- July 7, 2026
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The billion-dollar success of California Pizza Kitchen, even though the first location opened in Beverly Hills, traces its origin story to Florida.
It was in the Sunshine State where a pair of attorneys, Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax, met and became friends with Burton Goldberg in 1974. Goldberg was a prominent and celebrity-adjacent developer who rebuilt Coconut Grove, turning it from a “laid-back, bohemian enclave into a glittering playground,” Rosenfield would later write in his memoir, “The California Pizza Kitchen Story: How Two Federal Prosecutors Changed the Way America Eats Pizza."
Over the next decade, Rosenfield, Flax and Goldberg grew to become close friends, to the point where the attorneys, whose outside-work hobbies focused on fine wine and good food, started experimenting in the kitchens of their friend's high-end eateries across Miami. Rosenfield and Flax often lamented they wanted out of practicing law — they had been federal prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys and business partners — but were stuck.
Then Goldberg said something to both his friends that jarred them out of the inertia, Rosenfield recounts in his memoir, scheduled to be released July 21. “You chickenshit lawyers! Are you going to practice law your whole lives or do what you really want to do?”
Less than a year later a plan for California Pizza Kitchen was underway. And the first one opened in 1985, in Beverly Hills.
Known as CPK, the company grew into a global hit and billion-dollar brand. With its top-seller, the pioneering Barbecue Chicken Pizza leading the way, CPK had more than 200 locations and robust frozen pizza grocery store sales at its peak, just before the 2009-09 recession. Rosenfield and Flax sold the business, left and came back to it, helped take it public, and, in 2011, exited for good in a $470 million sale to a private equity firm. (California Pizza Kitchen grew again in the 2010s, then got walloped in the pandemic and filed for bankruptcy in July 2020. It emerged from bankruptcy in November 2020; Consortium Brand Partners, according to Reuters, bought CPK in 2025 for $300 million and the brand has 131 U.S. locations today, including nine in Florida and four in the region.)
Rosenfield, meanwhile, has returned to the state that started it all, living with his wife in Palm Beach County after leaving Los Angeles two years ago — and first considering moving to Sarasota or Naples. In his book and a recent virtual interview, Rosenfield, 80, shared some of the key leadership lessons and insights he learned while he and Flax started and grew California Pizza Kitchen. That includes how he and Flax developed what he calls a reverse leadership pyramid, where the people on the front lines, like cooks, servers, hosts and bussers, are at the top and the CEOs are at the bottom.
“Our job as leaders was to support the people doing the real work. That wasn’t a slogan. We meant it,” Rosenfield writes. “We used to tell the team CPK was a ‘work with’ company not a ‘work for’ company. It wasn’t just a line — it’s how we led.”
Go all in: Encouraged and prodded by Goldberg, the business partners — Rosenfield was 40, Flax was 42 — decided to do it. But there was a problem: “Passion,” writes Rosenfield, “we had in spades; restaurant experience, none.” Rosenfield, in our conversation, adds after a brief period of trying to both practice law and work on the restaurant, they saw half-measures wouldn’t be enough. “We came back from a long trial in San Francisco, mortgaged our homes, signed the lease,” he says. “We had no chef, no name, just this concept that we're going to do this new style of pizza.” In addition to second mortgages, the novice restaurateurs borrowed $200,000 from banks and raised $350,000 from some 20 friends to get ready for Day One of the first CPK, March 27, 1985, in Beverly Hills.”We went in full bore,” Rosenfield says.
Loving this: Rosenfield and Flex sought to create a place that was upscale yet approachable, relaxed but polished. “We carried a quiet confidence,” he writes. “What we lacked in résumés we believed we made up for in something just as valuable: the instincts and expectations of customers. We weren’t seeing things through the lens of industry pros; we were seeing them as people who loved to eat out, who valued great service and who knew exactly how it felt to be on the other side of the table. That perspective was our compass.”
In our interview, Rosenfield says one of the biggest influences on the company back then was McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc. Rosenfield says he Flax read Kroc’s 1977 autobiography, “Grinding It Out,” like it was a Bible, with the fast-food impresario's QSCV (quality, service, cleanliness and value) mentality becoming their mantra. Early on, when the restaurant’s pizza was making headlines, Rosenfield writes it was a source of pride that in many customer surveys, usually filled out by women, cleanliness was cited as a top CPK attribute. “We thought about all (four) of Kroc’s values from day one,” Rosenfield says.
Work the plan: Another valuable business and leadership lesson came from another restaurant industry legend, in Norm Haberman, CEO of W.R. Grace, which in the 1980s operated more than 1,000 restaurants, under brands that included El Torito, Houlihan’s Old Place and Charley Brown’s. Haberman, says Rosenfield, delivered a Mike Tyson moment, noting the boxer’s famous line, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” For Rosenfield, the lesson he learned from Haberman, a regular CPK customer, is sales, like winning in sports, is the ultimate elixir. “Norm sat down with us at lunch one day, and he said ‘let me tell you something about this business. Sales cure everything. If you can get customers in the door, you can fix inefficiencies. But if you can’t get them in the door, there’s no easy fix.’”
Eating exam: The company’s first hire, a hostess named Julie Carruthers, turned out to be the key to building what became a globally-recognized culture, says Rosenfield. Carruthers bought into the founders’ belief to see things through the “eyes of the customer,” he says. She wrote the company hiring and training manuals and later became CPK’s VP of human resources and a national voice in hospitality training.
And it was Carruthers, says Rosenfield, who brought them the idea that every server had to know every single menu item and ingredient. And that evolved, he says, to include managers. Potential hires had to take a test, and managers and cooks had to sample menu items, to make sure the food was up to par. The tests were so strict one person joked to Rosenfield that his son studied harder for a CPK menu test than his finals at Harvard. But the tests also became something of a calling card for CPK. “It’s how we weeded out people early, so the ones we hired were willing to make the effort,” he says.”And we never compromised on that.”
Hard choices: Not compromising on what they knew to be the right thing to do was an underpinning to a lot of the company’s early successes — and a constant source of leadership lessons. (Which fits, because Rosenfield, in our interview and his book, talks a lot about how compromises and bending on integrity soured him on continuing his legal career.)
“We were lawyers, we debated endlessly with each other,” Rosenfield says of the business partnership with Flax. “But we resolved everything, came to a conclusion, by doing the right thing. It's not always easy to do the right thing, right? But it’s always easy to identify the right thing.”
Rosenfield cites CPK’s decision, in 1991, to go non-smoking in all its locations, becoming the first national restaurant chain to do so. Laws and regulations had forced restaurants to have smoking and non-smoking. At a manager’s meeting back then, when the company had some 30 locations, a manager spoke up and said he was having trouble getting people to work in the smoking section. Rosenfield says going no-smoking was akin to putting up a stop sign on an indeterminate number of customers — not usually a good look. He also leaned on their do-the-right-thing mantra, even, or especially, when it’s hard. “We looked at each other and said ‘knowing what we know about secondhand smoke, what right do we have to ask anybody to work in a smoking section?’”
