As I’m sure most of Brooklyn pizza-lovers have heard, Patsy Grimaldi will be returning in March to his coal-fired oven at the site of the current Grimaldi’s pizzeria. He’s going to call it Juliana’s after his late mother. With such a happy ending to a sad story, I thought it was worth a reprint of my blog post from April of 2010. Now if only the tourists will keep lining up for the Grimaldi’s next door (although I’m not so sure they’ll be opening too soon), so that we can get our old neighborhood joint back!
Some might say this story is just a real-life version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It is that, but to me it is more about the question: “What’s the value of a name?”
This question has a lot of resonance for the movie business, and I’ll get into that next week.
My apartment building in Brooklyn is directly across the street from Grimaldi’s, one of the most famous Pizzerias in the world. People come from all over the globe to stand in long lines. (I took the above picture through my window yesterday afternoon.) Once inside, they put up with the rude waiters and uncomfortable seating for the opportunity to dine on pizza that is considered one of the best in the city, if not everywhere. Last week, no less than Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama ate there, setting off a tabloid controversy over whether Michelle said that it was better than Chicago pizza. (She didn’t.)
Even though it’s only a few yards away, my wife Melissa and I almost never patronize the place and neither does anybody we know in the building or neighborhood. Take a look at the reviews from locals on MenuPages, and New York Magazine’s 2009 list of famous New Yorkers choosing their favorite Pizza; only one, John Turturro, picks Grimaldi’s. If Melissa and I want take-out pizza, we get it from Fascati’s, on Henry Street.
Patsy Grimaldi learned how to make coal-fired brick oven pizza from his uncle, Patsy Lancieri, at age ten. Lancieri, who himself had trained with the man credited with opening the first pizzeria in America in 1905, opened Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem in 1931.
Sometime in the early 90’s, I’m assuming after Lancieri retired, the name “Patsy’s” was sold to a company who set about franchising it, and Patsy Grimaldi felt it was time to set up a restaurant of his own. I watched excitedly as the construction proceeded, and the bright green “Patsy’s” awning go up. One day, I peeked in the door and saw Patsy and his wife Carol inside, so I went in to welcome them to the neighborhood. Patsy told me proudly about his brick oven and its importance for pizza: it gives it a unique flavor and a crisp crust. I think there were only one or two other ovens like that in the city at the time. (Now they are ubiquitous.)
When I showed up on opening night I was impressed to see it was already packed. Patsy had a good mailing list. It was full to the brim with his friends--pure, glorious, pizza-loving Brooklyn people, the kind of folks who wouldn’t be caught dead in it today. He greeted me like a son and he personally brought over my first pie. I won’t try to describe that night, but I think you all have vivid sense memories of the great sensual experiences of your life. I lost my virginity that night, pizza-wise.
The Patsy Grimaldi I knew in those days was an artist. His artist’s materials may have been humble tomatoes and dough rather than paint or celluloid, but his approach was not that different from what other Italian-Americans like Scorsese or Coppola, or any artists do. I am not being flippant here. It is about being an artisan, knowing your craft, expecting the best of yourself, and respecting your audience. Remember that Coppola is a winemaker too—and his wine is very highly regarded.
Soon after he opened, Patsy was sued by the people who owned the “Patsy’s” franchise. They didn’t think he had the right to use his own name for a pizza place. He gave in and changed his green awning to “Patsy Grimaldi’s,” but even that wasn’t good enough for them. He had to put up a third awning, “Grimaldi’s,” before the bastards left him alone.
As the fame of the restaurant grew, it was often profiled on food and travel shows, and got in a lot of international guidebooks. That’s when the long lines of tourists started to form. It didn’t matter what how cold it was or whether there was a storm, they waited outside patiently. After all, if you have taken a subway ride to Brooklyn to have an experience, you’re not going to go back to the hotel without having it. And for anybody who happened to come to the neighborhood, the perpetual lines were the best advertising a restaurant could ever get.
Patsy sold “Grimaldi’s” around 2000, when he was just shy of 70. Running a restaurant is grueling work, and I’m sure the offers he was getting were pretty high. So he decided to retire, and sold it. From that point, all the people who worked there were Russians, except for a charming gentlemen who dealt with the lines. Having Russians run Grimaldi’s wasn’t necessarily a travesty. A large part of the Italian restaurants in New York today are run by Albanians, and many are quite good.
Unfortunately, the pizza changed utterly under the new ownership. The whole point of brick oven was the crispy crust, and you couldn’t even hold this pizza properly in your hands: the liquidy glop drooped over the sides of your fingers.
As many people have written in the reviews of the site, the waiters are as hostile as prison guards. The tables are crushed so close together that it’s hard to sit in the place. One person wrote in his MenuPages review that after he told the waiter he couldn’t pull his chair out enough to sit down and wanted to move to one of the other tables, he was told “take that table or else get out of here!” Perhaps some tourists think that rude waiters are part of the authentic New York dining experience. They are wrong about all the other restaurants in the neighborhood and they are really wrong with the place that Patsy Grimaldi ran.
Why is the pizza soggy at Grimaldi’s? Call me cynical, but you can move people in and out of the place faster if you don’t bother about whether the food is perfect—or even fully cooked. And as your customers are nearly all tourists, they won’t know the difference. In fact, they will rave about it. And not just tourists--many of my New Yorker friends love Grimaldi’s pizza.
Every time Melissa and I pass the long line across the street, she starts shouting, “Bad Pizza! Bad Pizza!” Even I get embarrassed and shush her. One time a young woman happened to be walking by and asked in this sad voice, “Really?” and I was ashamed--it was if we’d spilled the beans about Santa Claus to a little kid.
Like the “Patsy’s”-owning bullies who made Patsy Grimaldi change his awning twice, the new owners of the Grimaldi’s name are franchising it far and wide: there are now Grimaldi’s in Garden City, Hoboken, Douglaston, as well as Arizona, Florida, Nevada, Texas, and soon, the Limelight Marketplace in Manhattan.
In 2006, Patsy, then 75, told Jeff Vandam of the New York Times that retirement had been a mistake. He set up shop in a food court at Aviator Sports and Recreation in southeastern Brooklyn, as part of the “Brooklyn Food Hall of Fame,” which also included offerings from Junior’s and Jacques Torres. He told the Times that training young people in the art of making pizza wasn’t easy, and that he was urgently looking for a new pizza man, telling Vandam: “I did take one day off, and somebody else made the dough,” which they shouldn’t have done.”
When Vandam’s article was published, Patsy’s food stand still had no name.
