Tino’s Pizzeria in Cleveland Park has only been open since Labor Day, but it’s already distinguishing itself with pies offering unconventional, seasonal toppings.

Think octopus, peaches, figs, Nutella (for a smaller dessert pizza), and others on 10- to 11-inch Neapolitan-style pies.

Their names are catchy too.

Right now, “Prawn Love,” with its charred prawns, tomato sauce, piperade, cipollini onions, basil, and Parmesan, is the pizzeria’s showstopping pie.

“It’s beautiful to look at for sure,” says chef and owner Logan Griffith, adding that it’s something of a labor of love. “It takes a long time to clean those shrimp, take the shell off, you’ve got to devein them and then you’ve got to cut them in half.”

The owners say the most popular pizza is “Can I Smoke,” a pie serving up finocchiona salami, aged provolone, and smoked scamorza cheese.

And customers seem most intrigued by the “Octopie,” which comes with octopus, preserved tomato, mozzarella, pesto, olives, and parsley. Griffith cooks the octopus sous-vide in a water bath for five hours before charring it in the oven.

For eaters who aren’t quite as adventurous, “A Simple Pie” serves up tomato sauce and mozzarella with the option of adding pepperoni for an extra $2.

Tino’s Pizzeria marks the first restaurant for the four-person team behind it.

Three of the partners—Griffith; his wife, beverage director Maria Galindo Camacho; and managing partner Joe McCarthy—met when they were working at Wegman’s.

Griffith says he “instantly fell in love” with McCarthy, then the executive chef at the gourmet grocer, and started working as his sous chef in 2011 at the Fairfax location.

Four years later, Griffith fell in romantic love with Galindo Camacho at Wegman’s in Alexandria. They named Tino’s Pizzeria after their 17-month-old son, Constantino.

The trio come with decades of experience in the food industry.

Locally, Griffith mostly worked in fine dining at hotel restaurants—Blue Duck Tavern inside the Park Hyatt, the Inn at Little Washington’s restaurant (both of which are Michelin-starred restaurants) and briefly as executive sous chef at Kingbird inside Watergate Hotel. Galindo Camacho, meanwhile, was most recently a server at Kingbird’s whiskey bar and has served cocktails at the Four Seasons.

And McCarthy made his bones as culinary specialist for prepared foods at The Kroger Co. and as chef and owner of World Cuisine LLC, a culinary consulting company. Prior to that, he worked as executive chef in the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill.

McCarthy’s wife, Lauren, the pizzeria’s silent partner, works in sales and marketing as vice president for a Maryland-based builder.

Pizza has been Griffith’s “favorite food forever,” but Galindo Camacho wasn’t really feeling it until the couple visited Italy before little Tino was born.

After that, they joined forces with McCarthy, who needed no convincing about pizza—he grew up in a traditional Italian family in Connecticut and is passionate about farm fresh, local ingredients.

Griffith taught himself how to make pizza by reading cookbooks, studying the science behind dough, and trying things out in a test kitchen with McCarthy under the tutelage of the culinary director of Marra Forni—the company that made the restaurant’s gas brick pizza oven. And Griffith made pizza at home every Sunday for an audience of one.

“I was his guinea pig,” Galindo Camacho says.

Griffith’s Neapolitan-style dough uses hard, organic wheat that’s harvested in the fall, offering a higher protein content, combined with rye flour. As part of his process, he ferments naturally leavened dough with a sourdough starter for 48 hours. (He describes it as “very light,” but notes that it “has some chew to it also.”)

The minimalist, 28-seat pizzeria (plus patio seating) is situated inside a former Chipotle that the partners remodeled themselves.

They painted the walls and floors, added wood wainscoting around the edges, built a bar area where the soda fountain station once stood and a counter that left enough room for the pizza oven, and ordered tables from Minnesota made out of distressed cherry wood.

“We just wanted it to be clean, simple, a comfortable, neighborhood simple vibe,” says McCarthy, who served as the project’s general contractor.

As beverage director, Galindo Camacho has lined up red, white, and sparkling wines, and beer from local brewers like DC Brau and Right Proper Brewing Co., with plans to launch happy hour this month from 3 p.m.-6 p.m. Five cocktails are forthcoming.

In the coming weeks, Tino’s delivers a nod to fall with seasonal toppings like celery root, mushrooms, and butternut squash.

“You can put just as much effort into three-star Michelin food as you can a pizza,” Griffith says. “You’ve just got to have the right dough and the right ingredients to do it.”

Tino’s Pizzeria is located at 3420 Connecticut Ave. NW. Open Sunday-Thursday 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Friday and Saturday 11 a.m.-11 p.m.