Marion’s Piazza’s new Troy restaurant — the Dayton-based pizza chain’s first expansion in more than two decades — is scheduled to open on Valentine’s Day, Feb. 14, and another new restaurant will follow later this year in Mason, according to Roger Glass, CEO of the Dayton-based pizza chain.

The new Troy restaurant — located at 1270 Experiment Farm Road off of West Main Street (Ohio 41) near Interstate 75 — will employ 50 and will seat about 500, including 80 on an outdoor patio, Glass said. It will include a game room and a banquet room that will be available for general dining.

This is the eighth Marion’s pizza restaurant in the Miami Valley and the first new location since 1991, when the 46-year-old chain opened a restaurant at Town & Country Shopping Center in Kettering. In 2008, the company also built a new restaurant on Kingsridge Drive in Miami Twp. after fire destroyed a previous store there.

A ninth Marion’s Piazza is planned for Mason later this year, Glass said. It will be located at the Tylersville Road and Snider Road intersection, across Snider Road from a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. Construction is scheduled to begin this spring, with a target opening in early to mid-November, Glass said.

Troy and Mason were attractive sites for expansion because both cities are doing relatively well economically and have a solid base of industries and other development, Glass said. In addition, the two cities are far enough away from Dayton so as not to compete with existing Marion’s Piazza locations, but close enough to be supplied out of the Dayton-based commissary, he said.

There are no immediate plans for additional expansion. “We don’t grow very fast, but we do it on our own time frame,” said Glass, the son of the chain’s founder, Marion Glass. And the chain is careful to avoid significant debt when it builds new restaurants.

“The Troy store will be paid for on the day it opens,” Glass said. “That’s the way my dad did it, that’s the way we still do it, and it seems to work.”