Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream, the Iowa chain famous for inventing taco pizza, is set to open its first Twin Cities metro location on Aug. 24 at 750 Main Street in Mendota Heights. It’s a milestone for a brand that has spent more than five decades as a Midwestern staple but had never planted a flag inside the metro area, sticking instead to Greater Minnesota outposts in Crookston and New Ulm.
The Mendota Heights restaurant is the work of franchisee Brian Smith, and according to Bring Me The News, it could be just the first of as many as six new Happy Joe’s locations planned across Minnesota, a figure the outlet attributes to the Minnesota Star Tribune. The chain has long marketed itself as a family-centric, birthday-party-friendly restaurant, and the new store is expected to lean into that same dine-in nostalgia that has defined Happy Joe’s since it first opened its doors.
The location also drops Happy Joe’s into an active slice of local pizza competition. Its new address puts it directly across Highway 62 from Detroit-style pizzeria Bricksworth Beer Co., which is separately expanding into the same shopping-center area near the junction of Highway 62 and Dodd Road this August, according to the West St. Paul Reader.
A Taco Pizza Born From a Refusal
Happy Joe’s traces back to November 1972 in Davenport, Iowa, when founder Lawrence Joseph “Happy Joe” Whitty launched the chain after being reprimanded for throwing a child’s birthday party while managing a Shakey’s Pizza, according to Radio Iowa. Whitty, a North Dakota native who had moved to Iowa in 1966, led the company until his death in October 2019 at age 82, per the same outlet.
The chain’s signature dish came a couple of years later. In December 1974, Whitty refused a franchisee’s request to sell tacos and instead topped pizza dough with refried beans, taco-seasoned meat, lettuce, tomatoes, and crushed taco chips, creating what Happy Joe’s bills as the world’s first taco pizza, as reported by The Washington Post. It quickly became the chain’s top-selling item.
The dish also has a legal footnote. When competitor Pizza Inn tried to secure a national trademark on the term “taco pizza” in 1979, Happy Joe’s joined Pizza Hut in court to fight it, a battle that ended with taco pizza being ruled a generic menu term, per the Post’s reporting. That ruling is part of why regional chains like Casey’s gas stations can sell their own versions today.
Bankruptcy Hit the Parent Company, Not the Franchises
Happy Joe’s corporate history hasn’t been all birthday cake. In September 2022, parent company Dynamic Restaurant Holdings filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Delaware federal court, reporting $5.3 million in secured debt and a net income loss of $1.19 million for fiscal year 2022, driven by rising labor costs and food inflation, according to Restaurant Business. The petition was signed by CEO Tom Sacco that September.
The financial trouble stayed largely at the corporate level. The bankruptcy proceedings affected only parent holding company debt and corporate-owned units, insulating independently owned franchise locations — which make up roughly 90% of Happy Joe’s footprint — from operational disruption, per 98.1 KHAK. That structure means the Mendota Heights store, run by franchisee Smith, operates independently of any corporate liabilities.
A Turnaround Built on Nostalgia and New Markets
Since taking over in 2020, Sacco — who holds the title of Chief Happiness Officer and spent 48 years in the restaurant industry before joining Happy Joe’s — has pushed a brand turnaround centered on dine-in family nostalgia, according to The Food Institute. The chain shrank from more than 70 locations in the early 2000s to under 40 by 2026, and Sacco’s strategy is aimed at reversing that slide.
The Twin Cities debut fits into a broader expansion push. In July, Happy Joe’s signed a multi-unit development agreement with BB3 Hospitality Co. to enter Texas for the first time, targeting a late-2027 debut in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, according to Pizza Marketplace. As of mid-2026, the chain counted 35 domestic franchised locations and three corporate stores.
The brand has also gone global. Happy Joe’s opened its first restaurant in Egypt in October 2022 and had grown to six Egyptian locations by mid-2026, part of a 10-year master franchise plan covering up to 25 Middle East stores across countries including Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, Pizza Marketplace reports.
For now, though, the story in the Twin Cities is a hyper-local one: a taco pizza with 1970s roots landing across the highway from a Detroit-style upstart, with Smith’s Mendota Heights store serving as the test of whether Happy Joe’s brand of nostalgia can win over metro diners who have never had the chance to try it.
