Former Cleveland Indians outfielder Rajai Davis, who grew up in New London, poses with his Crown Pizza hat in a 2016 photo taken at Wrigley Field by Taso Vitsas, then-owner of the Waterford restaurant. The Vitsas family has since sold Crown Pizza, and Taso now works as a marketing director for a Boston-area restaurant group.

Taso Vitsas will forever be remembered locally as the super-friendly restaurant owner who somehow managed to get his friend and Cleveland Indians star Rajai Davis to wear a Crown Pizza hat during the 2016 World Series, which was placed on the bench in the Dugout Stadium in front of millions of television viewers.

Vitsas believes this move has resulted in the Waterford pizzeria’s turnover doubling overnight.

But Vitsas dreamed of bigger things, of competing in the World Series of restaurant competitions, so to speak, and when some relatives encouraged him to come to the Boston area to try his hand at business in a big city, he was ready to take the plunge.

Vitsas, who thanks his mother and father for teaching him the restaurant business, called me half a dozen years ago to tell me he was leaving town to seek his fortune in the Boston area, and I thought at the time that would be the last I would ever hear from him.

But Taso Vitsas is another guy who never forgets where he started, so it was nice to hear from him again last week from his new home in Framingham, Massachusetts, and find out that he’s still big in the restaurant business and his company is making a splash across New England.

He even told me that the Rail Trail Flatbread Co., a restaurant group based in Hudson, Massachusetts, for which he serves as marketing director, now has about 500 employees and operates several successful restaurants, including an ice cream parlor and a newly branded Irish pub/speakeasy.

“Everything just kind of worked out,” Vitsas said in a phone interview. “It was a difficult transition and a risk, but it turned into something great.”

The group’s New City Microcreamery ice cream brand has recently made a splash in New England by appearing in all Big Y supermarkets as well as all Whole Foods stores in the North Atlantic region. I asked my wife to bring home a pint of the baklava ice cream and I must say it was delicious, but expensive ($9.99).

Vitsas tells me that the Cambridge, Massachusetts area has become a hotbed of ice cream competition. I can understand this, because I grew up in the Boston area, where my father was always bringing home 10-gallon containers of ice cream that we had to try (I was probably one of the first people in the world to try Brigham’s Mocha Almond ice cream, which is still available in many supermarkets today).

In any case, 42-year-old Vitsas is very impressed with the foodie scene in the area and wants to deepen his knowledge by pursuing a master’s degree in marketing at Babson College.

“This area requires you to get better,” he said.

When it comes to marketing, Vitsas says his restaurant group has tried just about everything, from newspaper ads to newsletters to TikTok to Facebook Reels. One thing he tries to avoid is gimmicky marketing strategies.

“The crazy thing is that every company has their own platform,” Vitsas said. “We probably post 50 to 60 pieces of content a day just to stay relevant.”

One marketing concept he adopted from Crown Pizza is the “pizza and poetry” challenge, in which students (originally from Oswegatchie School in Waterford) write poems that are then pasted on the front of pizza boxes. At the Rail Trail Flatbread Co., with locations in Hudson and Milford, Mass., they are also pasted on the windows of restaurants.

“This is a continuing tradition,” he said.

But there’s always something new to master in marketing, including TikTok, which Vitsas says is about “real connections and authenticity,” and YouTube Shorts and Facebook, which he says are “under-used for business.” Mailings with coupons and even door-to-door sales with gift cards are effective, he said.

“We literally have to do everything,” he said.

He even has a presence on Instagram under the hashtag The_Hungry_Greek, a persona he created at Crown Pizza that already had a loyal following. At his family’s restaurant, Vitsas also set a world record by putting 112 different types of cheese on a 24-inch pizza – another of his marketing ploys.

Many of Vitsas’ early experiences revolve around Waterford and East Lyme, communities he remembers fondly even though he himself is a graduate of Westbrook High School.

His parents have since been able to sell Crown Pizza and recently returned to Greece to spend time with older relatives. But Vitsas said the lessons he learned from his parents at Crown Pizza remain, particularly the idea that treating people well is more important than making money. It’s an idea his business partners share, he said.

“We consider these companies our home,” Vitsas said. “That’s a rare thing.”

It was one of those human connections that led Vitsas to his most famous marketing idea, when he asked his friend Rajai Davis, whom he had met at a tryout for the University of Connecticut baseball team at Avery Point, to pick up a Crown Pizza baseball cap before a World Series game in Chicago. A photo of the Crown Pizza cap in the team’s dugout went viral, sparking a huge stir in the region. The restaurant then doubled in size as new customers flocked from near and far.

“When I saw how one small thing could change the course of a life, I decided to take it on,” Vitsas said. “It changed the course of my family’s legacy… and it was a small stroke of luck.”

Lee Howard is The Day’s business editor. You can reach him by email at [email protected].