 17, and he couldn’t afford to go out and eat all the time. He started cooking for himself and developed his own style.

“My mom was a wonderful cook, and from the time I could stand up she claimed I would stand on chairs watching her cook,” Fazale said.

After getting his degree in electronic engineering, he worked in IT for 25 years in Miami. When he became fed up with the big city, he decided to move out here to Grand Junction. He said that he wanted to try something completely different.

“Owning a restaurant was something I always wanted to do,” Fazale said.

Fazale went on to say that during his IT career, he did a lot of traveling to places like the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.

“My company would put me up in five star hotels and take me out to the best restaurants, and after 25 years of traveling down there, I picked up a lot of the flavor profiles, and developed my taste buds to the type of cooking I like to do,” Fazale said.

Enzo prides himself on his pizza making skills and said that he learned those skills while working in Italian restaurants during high school and college.

“At my home, I had a wood fire oven in my backyard, and I would practice making pizza dough and cooking them on a wood fire oven,” Fazle said.

Everything at Enzo’s is made from scratch, from all of the pasta to the sauces to the rolls and pizza dough. Four years ago, Fazale opened a second location in Clifton. The ambience of that location is a little different. The Clifton restaurant is designed more similarly to a sports bar and pizzeria. They feature a few less pasta dishes there, and tend to keep their menu simple.