The 200 available tickets to Casa Italiana’s Nov. 3 Pizzeria event were sold out in 22 seconds after the reservation form opened at 10 p.m. on Saturday. The waitlist was closed 13 minutes later after 552 people signed up, according to Casa Financial Manager Mak Klein ’14. This is the fastest sell-out time in Pizzeria history.
“I think … the reason it’s so attractive to people at Stanford is it’s a nice middle ground between a party and a way to hang out with your friends,” Casa Community Manager Alex Walker ’13 said. “It’s a once-a-quarter thing, so people leap at the opportunity.”
Casa Italiana’s Pizzeria originated decades ago as a small weekly dinner for the house before becoming a quarterly event open to anybody with a ticket — salad, pizza, gelato and, for those over 21, wine included — on Casa’s lawn, weather permitting.
Students who successfully submitted the form from the first link posted on the Pizzeria Facebook page will be able to attend Pizzeria, pending payment. Students must pay $15 per attendee for their full reservations by 8 p.m. on Oct. 31. Once the 207th person completed the reservation form, Klein closed it, then opened the waitlist form at 10:03 p.m.
Ticket sales for next weekend’s event were capped at 15 per reservation. Most reservations were for groups of eight to 15, and while students were allowed to make multiple reservations of 15 tickets, none did.
“Because it went so fast, people didn’t have enough time to do the form twice to get a group of 30,” Klein said. “People who were on the website right at 10 and filled it out didn’t get [tickets].”
He added that much of the anticipation for fall Pizzeria is due to the positive experiences that attendees reported at the spring Pizzeria, which hosted its 450 guests, a record-high number, in two successive seatings. Tickets sold out in four hours, which at the time had been unprecedented, according to Klein.
While winter Pizzeria is always smaller because of the unpredictable weather, Klein said Casa staff is planning to repeat last spring’s Pizzeria format this spring. Klein said that the staff would like to do two big seatings again to accommodate as many people as possible.
“The reason it was such a successful process this year is because the staff worked so hard to put the event together,” Walker said. “[We’re] really excited to have people over and show them what Casa is all about.”