How Patsy Grimaldi Is Getting His Good Name Back

Christening a restaurant is never simple. But the question of what Patsy Grimaldi would call his new pizzeria was further complicated by the fact that he was legally barred from following the long-standing tradition of just naming it after himself. He couldn’t call it Patsy’s—he had called an earlier place that and been sued by the restaurateur who owned the rights to that name. Nor could he call it Grimaldi’s. For business purposes, his last name belongs to one Frank Ciolli, to whom he sold his iconic pizzeria under the Brooklyn Bridge in 1998. In the end, the 81-year-old chose to call the place Juliana’s, after his mother. It helped that the trademark was unclaimed.

If neither Patsy nor Grimaldi could be on the sign, Patsy Grimaldi was determined to put his stamp on the food. One morning earlier this month, he stood at the marble counter in front of Juliana’s refurbished coal-fired oven, auditioning two pizzaioli. Both were clearly nervous. And Patsy wasn’t making it easy. He didn’t like the way Jose Martinez, a 35-year-old with ten years of experience, threw flour on the board—Patsy showed him how to flick his wrist so it settled like a delicate layer of snow. He didn’t like the way 23-year-old Vinny Amato patted the dough—use your fingertips, not your palms—or the way he lifted it off the counter to stretch it with his fists; any true pizza man knows that will make the center too thin. “You get it?” Patsy asked as his fingers flew, nimbly caressing (“like a woman,” he used to say) a lump of dough into a perfect round. Then, perhaps realizing that he had to hire someone if Juliana’s were to open by the end of the month as planned, he added, “I know you are both professionals. But you have to do it my way.”

The prospect of pies done Patsy’s way—blister-edged discs topped with ingredients like fragrant tomatoes and his wife Carol’s homemade mozzarella—has had pizza geeks salivating since word first leaked last winter that the maestro was returning after nearly fifteen years in retirement. That Patsy would be serving his pies at 19 Old Fulton Street, the very spot on the Brooklyn waterfront where he and Carol had opened more than twenty years ago, would make them taste even better. But Patsy’s big comeback has been fraught. Ciolli, who continued to operate Grimaldi’s at 19 Old Fulton until this past December, when he was forced to move a few doors down after a bitter dispute with the landlord, has taken Patsy and Carol to court. Juliana’s, he claims in an affidavit filed last month, could slash his business by 30 percent or more. Patsy and Carol, he alleges, are trying to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.”

For Patsy, Juliana’s is more than just a swan song. “It’s a classic, almost Sicilian thing,” says Ed Levine, the editor-in-chief of the food blog Serious Eats and the author of Pizza: A Slice of Heaven. “This is about one thing: getting his good name back.” Even if the name he has to use to restore his legacy isn’t his own.

Never before has the city been the pizza wonderland it is today. You find great pies in Bushwick, the Village, Hell’s Kitchen—even midtown! And you can indulge in a kaleidoscope of styles. There are Sicilian slices at Di Fara; wood-fired Neapolitan pies with soupy centers at Franny’s and Motorino; Roman pies with their crackerlike crusts at Campo De’ Fiori; fried, lumpy, but delicious blobs called montanaras at Forcella and Pizz­Arte. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that less than ten years ago—what the New York Times’ Frank Bruni once called “less self-conscious pizza times”—good pizza in New York meant only one thing: a coal-fired pie.

According to lore, pizza made its debut in New York in 1905, when the Neapolitan immigrant Gennaro Lombardi began using leftover bread dough to make pizza at his grocery store in Little Italy. The pies were cooked in coal-fired ovens, not out of any culinary pretension but because that was the technology of the day. The result was a pizza with a crust that was neither too thick nor too thin, a slightly charred bottom that lent a subtle smokiness, and distinct islands of sauce and fresh-pulled mozzarella.

The original Lombardi’s closed in the early eighties (a spinoff still operates in Noho), but not before giving root to New York’s three other great pizza families. Anthony Pero, who opened Totonno’s in Coney Island in 1924, worked there. So did John Sasso, who started John’s in 1929, and Patsy Lancieri, who opened Patsy’s in East Harlem in 1933. To a casual observer, their pies might have seemed interchangeable. But the four families have long defended their turf with the same ferocity of those other famous New York families (minus the violence and illegal sidelines). Louise “Cookie” Ciminieri, Anthony Pero’s granddaughter, still runs Totonno’s in Coney Island. She refuses to tell customers what goes into her sauce or whether there’s a touch of Romano cheese sprinkled on her pies. (Survey says? There is!) And she certainly would never deign to taste someone else’s pie. “I don’t eat anyone’s pizza,” she says brusquely. “Because then they turn around and say Totonno’s eats my pizza!”

by Jane Black, New York Magazine |  Read more:

Photo: David Leventi