Punky's pizza, taco shop to open at Upper Yoder Township location

Yahoo

09-02-2025

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – Punky's pizza and taco shop is coming back with a new location in Upper Yoder Township.
After getting unanimous approval from the Upper Yoder Township Zoning Hearing Board in January, Punky's is set to open this spring at 360 Goucher St. The location is next to a Giant Eagle supermarket and across from Berkley Hills Golf Course.
Punky's owner Scott Miller said he's working toward opening in early April and looks forward to continuing the Punky's legacy that his parents built in the Johnstown area for more than 60 years.
The family-owned business is best known for its square-cut pizza and its tacos made with Punky's homemade soft shells. There have been multiple Punky's locations through the decades, but its flagship location had long been a shop at 466 Harold Ave. in Johnstown's West End.
In recent years, Miller has been mass-producing Punky's signature shells at a facility in Johnstown's Hornerstown neighborhood for distribution to restaurants across the region. He embarked on that project in partnership with a friend, Johnstown businessman John Burley.
To dedicate time to the soft shell operation, Miller sold the Punky's takeout and delivery pizza shop in the West End to an employee in 2021, but it closed 21 days later. And after Burley died in a plane crash in late 2023, Miller started to wind down mass distribution of Punky's soft shells.
'Our goal was to go national, and then, after John passed away, it wasn't the same,' Miller said.
In addition to losing his business partner, the expenses of meeting rigorous regulations for mass production for large retailers over-extended him, he said. So he has refocused on reopening Punky's as a takeout and delivery restaurant.
'I just want to bring back our pizza and the tacos and feed the people,' he said.
Miller's father, Bob Miller, established the restaurant first as Kutzarino's in 1963. Kutz was his nickname, and he added an Italian 'arino,' Scott Miller said.
In the past 60 years, Bob Miller had more than 50 pizza shops throughout Cambria, Bedford, Indiana and Somerset counties. The most he had at one time was eight, Scott Miller said.
After the 1977 flood, Kutch's pizza was opened by Charles 'Kutch' Tomljanovic, who became Johnstown's mayor. To eliminate confusion between the two restaurants, Bob Miller changed his shop's name to reflect the nickname of his wife, Rosalyn 'Punky' Miller. The nickname evolved from Rosalyn's father calling her 'his little punkin' when she was about 3 years old.
'He used to call her his 'little punkin' and she would say, 'Punky,' ' Miller said.
Rosalyn Miller passed away in 2009. Bob Miller still lives in the area.
'I think he likes to be the pizza guy, the Punky's guy, and he likes to see the name still around,' Scott Miller said. 'I've always wanted to carry on my parents' legacy, and I just believe in our product.'
The Millers developed Punky's taco shell recipe around 1980.
'My parents decided to make a taco for our pizza shops when the whole Taco Bell thing became popular,' Miller said. 'They were like, 'Let's try to make our own taco,' and that's when it all happened.'
The soft shells became so popular that the Millers began to sell them to commercial customers including grocery stores by hand-cutting circles of dough with a pizza cutter at the West End shop.
In 2021, Miller and Burley purchased a building in Hornerstown and filled it with equipment including a 400-gallon fryer to automate the process.
'We were making like 2,000 shells an hour – not every day, but we had that capacity,' Miller said.
Punky's supplied eight food distributors and 50 restaurants in the Johnstown area, he said.
With that part of the company dissolved, Punky's new location on Goucher Street will be the only place to get tacos and flatbread pizzas made with Punky's soft shells.
'I feel terrible that I'm not going to have the space or the equipment to mass-produce anymore, but I was just killing myself trying to automate, and it was just like, 'I gotta do this for myself now,' ' Miller said.
Miller said he's been getting multiple calls from restaurant and food distribution customers in Northern Cambria, State College and Pittsburgh, telling him how much they will miss carrying his product.
'They are calling me saying they were buying freezers just to stock up when they heard we were going out of the shell distribution business, and that was a good sign that I had to keep carrying this on with a new shop,' Miller said.
'It feels good. I like to call this Goucher Street store 'Store No. 1.' I hope I can franchise this whole thing, maybe. I still have big dreams, but I'm OK if I just make a decent living with one place. I just feel like this is what I'm supposed to do.'
Miller is set to run the restaurant with his girlfriend Shannon Glover.
'I think in this location, we will have more traffic than we had at the West End location,' Glover said. 'I think it will allow us the opportunity to try different food specials and expand the menu. We want to offer healthy options and things other places aren't offering in our area.'
Miller said the planned menu includes Punky's traditional pizzas and tacos, as well as healthy salads that are more than the typical iceberg lettuce salad.
'I think Johnstown is lacking healthy food, and a lot of people on their lunch hour want to eat something healthy,' he said. 'At the same time, we want the greasy pizza and the greasy tacos, too, but I really want to have some healthy options and try to cater to everyone.'
Glover said plans also include the possibility of baking gourmet cookies.
'That was my daughter's idea and she will be involved in that venture,' Glover said. 'Closing the shell division of the company was a hard hit on Scott, but sometimes God has a better plan, and you just have to trust in it. That's where this is leading us. His parents started this as a family business, and we can turn this into our own business.'