Photos by Burton Spruce Balkind
At left: A summer crowd gathers outside Pi Pizzeria on West Creek Road, where the restaurant has built a loyal following over the past 25 years. At right: Co-owner Evan Marley, who founded Pi in 2001 and later moved the restaurant to its current home, now part of a sale offering that includes the business, commercial property and employee housing.
For 25 years, Evan and Maria Marley transformed a small pizza operation in the back of a Nantucket wine shop into one of the island’s most enduring restaurants. Now Pi Pizzeria, its West Creek Road property and employee housing are on the market for $12.495 million, putting more than a restaurant up for sale. The Marleys hope the next owner will preserve what they built on Nantucket, and perhaps carry Pi far beyond the island.
By Don Costanzo • August 18, 2026
There are restaurants on Nantucket that people visit because they are new, fashionable or difficult to get into. And then there are those that become part of the rhythm of living here. Pi Pizzeria belongs in the second category.
For a generation of islanders, summer residents and returning visitors, Pi has been the place for a Rustica after work, a Margherita at the bar, meatballs and pasta on a cold winter night, or the carefully timed phone call needed to secure a takeout pizza before the evening’s production was spoken for.
It has never occupied one of Nantucket’s postcard locations. There is no harbor view, Main Street address or oceanfront deck. Pi sits on West Creek Road in the middle of the island, surrounded by the practical Nantucket of businesses, parking lots and year-round traffic. As it turns out, that has been exactly where Pi needed to be.
“It has proven to be the ideal location for Pi,” co-owner Evan Marley said. Now, after 25 years, Pi is at a crossroads.
Evan and Maria Marley have put the restaurant, the commercial property at 11 West Creek Road and a three-bedroom employee residence at 41.5 Nobadeer Farm Road on the market together for $12.495 million. The listing has been given the almost inevitable name “The Whole Pi.”
“We are definitely not planning on leaving Nantucket, just the day-to-day operations of Pi Pizzeria,” Evan said. “Speaking for myself, I am not ready to retire, but just looking to slow down.”
Nor does he envision necessarily disappearing from the business the moment a sale closes. He’s willing to work with a buyer for a mutually agreed-upon transition period, and his ambitions for Pi could extend well beyond West Creek Road. If the right buyer wanted to develop multiple locations, Marley said he would be interested in helping.
One possibility he has considered is the Boston Seaport. Customers, he said, routinely tell the Marleys they wish Pi existed closer to where they live, “from Palm Beach to Aspen and everywhere in between.” His vision would be clear: expand the concept if the opportunity makes sense, but keep Nantucket as its center. The West Creek Road restaurant, he said, should remain the flagship Pi. That changes the meaning of the sale.
What’s being offered is considerably more complicated than a pizzeria. It is a business, a building, a brand, employee housing, equipment, recipes, websites, phone numbers, routines and 25 years of accumulated goodwill. It is also valuable Nantucket commercial real estate at a time when the island has repeatedly watched longtime businesses disappear, relocate or become something entirely different once the property beneath them changes hands.
The question hanging over Pi, therefore, is not simply who will pay $12.495 million, It’s whether the next owner will understand what, exactly, they are buying.
It Started in the Back of a Wine Shop
Pi did not begin on West Creek Road. Its beginnings were much smaller and considerably less certain.
Evan Marley came to Nantucket as a seasonal worker, painting houses during the day and waiting tables at night. He grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, and had been fascinated by pizza since he was young. He made pizzas in high school, worked for a second-generation Neapolitan family and would go well out of his way to New York and New Haven simply to eat pizza and understand how other people made it.
But his education went much further than eating his way through famous pizza cities. Marley spent two weeks working with Howard Jelleme in Tuscany and then took the train south to Naples, where he spent a week visiting some of the city’s original pizzerias. The winter before opening Pi, he also worked for free — “staging,” in restaurant language — at American Flatbread in Waitsfield, Vermont.
This was not someone who simply decided Nantucket needed another pizza shop. Marley was studying the craft.
On Nantucket, meanwhile, he had gone to work for Michael Fahey, the former Wauwinet Inn sommelier behind Fahey & Fromagerie, a wine-and-cheese shop on Pleasant Street. Marley wanted to learn more about Italian wine. Then a bakery space became available in the back of the shop, and Fahey asked whether he wanted to make pizza there.
In 2001, Pi was born. There was no 46-seat dining room, no full bar and no dedicated West Creek kitchen. Pi was essentially a pizzeria operating from the back of another business, but the fundamental idea was already established: thin-crust, Neapolitan-influenced pizza made seriously, with an attention to ingredients and technique that was uncommon for food still frequently treated as casual takeout.
Maria Marley brought another strand of pizza culture to the business. She grew up in New Haven, where pizza is less a menu category than a civic institution, and comes from an Italian-American family. Evan’s own pizza education had repeatedly taken him there long before New Haven became a regular subject of national pizza debates.
Pi was never an attempt to reproduce New Haven apizza, however, nor was it a literal imitation of Naples. It borrowed from those traditions, combined them with Evan’s travels and training, and created something of its own on Nantucket. Five years after opening in the back of Fahey & Fromagerie, the Marleys were ready to give Pi a permanent home.
In 2006, they acquired 11 West Creek Road, renovated the building and moved in. The response suggested that their little operation had already become something considerably larger. Evan has recalled opening the doors in January, in the dead of a Nantucket winter, and finding a line waiting. Within roughly an hour and a half, the restaurant was so overwhelmed that they stopped taking customers.
They reopened the next day, and Pi has essentially been busy ever since.
Burton Spruce Balkind
From left: Pi’s small market area carries branded merchandise and Italian specialty goods; the familiar menu board outside the West Creek Road restaurant, including the reminder that Pi is closed on Tuesdays; and a shelf of the restaurant’s red reservation books, a year-by-year record stretching back nearly two decades above imported pantry staples.
Before There Was Pi
The West Creek Road building has its own history, and Evan Marley remembers a succession of Nantucket businesses passing through it long before the first Pi pizza came out of the oven. According to Marley’s recollection, the building was most recently West Creek Café before Pi took over. Before that came The Beach Plum, and earlier still Jock Gifford’s Upper Crust Bakery.
Before the restaurants and bakery, Marley remembers the building serving as a doctor’s office.
The story may go back even further. Marley said his understanding is that the original owner was Martin Foley, who ordered the building through the Sears catalog store that once stood across from the location of today’s Stop & Shop. He recalls hearing that the building cost approximately $3,700 and arrived after a lead time of about three and a half weeks.
Marley is careful to characterize those details as the best of his recollection rather than documented history, but they add another layer to a building that predates Pi by decades.
Property records date the structure to 1955. Whatever its precise lineage, the West Creek building had already lived several Nantucket lives before the Marleys arrived. They gave it another.
Over the next two decades, Pi evolved far beyond its original pizza-counter beginnings. Today there is a 46-seat dining room and bar, a separate takeout entrance and small Italian market area, a substantial kitchen, a nine-by-nine-foot walk-in cooler, storage and office space, a porch and patio and approximately 20 parking spaces. The building was remodeled again in 2020, and plans for additional expansion are included with the sale.
Pi did not survive for 25 years by remaining a novelty pizza shop.
It became a full restaurant while somehow retaining the personality of the much smaller operation that started behind a wine store.
Why the Pizza Mattered
Longevity alone does not make a restaurant good. Pi earned its following because the Marleys treated pizza as something worth being obsessive about.
The dough is made fresh. The sauce is prepared from scratch with imported San Marzano tomatoes. Whole-milk mozzarella is grated daily. The pizzas cook at roughly 900 degrees in Pi’s wood-fired oven. Around them grew a broader Italian-American dinner menu, along with nightly additions influenced by seasonal ingredients.
But then there is the Rustica: stracchino cheese, pancetta, garlic and arugula. It became Pi’s signature pizza to the point that describing it merely as a menu item seems inadequate. For longtime customers, it has become part of the restaurant’s identity.
That reputation has been remarkably consistent at home. Marley says Pi has won the Inquirer & Mirror’s annual readers’ poll for best pizza every year since moving to 11 West Creek Road, and that this year has been notified that Pi had won “by a landslide.”
The acclaim is not limited to pizza. Marley also points to Pi’s longstanding reputation for serving one of Nantucket’s best steaks, an often-overlooked part of a menu that expanded well beyond its pizzeria origins. That breadth helped Pi become more than a takeout destination. It developed into a full-service Italian restaurant with a following for dishes well beyond the wood-fired oven.
Pi’s reputation has traveled well beyond Nantucket as well. Dave Portnoy reviewed the restaurant for Barstool Sports’ One Bite in 2016 and scored it an 8.6, an exceptional rating by the standards of a reviewer famously reluctant to hand out high numbers. Pi’s community score on the platform has also remained above eight, with reviewers repeatedly praising the crust, sauce and Rustica and sometimes comparing the pizza favorably with places in New Haven and elsewhere.
But perhaps the strongest evidence of Pi’s popularity is simpler: on some summer nights, it cannot make enough pizza. Listing agent Courtney Cotter has said the restaurant receives more orders than the kitchen can physically produce. Longtime customers already understand the system: deciding at 6:30 on an August evening that you would like a Pi pizza does not necessarily mean one remains available to you. The restaurant’s production capacity effectively becomes its own form of reservation system.
That is an enviable business problem, and it is one reason the Marleys believe the opportunity for a new owner may not be simply preserving Pi, but expanding what it can become.
Burton Spruce Balkind
At left: Pi co-owner Evan Marley beside the restaurant’s wood-fired oven, the centerpiece of the West Creek Road kitchen and the source of the 900-degree heat behind Pi’s pizzas. At right: The takeout counter in motion, with staff working behind the line as another stack of pizza boxes heads out the door.
What $12.495 Million Buys
At first glance, $12.495 million for a pizzeria sounds like another example of Nantucket economics escaping gravity.
But the offering is not simply a restaurant.
The buyer gets the Pi Pizzeria operating business and brand, the commercial property at 11 West Creek Road and the separate three-bedroom residence at 41.5 Nobadeer Farm Road that has been used for employee housing. The restaurant property includes its dining room, bar, takeout and market operation, commercial kitchen, wood-fired oven, basement storage and office areas, approximately 20 parking spaces and expansion potential. The employee residence adds another six parking spaces.
And Marley points out that there are less visible assets included as well. The buyer would acquire Pi’s websites and internet addresses, including pipizzeria.com and pipizza.com, along with its established phone number. That may sound minor compared with Nantucket real estate, but Marley does not see it that way. He said he has previously been offered “thousands and thousands of dollars” for the domain names alone.
After 25 years, Pi is not merely a sign over a restaurant, it’s a searchable, established brand with a name customers already know how to find.
Then there’s the employee house. On Nantucket, that property may be nearly as strategically important to the business as the restaurant itself. A restaurant can have a great chef, a packed dining room and a profitable summer and still be crippled by its inability to house the people necessary to operate it. Pi’s staff housing is therefore not incidental real estate, it’s part of the machinery of the business.
Cotter has said the property is used primarily by kitchen employees, whom she described as the backbone of the operation.
That makes “The Whole Pi” an unusual Nantucket offering: an established restaurant being sold together with at least some of the infrastructure required to keep it functioning.
The asking price represents more than square footage. It attempts to place a value on an entire working system — the real estate, restaurant, equipment, employee housing, customer base, name, websites, phone number, reputation and the opportunity to take it over without beginning the familiar Nantucket obstacle course of locating a site, obtaining permits, building a commercial kitchen, creating parking, establishing a brand, recruiting staff and then figuring out where some of those employees are going to live.
The same package that makes Pi unusually viable as an operating restaurant, however, also makes the property attractive to someone who may see entirely different possibilities. And that’s where the uncertainty begins.
Preserving Pi Without Freezing It
The reaction to the sale has focused less on whether Evan and Maria Marley have earned the right to step away from daily restaurant life than on what happens afterward.
Running an island restaurant for 25 years means surviving recessions, labor shortages, a worsening housing crisis, changing customer tastes, escalating food costs, brutal seasonal swings and the extraordinary disruption of the pandemic. Maria has spoken about wanting time for art classes and lightship baskets and a life less governed by restaurant operations.
Evan’s plans are somewhat different. He wants to slow down, but he’s not ready to disappear.
“We are definitely not planning on leaving Nantucket,” he said. And if the right buyer arrives, Marley would be willing to help make the transition successful. That could mean continuing at West Creek Road for a period of time. It could also mean helping a buyer who believes Pi can become something larger.
Customers already plant that idea in his head almost daily. They tell him they want a Pi in Palm Beach, Aspen, closer to wherever they spend the rest of the year.
Marley can imagine it. He specifically mentions Boston’s Seaport District as one possible starting point. But there would be an important hierarchy. Nantucket would remain home, and the original Pi would become the flagship. That presents a much more interesting possibility than merely keeping the restaurant exactly as it is.
Preserving Pi does not require freezing it in 2026. A new owner could expand production, improve takeout capacity, make use of the expansion plans, develop the market operation or open additional locations while retaining the food, personality and island roots that created the demand in the first place. That may ultimately be the best definition of stewardship: understanding what should change and, more importantly, what should not.
The danger lies at either extreme. One would be allowing Pi to stagnate because nothing can ever be altered. The other would be paying millions for a successful 25-year-old business and then erasing the very identity that made it valuable.
Burton Spruce Balkind
Can Pi Stay Pi?
For now, Pi remains open. There is no announced closing date, and no reason for customers to begin treating every Rustica as though it were the last one. The sale could happen quickly or take time, but if and when it does, Evan Marley does not envision handing over the keys one afternoon and disappearing the next. He’s willing to work with a new owner for whatever transition period makes sense, helping preserve the systems, standards and character that have allowed Pi to endure for 25 years.
That makes the best-case scenario more ambitious than simply keeping the doors open. A new owner could buy the entire package, understand why the restaurant works, keep the employee housing tied to the operation, retain the dishes and personality customers care about, and then give Pi enough new energy to make its next 25 years possible. Nantucket may remain the only Pi, or West Creek Road could become the flagship of a broader operation, perhaps beginning with the kind of Boston location Marley has already imagined. Either way, what happens next will depend heavily on whether the eventual buyer sees Pi as a piece of real estate with a restaurant attached to it, or as a restaurant whose value has been built slowly over decades.
That’s what makes the sale larger than Pi itself. Nantucket is full of places whose financial value and cultural value no longer fit neatly on the same spreadsheet. A property may be worth millions because of what someone could someday do with it, while a business may be worth something entirely different because of what generations of people have already done there. The two values can coexist, but they don’t always point in the same direction.
For 25 years, the Marleys accomplished something that is becoming increasingly difficult on Nantucket. They started small, built slowly, found a permanent home, created a year-round following, acquired employee housing and turned an obsession with pizza into an island institution. They did it without a waterfront address, a celebrity chef or a hospitality conglomerate behind them, and over time Pi became valuable precisely because it became familiar.
That familiarity is part of what people are really hoping survives. They know the wood-fired oven and the Rustica, and they know that Tuesday is the wrong night to crave Pi. They know that in August getting a pizza may require planning, while in January the dining room can still feel like Nantucket rather than a restaurant simply waiting for Nantucket to return. Those routines may seem small, but taken together they are what turns a business into part of a community.
Eventually, someone else may own the building, the oven, the recipes, the parking lot, the domains and the name. Evan and Maria Marley, however, are not leaving Nantucket, and Evan is not quite ready to retire. His role may simply be changing, from the person who built Pi to someone who helps determine what it becomes next.
The real question is whether whoever buys The Whole Pi understands that some of the most valuable things included in the $12.495 million purchase will never appear on the closing statement.