CHEF PROFILES | FLORIDA
How Ya Dough’n Began With Sourdough, Suburbia, and a Cease-and-Desist Letter
HOW YA DOUGH’N | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Eric Barton | May 17, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: Eric Barton is editor of The Adventurist and a freelance journalist who has reviewed restaurants for more than two decades. Email him here.
Gabby and Garett Goodman still have the cease-and-desist letter. Most people would have buried it in a file cabinet, along with old bills and the manual for a dishwasher they no longer own. They framed theirs.
The letter arrived during the pandemic. It ordered the Goodmans to stop selling pizza from their backyard. When they turned their little project into a pizza shop in Boca Raton called How Ya Dough’n, that letter became the first decoration. It also became something of a mission statement for a place that decided not to behave like every other pizza shop.
For the Goodmans, that origin story is now a source of pride. What began as a home project during Covid turned into a South Florida pizza business with locations in Boca Raton and Boynton Beach, a Las Vegas expansion, and franchise plans nearly finished. For Gabby, it’s also the story of a woman who built a brand while pregnant with her third child, raising two young kids, fielding neighborhood complaints, and carrying pizzas out to cars like a suburban maître d’ in survival mode.
But then, for Gabby, food has always been a source of stability. Her childhood came with constant change, as her family moved every couple of years. That meant learning how to be new over and over again. “At the time, it wasn’t always easy, constantly being the new kid and having to adjust to different environments,” she says. “But looking back, it really shaped me in the best way.”
The one constant was family dinner. “Those moments around the table were where everything happened—catching up, slowing down, just being together,” she says. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but that really shaped how I think about food now.”
Gabby and Garett met at a dog park, because sometimes the universe has the narrative sense of a Nora Ephron movie. They bonded over dogs and restaurants. He was at Florida Atlantic University, living “the young bachelor life.” She worked in photography. Before How Ya Dough’n, their life was family, beach, pool, and Garett dragging Gabby from Palm Beach to Miami to eat.
Then the pandemic arrived, and someone convinced them to buy a backyard pizza oven. Garett went deep into sourdough. Gabby saw the potential. “At first, it really was just something fun—an outlet during a time when everything felt uncertain,” she says. “We really started it for our kids and neighbors as something to do during Covid.”
It escalated fast, as good bad ideas often do. They built a following on Instagram and sold pizza through an app. People kept coming back. The numbers stopped looking like a hobby. “When we started selling close to 100 pizzas on a random Friday or even a Tuesday night out of our house, that was the moment it really clicked,” Goodman says.
Garett remembers another turning point: a call to his “pizza mentor,” Steven Leeds, and a decision on how to divide the labor. Leeds would assemble the pizza, Garett would cook them, and Gabby would run them out to the folks waiting in their cars.
By then, Gabby was pregnant with their third child. There were two kids under four at home, sometimes a hundred pizzas a day going out the door, and an HOA that sent a cease and desist letter and finally pushed them into opening a real restaurant. “To say we were living in chaos would be an understatement,” she says. “But we had so much momentum.”
That chaos soon gave way to a sustainable company DNA. Garett focuses on food. Gabby focuses on design and brand. The name came over martinis, which explains the apostrophe joke and maybe also the confidence required to launch a pizza business from a backyard. “I love a good pun—not in a cheesy way—but in a way that keeps things easy-going and approachable,” she says.
After opening a brick and mortar in Boca in August 2021, the second arrived in Boynton Beach in 2024. Then a third in Las Vegas opened in December 2025. Gabby talks about expansion carefully, the way people do when they know growth can either build a company or sand off everything that made it interesting in the first place.
“We’d love to franchise and bring How Ya Dough’n to more communities, but in a way that still feels authentic to our brand and the experience we’ve created,” she says.
The kids remember the backyard years. Goodman calls them “restaurant kids through and through.” That may be the truest inheritance here: not the pizza business exactly, but the evidence of what happens when a family turns pressure, noise, and one highly inconvenient legal letter into dinner.
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