Taso Vitsas will be forever remembered locally as the super-friendly restaurant owner who somehow got his friend and Cleveland Indians star Rajai Davis to wear a Crown Pizza hat during the 2016 World Series, where it was seen by millions on TV propped up on the dugout bench.

Vitsas credits this one move with doubling the Waterford pizza parlor’s business overnight.

But Vitsas had a dream to do bigger things, to enter the World Series of restaurant competition in a way, and when some relatives encouraged him to come to the Boston area to try his hand at business in the big city, he was ready to jump.

Vitsas, who credits his mom and dad for teaching him the restaurant ropes, called me a half dozen years ago to tell me he was leaving town to make his fortune in the Boston area, and I figured at the time it was the last I’d ever hear from him.

But Taso Vitsas is a different kind of dude, the kind who doesn’t forget where he started. So it was nice to hear from him again last week from his new home in Framingham, Mass., and find out he’s still in the restaurant business big time, and his company is making a splash all over New England.

In fact, he told me the Rail Trail Flatbread Co., the Hudson, Mass.-based restaurant group that he serves as marketing director, now has about 500 employees, operating a series of successful restaurants including an ice cream business and a newly branded Irish pub/speakeasy bar.

“Everything kind of worked out,” Vitsas said in a phone interview. “It was a tough transition and a risk, but it blossomed into something great.”

The group’s New City Microcreamery ice cream brand recently has made a mark in New England by being placed in all Big Y supermarkets as well as all Whole Foods stores in the North Atlantic region. I asked my wife to pick up a pint of the baklava-flavored ice cream, and I have to say it was delicious but expensive ($9.99).

Vitsas tells me the Cambridge, Mass., area has become a hotbed of ice cream competition, which I can understand having been raised in a home in the Boston area where my father would bring home eight-gallon containers of ice cream we were required to test out (I may have been one of the first people in the world to taste Brigham’s mocha almond flavor, still available in many supermarkets).

Anyway, the 42-year-old Vitsas is very impressed with the foodie scene in the area, and is looking to become more knowledgeable by getting his master’s degree in marketing at Babson College.

“This area demands you to become better,” he said.

When it comes to marketing, Vitsas said his restaurant group has tried just about everything, from newspaper advertising to newsletters to TikTok to Facebook reels. One thing he’s been trying to avoid is gimmicky marketing schemes.

“The crazy thing is each business has its own platform,” Vitsas said. “We’re probably putting up 50 to 60 pieces of content a day just to stay relevant.”

One marketing scheme he brought from Crown Pizza is the “pizza and poems” challenge in which students (originally from Oswegatchie School in Waterford) create poems that are then taped to the front of pizza boxes. At the Rail Trail Flatbread Co., with stores in Hudson and Milford, Mass., they are also attached to the front windows of the restaurants.

“That’s a tradition carried over,” he said.

But there’s always something new to master when it comes to marketing, including TikTok, which Vitsas said involves “genuine connections and authenticity,” plus YouTube shorts and Facebook, which he added are ”underutilized for business.“ But he said mailers with coupons and even door-to-door campaigns handing out gift cards have been effective.

“We literally have to do it all,” he said.

He even has an Instagram presence under the hashtag The_Hungry_Greek, a persona created at Crown Pizza that already had a devoted following. It was at his family’s restaurant, too, that Vitsas captured a world record by placing 112 different types of cheese on a 24-inch pizza, another of his marketing ploys.

So many of Vitsas’ early experiences revolve around Waterford and East Lyme, communities he remembers fondly, though he is a Westbrook High School graduate.

His parents have since been able to sell Crown Pizza and recently moved back to Greece to spend time with elderly relatives. But Vitsas said the lessons learned from his parents at Crown Pizza remain, especially the idea that treating people well is more important than making money. It’s an idea, he said, that his business partners ascribe to as well.

“We consider these businesses to be our home,” Vitsas said. “It’s a rare thing.”

It was one of those human connections that brought Vitsas his most iconic marketing idea when he had his friend Rajai Davis, whom he met while trying out for the baseball team at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point, to take a Crown Pizza ball cap before a World Series game in Chicago. A shot of the Crown Pizza cap in the dugout went viral and led to a buzz of excitement in the region, supporting a doubling of the size of the restaurant as new customers swarmed from far and wide.

“Once I saw how one little thing can change the course of your life, I decided I had to master it,” Vitsas said. “It changed the course of my family’s legacy ... and it was one little stroke of luck.”

Lee Howard is The Day’s business editor. To reach him, email l.howard@theday.com.