Pizza: A Love Story (2019) Movie Script

- Anyone who would ever use the phrase
"It's just pizza," they're beyond hope.
And you can only hope that at some point
in their life they're willing to try it,
and then no words are necessary.
All they have to do is try it.
You know, I would just
silently say to myself,
it's your loss, it's your
loss, just get away from me.
(soft upbeat accordion music)
- [Narrator] If you haven't
been to New Haven and had Pepe's
and Sally's
and Modern,
you really can't talk about pizza
with any authority I don't think.
- Sally's.
- Modern.
- Pepe's.
- Sally's.
- Pepe's first.
- Modern.
- There're great things about each of them
and I don't like to take
sides in the pizza world.
- You have to go with Sally's.
- It's gonna be Sally's
- Oh Sally's.
- Sally's
- I was raised on Sally's.
- By far Sally's.
- I like Sally's.
- Sally's basically.
- And if I had to choose
between the three,
I would choose Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern.
- Modern Apizza.
- Right here, where Pepe's is,
the best pizza in the world.
- Pepe's.
- Pepe's pizza.
- I'm a Pepe's guy.
- Pepe's.
- Pepe's.
- Pepe's.
- Pepe's.
- I love Pepe's.
Yey Pepe's!
- [Interviewer] Sally's, Pepe's or Modern?
- Yes.
(all laughing)
(upbeat music)
(pizza knife rolls)
- [Interviewer] Do you think
there's a huge learning curve
when you're sitting
down for that first pie?
- There is a learning curve,
'cause people will, " oh,
why is it cut like this?"
why is it shaped like
this, why is it burnt.
And I bet when they say why is it burnt,
a little part of you, your heart stops,
and you say oh, we need to
educate these people right now
this is not burnt, this
is charred, this is the,
this is what this pizza is all about.
- [Amy] Pepe's was my first experience,
and I remember being
blown away by the charr
of the pie and thinking, they do this,
they can do this, and this is pizza?
It was a different kind of experience
a different kind of pizza, it was dirtier
it was grittier, it was more flavorful,
it just had a lot more personality than,
New York Style pizza or Neapolitan pizza
or you know, those deeper dish pies
that I was used to as a kid.
- People get scared just by looking at it
with never tasting it, and
then once they taste it,
they get it and then it's like,
oh, okay, I'll tell you,
99 per cent of the time,
when they wanna send it
back, and I can convince them
to take a bite of it first, they keep it.
At Mordern, especially, we
use open flame brick ovens
so there's an open flames,
like cooking in your fireplace.
So you're gonna get a little
bit of char on the outside
it's like barbecue.
- I always bring people to Pepe's,
or Sally's or Modern
and the first thing is,
they can't believe that it's so charred,
it's so, well, burnt they think.
But I think as soon as they eat it
they realize oh that's not really burnt.
It's a little bit of
smoke, but it's not burnt.
- If you say the Pizza's burned,
I just say they cook it well done,
they cook it the right way, basically,
it doesn't taste burnt
to me when I eat it.
- I don't know any other place,
or any other kind of pizza
that when you leave you
have dirty fingernails.
You need to actually like,
thoroughly wash your hands
after eating a New Heaven pizza,
'cause it looks like, I don't
know, you've been gardening.
- Don't let anybody tell you that,
there was pizza before 1565 in Italy,
because Italy didn't have
tomatoes until the 1600s.
It's interesting because
everyone has this imagine
of Italian eating sauce and having pizza,
well before that time,
actually it was brought
to the king of Naples in
1565 by the kind of Peru
as a gift, what they did was,
they planted these seeds
at the base of Vesuvius.
In this very fertile,
rich, lava coated land,
that grew these, what they
called San Marzano tomatoes
which is known the world
over for Neapolitan sauce.
You know when you're up in
the fields tending the sheep
or you're filing the lands
so you brought up some bread
and you had some dried tomatoes
you just slathered on bread
and that was your lunch, and
that was the origins of pizza.
Once you pull back the layers
and start understanding
where pizza comes from you realize,
that it was brought over
mostly by the women,
who in Southern Italy, make
do with very few resources.
They were very ingenious
in what they cooked.
When you think about immigration
and how it dove tails in with pizza,
that was the food of choice
amongst many many immigrants
because that's all they could afford.
You have to remember the
role of the women in all this
is that they were the difference,
between starvation and survival.
(speaking in a foreign
language) it was the language,
the food of the poor, which
now becomes number one
on the American food
list, everyone craves it,
people come from all over
the place to eat it, why?
Well it evolved over centuries
and centuries of women,
caring women, nurturing women who cooked
with scarce resources and came up
with this phenomenal cuisine
called Campania cuisine
which part of it is pizza.
- Italian immigration to
New Haven really started
with the sort of need for workers.
- Sargent lock, and this is no pun,
was a magnet for especially
people from the Amalfi Coast.
- Sargent Hardware, in the two decades
before World War one was among
the great hardware
manufacturers in the world.
They were pioneers of mass customization.
They were 10 to 12 thousand
full time employees.
It was a very high-quality
manufacturing firm
and it ran out of Yankees early.
- Sargent's wife had Italian roots,
and she actually was instrumental
in convincing her husband
to send agents throughout the Campania,
they combed the poor towns of the South,
and offered young men,
who were mostly unskilled,
opportunities to come here
and find immediate work.
They would get off the
boat literally in New York
the Richard Peck, which was a small boat
that took people right to
the harbor of New Haven,
and they pulled right up to the dock
and they had a saying
amongst the immigrants.
They said (speaking in
a foreign language).
The boat stops at
Sargent's in other words,
as soon as you got to
New Haven your first stop
wasn't the employment agency,
you checked in at Sargent's
you got your job, and
that's why there were
so many Italians around Wooster street,
the Wooster Square Neighborhood,
it's because they found
them housing for them too.
So they literally were paid for,
they were sponsored for by Sargent,
who took this whole strada
of poor people, basically,
unskilled young men and gave them work
on the production lines,
you know, at the factories,
making locks and coffins and house fixes.
They were the forerunners
of sort of the Home Depot
of today, they exported their
goods all over the world,
even in the 10s and the 20s,
New Haven was going
through an economic boom
they were emerging
factories all over the city
that were looking for unskilled labor
and they found many of
it in Italian immigrants.
Sargent's was a colossal building
it just took up city blocks it was huge.
- [Douglas] I traced
out the home addresses
of people hired in the
first six months of 1910
and sure enough they are tightly bunched
in what we now think of as Wooster Square.
- [Anthony] At one time
you could just walk down
from any part of Wooster
Square neighborhood
and just walk down to
Sargent's and go to work,
that's what they did.
- [Douglas] So New Haven accumulated,
largely through their efforts
an unusually large and
unusually geographically focused
immigrant population of Italians.
- [Anthony] It was hope for
things like steady work,
unheard of for most farming
people in Southern Italy.
An apartment of your own that
you could eventually own,
the American dream.
- But ever so quickly they realized
that they were without their staple foods.
And we find that bakeries,
Italian bakeries,
were first listed as early
as 1890 in city directories
and it's from those bakeries
that the original pizzerias evolved.
- I don't like to hear the word pizza
I grew up in a generation
of loyal New Haven,
not just Italian
Americans, Irish Americans,
Polish Americans, whatever you were,
you always referred to that
fine Italian crust as apizza.
- There is an image a great image,
of another historic pizzeria
that was the different family
this was the Mayerino family.
They had a place called
Mayerino's restaurant
and they had an awesome
image of the three brothers
behind the bar with a sign behind them
that says a apostrophe pizza, but it's,
as we pronounce it apizza,
and it's the only
evidence we've ever found
of the word apizza having an apostrophe,
which takes us back to how apizza started.
- The article before a word would be,
you know in Italian would be lapizza,
which is proper Italian,
but in Neapolitan dialect
you didn't say la it was
a or o, so it was apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza
- apizza.
- apizza.
- New Haven apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza.
- apizza, apizza.
- apizza, apizza (speaking
in a foreign language).
- I think that's how you pronounce it.
- I used to call it apizza,
because that's what my
father used to call it.
- I think it's time went
on and as I got older
it began to change with me, you know,
I started saying apizza, you know,
not unless there was a
couple coming from Italy,
true Italians and they'd say apizza,
then I would say apizza,
'cause we could relate.
- It was never called pizza.
What are you gonna have,
we're going for apizza,
you're going for apizza,
here we are Polish people,
we're going for apizza.
- It's always good to have a
title that no one understands.
- You better say it right.
(soft string music)
the first record of a pizzeria comes from
a gentleman named Francesco Scelzo,
and he had a pizzeria on Hamilton street.
It was bakery in the back
with a big coal fired oven,
you had to go down an alley,
past the tenement to get to it
and there was a tenement in the back,
once noted as the beehive
because it had 18 rooms in it
that were rented out to immigrants.
This site was the first known pizzeria
and there's a whole family history about
how the sign was spelled wrong.
Instead of Pizzeria Napolitana,
it was spelled Pozzeria
Napolitana, meaning crazy house.
(upbeat music)
So after this kind of evolution
of these early bakeries
into pizzerias, we do
get some verification
of early pizza makers, Scelzo being one,
another being Ignassio Camposano
we have records of his
family actually opening up
a bakery in 1917, it was sort
of a behind the house bakery
and he would deliver
bread but he would also
cart around pizza on his cart,
Camposano eventually opened
up a storefront bakery
right on Hill street,
which was basically called
Pizzeria Napoletana or Composano's apizza,
his bakery definitely
served pizza and bread,
it was hand in hand.
(soft Italian music)
- Pepe's pizza's you know,
different and special.
You feel as though it's not
as much of a business
that's invested in this pizza,
you feel that it's someone's life.
When you see a Pepe's pizza,
it's the product of someone's life,
their life's work, total
commitment to this pizza.
That's the way it struck me.
- [Journalist] And the top
pizza in America goes to Pepe's
in New Haven, a 90 year old institution
which has won the Daily Meal
contest three years in a row.
- Honestly, over the
years, I think its six
or seven years that we've
been doing this list,
there's only one year that
Pepe's has not been number one
on that list and it was
knocked off by Di Fara
and then went right back to number one.
You can't talk about pizza in this country
unless you talk about Pepe's.
- In the grand scheme of all things pizza,
Frank Pepe is number one to five.
(upbeat music)
- He came back from World War one,
he was here in 1907, however
he returned to the war
to fight for Italy in World War one,
and he returned married
in January of 1919.
He worked at Sargent's, he didn't like it,
he gravitated to learning
how to bake bread here
and he joined up with a
larger bakery Genneroso Muro
where other bakers were working,
such as his brother Peter.
He founded Frank Pepe Pizzeria in 1925.
Rented a location which
is now part of our annex
which is called the spot.
- When he was working out of there
and he was, you know, selling
his pizzas with his headdress
in the cart.
- [Colin] Literally selling
it for five cents apizza
and he went to factories, he
went to the produce market,
and he got well known for that.
- [Gary] He couldn't keep
track of owed him money.
- [Colin] He couldn't document
where he brought the breads
to, he couldn't read or write.
- [Gary] So that's when his
wife, my grandmother said,
well let's have 'em come to us.
- The Spot is the original
location and the original oven.
He was there from 1925 to about '38.
(soft music)
- When the repeal of
prohibition happened in 1933,
Connecticut State Law allowed restaurants
to have a tavern license
and you could sell beer
and stay open until
three a.m in the morning.
And Pepe followed suit, he
had enough money saved up,
he had a growing family, he
live upstairs from a meat market
and a grocery store, and
he got money together
and bought the buildings, and
he converted those two stores
into what was then considered
the largest pizzeria in the country
and that's phenomenal,
considering that New York City,
Boston, and other cities in the 30s
had some sizeable pizza restaurants,
nobody had 136 seats in two rooms.
Pepe opened the doors to
other than just Italians
coming into a pizzeria.
So that's 1935, he bought the building,
1936 he expended he built
a giant 14 foot brick oven
made by Middleby in
Boston, had a local mason
put it together, and just
started chugging out pizzas.
(soft upbeat music)
- My grandfather, he was a charming fella.
He was actually very
self-effacing often times,
as I remember him, he died
when I was 18 years old.
But I think he had a great
entrepreneurial spirit,
and I think he was very charming
and I think he really drew people in.
He also had a sense of self promotion.
Even though, like I said,
he was very self-effacing
you would never know it
but, what I'm seeing now
as I archive the imagery of the past,
you know there's so
many of him with in his,
in his garb if you will,
you know his hat and bowtie
and he took the time and he must have had
the wherewithal to know
that this was significant.
It has nothing to do
with the pizza itself,
but it also has to do with,
I think, bringing people in
I think the popularity was
based a lot on that as well.
- Another phenomenal
thing that Frank Pepe did
was he had the first ever pizza box,
at least the first record
of a pizza box in the world
made for him, we're talking about 1936.
The story goes is that a customer
worked at the National Folding Box company
and he offered Pepe to make his own boxes.
This historic box was found
in the attic of Pepe's
by one of the family members.
It's the oldest record of
a pizza box in the world.
Frank Pepe helped americanize pizza.
Frank Pepe also helped bring his version,
his family's version of pizza to America
and it's what we know
as American style pizza.
(soft upbeat music)
(patrons chattering)
- I like the red pie with bacon
I like the white clam with bacon
and I like the white
pie with fresh tomatoes.
- I don't know, my dogs are playing,
the cheese pizza, the Margherita,
and the clam pizza, amazing.
- At Sally's favorite
pie, love the plain pie.
- Sausage and mushroom.
- Sausage and mozzarella.
- Sliced tomato.
- If I'm feeling crazy, sausage.
- Margherita or clam
- All of 'em, depends on the day.
- And my husband's favorite pizza,
honey, what's your favorite pizza?
- Anchovies.
- Pepperoni.
- The Italian bomb.
- Plain tomato.
- The tomato pie at Sally's.
- A plain pie.
- Plain tomato with grated cheese.
- Plain with garlic.
- Plain with garlic.
- Plain cheese pizza.
- The cheese pizza.
- The mootz.
- The white clam at Pepe's.
- Clam and garlic.
- Clam.
- Clam.
- The white clam.
- The white clam.
- The white clam.
- The white clam.
- The white clam pizza.
- The white clam.
- The white clam.
- Clam and with bacon at Pepe's.
- Bacon and onion.
- A bacon and sausage.
- Sausage bacon.
- Bacon.
- Bacon and mozzarella.
- Bacon with the mozzarella and marinara.
- Bacon.
- Bacon.
- Bacon.
- A double bacon well done.
- Anchovies.
- Crushed tomato, the local crush tomatoes
with mozzarella and bacon,
just like you're having a
toasted cheese sandwich,
believe me.
- yeah.
- And they would have broccoli
rave in season at Sally's
and I can go on and on.
- [Husband] The 23 inch Italian bomb.
- My husband prefers the
23 inch Italian bomb.
- The greatest experience I had at Pepe's
was having their pizza.
- If I have to pass away in this world,
Sally's would be the last
bit I would wanna have.
(soft upbeat music)
- A real sign of
accomplishment in New Haven
is the secret number at Sally's.
Now, I had the secret number
before I became mayor,
I was given the secret number, of course,
if you told anyone the secret number,
you were in danger of
not being able to use
the secret number.
- A secret number, and
I'm sorry for those of you
who waited for two and a
half, three hours outside
in line to get in, but
we're friends and family.
Private number that would still ring true
even though they were
already full for the night
and I would say hi, it's Michael Bolton
and I need to try to get in with five
or six people tonight is it possible?
What time you come in Mike?
Then there would be the
difficult experience
of walking past people waiting in line.
- [Announcer On TV] We now
return to cutting in line
in front of Italians.
(all clamoring)
- Now when I was a citizen
I didn't mind so much
but when I became mayor I felt it wasn't
so egalitarian to cut
lines, except for pizza.
apizza I'll cut the lines.
- You had to keep your head down
while you were walking
past people who were
looking and not necessarily
noticing, oh is that the singer?
They're more thinking
where are they going,
why, wait, how are they getting in?
- That phone number is not secret,
it's hooked up to my home,
so when I come to work,
I hook it up here, so any you know,
I do have family that will occasionally
have to get to me in an emergency
but I could discontinue that
'cause we all have cell phones now.
- To have that number was
a very very special thing.
That would be like an
all-access pass backstage.
(soft accordion music)
- Everybody calls me Flo, so,
we're friends, call me Flo.
Sal was Mister Pepe's nephew,
my mother-in-law and Mr.
Pepe were brother and sister.
- [Bob] My father who worked
for his uncle down the street
and my Uncle Tony also my
father's younger brother,
they both worked there,
they learned the trade from Uncle Frank.
- My brother-in-law who
worked there with him,
Uncle Tony had words with the uncle.
So he walked out, and naturally,
his brother followed him.
- Somewhere along the
way, there was a baker
who wasn't doing very well.
- This was a bread bakery,
in late 30s it went under,
and my grandmother bought it.
- She hocked so jewelry and for $500,
they bought the business from the baker
and started Sally's Pizza.
Tony was still a minor and you had to be
21 or over to get a beer permit,
and that's all it was, it
was beer insider permit.
So that's why it got to be called Sally's.
(soft music)
- My grandmother opened down
the street from her brother.
It was not bringing any animosity,
if anything he helped,
and Uncle Frank would
help and help my father.
- [Flo] there's always
been the saying, you know,
Sally's or Pepe's, makes it
seem like we're competing.
There's no competition, I'm very friendly
with my husband's cousins
and they're friendly with me.
- [Interviewer] Do you
ever eat their pizza?
- [Flo] No.
- When I graduated high
school it was 1940,
at that time, his brother Tony was there.
His sister Connie and
Sarah were the waitresses.
So when we would go to Sally's,
we would get there like
after getting through
with the treater as young kids in the end,
we would get there like 11:15 or something
and by the time we have
pizza and playing cards
or what have you, it was
like 1:30 in the morning
and we were still high school students.
- [Interviewer] Do you
remember what a small pie
would cost back then or?
- All I know is when (chuckles)
you're gonna think it's,
when I took my family to eat pizza,
it was the cheapest place that I could go
and support, and feed my family.
- It was a good meal
for a reasonable price
and so, we had a lot of
factories in New Haven then,
and a lot of the factory
workers would come in
and in those days Sal
would open for lunch,
and then close, and then open,
and he'd stay open til one,
two o'clock in the morning.
Yeah, he had long hard hours.
(soft music)
He's the boss.
- No, no, I'm no boss.
- No really, he takes care
of everything in the kitchen
and he leaves the floor to me.
- I love the interior of Sally's.
Sally's looked like what I would want
a pizza place to look
like, like in The Sopranos
or something like you walk
in, it was old school,
old feel everything about it felt right.
Look at that pie, makes me wanna cry Frank
a work of art, the crust,
so brown let's see.
What do we got an eight eight
and an eight five so far
in New Haven, one bit
everybody knows the rules.
Woofster street, right,
that's where we're at?
- [Cameraman] Yeah.
- Yeah.
(crust crunches)
- Flo and the family do not consider
their place a restaurant, it's
an extension of their house
they feel like they're throwing a party,
or that they've invited
you or, into their house.
It's not a retail
establishment in the way that,
most retail establishments
are, so, I think again,
some people are not comfortable with that
and they feel, this is
ridiculous, you know,
I just want pizza, you know,
why can't I just go in
and have apizza in peace?
Well that's not part of what going over
to the, you know,
Consiglio's house is like
and you just have to sort of accept that.
Some people bridal that
they get caught up in the
is it fair, is it unfair,
is it this, is it that?
And the fact of the matter is,
they are not asking you
if you think it's fair.
You know, you can go to
Modern, you can go to Pepe's.
- So I think it's
suspending a little bit of,
what you think is control as a diner,
that's really what this
Sally's experience is about,
is accepting that, you know,
you're in their dining room
and you know they're gonna give you,
what they wanna give you
and you're okay with that
you know, 'cause you're at Sally's.
- Nine two, nine-two.
(soft music)
- Oh my God.
- [Server] Dig in.
(patrons chattering)
- [woman] Oh it's hot.
- [Man] It is really hot.
- [Woman] It's really hot.
(patrons chattering)
- Tomato sauce is delicious.
- I would say that anybody
that's asking what is a plain pie
what's a New Haven plain pie,
it's called a tomato pie.
It's a red pie it is grated cheese only,
it's just Romano cheese
only, there is no mootz
- When grandpop and my
grandmother did start,
pizza was just plain
tomato, grated cheese,
oil, garlic and oregano for garnish.
- We didn't know anything of any bacon,
we didn't know anything of a sausage,
it was just plain tomato
sauce, the marinara,
and it couldn't afford anything more.
- The standard of a
pizza I think is a plain,
how good is your sauce,
how good is your crust?
Let's eliminate all the other stuff
and let's see what you got.
- Pizza is, at it's
heart, such a simple food.
I don't want its faults and
its pleasures to be hidden.
So when a plain pie can't hide bad sauce
or crust, non-descript cheese
I mean, it is what it is.
- The first thing I look on the menu,
is the world plain up there,
if there isn't plain I'm in trouble,
I don't even wanna go there,
because they don't get
it, or they don't get it,
but let's put it this way,
their clientele demands something else.
- They do dream up some really
weird concoctions though
- Yeah we've seen like uh, sausage,
sausage, pepperoni and anchovy you know.
Disgusting but.
- And cucumbers.
- Wait a second, what is that?
- It's cucumbers.
- No no no, you can't
put cucumbers on a pizza.
- It's not mozzarella, it's mootz,
and I don't know if that's
just a traditional way
that New Haven has
described their mozzarella
and I know I'm not an
Italian-American so I don't,
I can't give it the kind of flourish
that some of the proprietors can
of each of these New Haven
institutions but yeah, it's mootz
- In New York, in Boston, in
some of these older places,
Trenton, New Jersey, you get
some of these restaurants
that they understand, they
still call it a marinara,
they may not call it
a plain, and you know,
it is a testament to the
history and tradition
and a lot of 'em lost that,
they lost it probably in the 50s,
when sort of the popularity
of just the cheese pizza
became prevalent everywhere.
- There is a huge learning
curve, especially,
I mean the country it's huge
I mean you travel, people travel,
you get to the midwest, they have no idea.
- Would you like some pizza?
- What is pizza?
- You don't know what pizza
is, where are you from?
- I'm from Kansas.
(soft music)
- [Interviewer] Sally's,
Pepe's, or Modern?
- Modern
I was dating my wife, who
is living around the corner
from Modern about 15 years
ago and that became our spot
so I love Pepe's I love
Sally's but I'm a Modern guy.
- Modern is the definition
of pizza, this is amazing.
This is a stone cold stunner
to get the one two three off right here.
Hmm!
- The story of Modern is
a really amazing story.
You gotta go back to a
guy named Antonio Tolli.
And he was born in Plainville,
he ended up going back
to Italy with his family
and grew up in Italy in the teens and 20s,
and finally came back to New
Haven to live with his uncle
in 1930 as an 18 year old.
- His uncle was none other
than Giuseppe Marzullo,
one of the earliest Italian
pastry maker in New Haven.
His place was on Wallace Street,
Tolli learned how to make
pastries from his uncle.
In 1933 after the repealed prohibition,
a lot of these guys were considering
opening up restaurants
so they could sell booze,
they could have some pizza.
Tony went into business with his cousin
and they opened up a place,
and they named it Washington
Pizzeria, on Washington Avenue.
In '36 the understanding
is that the two split.
Marzullo went back to making
pastries on Washington Avenue
and Tolli opened up
a completely new pizzeria on State Street.
He opened up where Modern is today,
he built an oven in the back,
it was the same kind of
oven that Pepe's built
a Middleby oven from Boston,
and he named it after
himself, Tony's Apizza.
He opened up a lot of
restaurants, Tony was a busy guy
and all the while he was training people,
you know he was a cook,
he was a really good cook
and he trained people as well.
One of the guys he
trained was Louis Persano.
Louis took over the
business in the early 40s
and he also had another
guy named Nick Nuzzo,
they all worked for Tony.
They really had to find a new name,
and the story that we
hear, is that Nick Nuzzo
went next door to the
Polish drugstore owner,
John Bosniak, and he said,
we don't wanna call it Tony's anymore,
what should we call it?
And he says well you guys are new right,
so let's call it Modern, and
that's how that name stuck,
Modern Appizza.
- [Interviewer] And what year was that?
- That was in 42.
The tradename for Modern
Apizza is listed and recorded
in 1944 and the sign
that we now understand
it was a neon sign that was first made
most likely comes from that time period.
So over time, you know,
you've got different owners,
so Louis Persano became a fireman,
Nick Nuzzo took over in the early 50s,
and he owned it for 40 years with his son
and wife and all his family, and finally,
after the death of
Nick's son Barry in '87,
they sold it to Bill Pustari.
- So I had a pizza place
prior to this in Fairfield
in Black Rock Turnpike
in Fairfield Connecticut.
And that was in 1986.
Nick wanted to sell the place
but he didn't wanna put it on the market.
He didn't want people to know
that it was going downhill so fast.
I had a meeting with Nick at his house.
I said obviously you need help,
I'll start working for ya
that was Monday we had the meeting,
I started working Tuesday the next day
here as a pizza man, and then
it took us about six months
so make the deal and close on it.
And in those years that's where we became,
like the local place,
know where the locals go.
- When I'm at Modern I
don't feel the weight
of the pressure that Pepe's
and Sally's I think have
that everybody in New Haven
kinda has to pick a side
and from being from outside of New Haven,
I like to have Modern, it's a little bit
more user-friendly for me as
a New York, New Jersey guy
you know, it's more of what I'm used to,
size and shape wise it's
a cleaner cut for me
and it's got more cheese coverage so,
it just feels more familiar.
- To me Modern then and Modern now,
it's just continuation, it's family.
I mean after CYO, everybody
would go for pizza,
you went ice skating,
everybody went for pizza,
it was part of your life, it
was part of your socializing
it was part of being young.
- [Interviewer] Have
you noticed any changes
in the pizza over the years?
- The apizza, the taste
sames to be the same
the were probably
following the same formula
for putting it together.
- You know we have to be consistent
so we have consistent product all the time
and we have consistent help,
the help never changes here,
everyone's been here
I mean most of my guys
have been here 28 years,
30 years, they don't leave.
They've only made pizza here,
they've never made pizza
anywhere else and
they've all learned here.
So in the rotation of making pizza here
you have to start at the bottom.
And then as your job
changes you keep moving up
until you become a pizza man.
We don't hire a pizza man.
You'll never see an ad in the newspaper
saying help wanted pizza man at Modern,
we don't hire 'em like that.
So we teach 'em all from the bottom up
so everyone works their way up to the top
and I think that's why
we have the same quality
that we have because
everyone's learned here
no one's bringing in their own thoughts
and their outside stuff, so.
- And you also still make the pies?
- I still do you know after 30 years,
I'm not on the schedule but if we get busy
we get a big order I jump
right in and make 'em
and everyone knows that
because I trained everybody.
I didn't graduate business school,
I graduated from restaurant
U, I make pizzas,
and that's all I ever did and
that's all I wanted to do.
- [Interviewer] So how
much meat is on this?
- There are three meats on it,
pepperoni, sausage and
bacon, then there's also
three vegetables on it,
peppers onions and mushrooms,
and garlic, obviously,
we call it a diet pizza.
The three vegetables
cancel out the three meats.
- [Interviewer] What is it that you think
makes the Modern pie such a great pie?
- [Bill] So it's an old-fashioned dough,
the dough that we use, I don't use yeast,
I use a natural airborne yeast,
I use something called a mother.
So the mother is a living breathing thing
and you have to keep feeding it.
And by feeding it what I mean is,
as you use it, you have
to give it more flour,
because there's natural yeast
that's already in the wheat
that's in the air, that's
how Belgiums make beer.
Well that's how we make dough,
and that was the original
way to make dough.
We don't use a brewer's
yeast or dried powder yeast,
we actually have a living mother,
that's the way they make
it in Europe, in Italy.
And you just keep reusing the old dough,
and that creates your yeast.
Then we take that and we go
to a 24 hour cold frontation
so we let the dough rise in the cooler
instead of letting the dough rise outside.
- [Interviewer] How much dough do you have
in the cooler at one time?
- We make dough twice a day,
so after lunch if we went
through 10 trays of dough
10 trays would be 150 pizzas,
you go downstairs and
they refill those 10 trays
and put 'em back in a walkin box again.
But right now we have about 60 to 70 trays
average 10 so 700 pieces
of dough in a rotation
that's constantly rotating.
Only San Marzalo tomatoes, only olive oil,
and we use the best
cheese that we could buy
and you know it's not the
fresh mootzarella cheese
you know your typical Naples pizza,
it's American mozzarella,
but it's a whole milk
it's a high-content of butter fat in it
because we have high temperature ovens
with a lot of top heat, so we don't have
as much bottom heat but
we have a lot of top heat
so you need the butterfat in the cheese
so it doesn't burn.
I could buy cheese at $2 a pound
or I could buy cheese at $3 a pound.
So if I choose to buy it at $2 a pound
and I'm buying 50,000 pounds a month,
well I'm saving $50,000 right.
Corporate's not gonna
let that go, I let it go.
Because it's not what I wanna put out,
it's not my product.
Owning this place, it's kind of like
being a lead singer on
a rock and roll band.
You can't do it by
yourself, so it's everybody
it's all the employees, it's
everyone that works here
it's a mentality that it brought in
that everyone shares,
I got the best drummer,
I got the best bass player,
I got the best producer,
I got the best tour manager,
I got the best everything
and it's putting it all together,
and I could guarantee you, I don't,
there's no restaurant that
has a better staff than here.
(patrons chattering)
(dishes clinging)
- Is this empty, water?
- No I think that was mine
(patrons chattering)
- I love it.
- Now his grading scale from one to five
it's definitely a number five,
might be a five point five
- No, it's off the scale for me.
(soft music)
- There were no temperature
gauges in those days,
but they could tell by
the bricks on the outside
of the oven, the opening,
and when the keystone,
the one very, the one right over the top
turned a little bit gray,
that meant that it was so the right heat,
and it was ready to go.
- We cook it between 600 and 650 degrees.
(flames roaring)
- We cook, oh around 700, right,
you know, it's a fire
oven so it's fluctuating
everywhere in the oven it's different.
We let it die out at night, you know,
it's still glowing when I lock up
and I come in the next
day and rake it out.
It's probably around anywhere from maybe
270 to around three, a little over 300.
I'd rake it out, start a new fire
and it takes a good couple hours
to bring it up to heat again.
- Well when we close for vacation,
it takes three days, because
you have to build it up
gradually or you'd crack the bricks.
On a Tuesday it takes longer
than it would on a Wednesday
because it retains some of the heat,
but being closed on a Monday,
you have to start from scratch
so you have to get in
here earlier to start it.
I would say maybe bout five, six hours
to get it up to baking temp.
- [Interviewer] The ovens
were originally Coke?
- Coke which is a coal derivative,
it's a softer type of coal.
The oven had collapsed, I
believe it was in the 70s,
the inside they rebuilt it
and tried this with an oil
burner fired into a pit
so it was an open flame coming up,
just like if it was wood or anything else.
So it's not really the fuel source,
it's the style of the oven.
So it's beehive oven, compared
to a french bread oven.
So the two differences in the ovens,
so a beehive oven would
be an old bread oven
that's tall, a french bread oven,
they are domed this way, they're shorter,
they're lower in side,
so they heat differently.
The beehive causes a convection
so as the burner goes
off, the fire comes up
and rolls over the top of it
and it's almost like
cooking in a convection oven
the original convection
oven, put it that way.
- Different ovens cook different ways,
that's the unique character
of each of those places
are those ovens, something
that's been around
for that many years,
it's infused with the oil
with the sauce with everything,
that oven has got a character
that you can't duplicate it
I don't care, you'd have
to wait another 60 years,
maybe it will taste
the same but otherwise,
nah, it doesn't work the same.
- If it's all about the oven,
then you're taking all the credit away
from the real hero, the pizza maker.
You put a good pizza maker on a bad oven,
and they're gonna make
you something better
than a bad pizza maker on
a good oven, guaranteed.
When I was a kid I needed
dough so I worked at night
I worked for Mr. Pizza
making deliveries on my bike
I pedaled my buns all over
time for all the tips I got
When I got there I made
sure my pizza was still hot
I'd sing the pizza pizza
pizza pizza pizza boy is here
I got you that hot pizza,
I hope you got the beer
- The erosion of historical New Haven
became conspicuous and
obvious in the 1920s.
And if you look at the redlining
maps that were prepared
by the Roosevelt
administration in the 1930s,
the presence of Italians, most
notably, Southern Italians
was a sure ticket to a low rating.
The neighborhoods were talking about
where the pizzerias and
the immigrant workforce
were levels C and D, the bigotry embodied
in the home owners loan association,
which was created by the new deal,
was a way of stopping
mortgage foreclosures.
And what they did was they
looked what correlated
with hyper closure rate, the answer was,
cheap housing near factories,
full of immigrant families,
so they redlined all that
and the sense of an urban crisis
was there for the first time in the 30s.
Lee was an M80 in a mailbox.
Lee discovered Edmund Monroe
in the housing act of 1949.
And discovered that you could transform
the appearance, if not the
reality of a neighborhood
in short order with eminent domain
and the forcible use of bulldozers.
And did indeed destroy the
Oak street neighborhood,
where the 34 connector now runs.
It was a real melting pot
kind of a neighborhood.
Lee hit it pretty hard, basically,
took it out of existence, and there was
a fundamental fallacy in urban renewal.
That neighborhood was ugly to look at,
the plumbing was
inadequate, the ventilation,
light and air and all those
things were inadequate,
but the crime rate was really low
and the rate at which kids got educated
was pretty high.
And if looked at, if you compared
any of these immigrant neighborhoods,
pre urban renewal with post urban renewal,
the ones that came out the best
were the ones which
resisted it altogether.
And the ones which came out worst
where the ones were the
bulldozers did the big scraping.
- In the name of progress,
they destroyed these
old ethnic neighborhoods
and told people that they had to leave.
They were told that the
city was gonna be renovated
and that they could come
back but that never happened.
- I grew up in place called Hill Street,
which doesn't exist anymore.
We all got booted out for urban renewal.
- Then you got all of the social stuff
that starts happening because
neighborhoods have been
ripped up and people are trying
to find their roots again
you're trying to find
something to hold onto.
Thank goodness for lot
of these restaurants
that people were so loyal
to, 'cause that was,
that's what we held onto.
- (mumbling) well look,
why don't we get rid
of this blighted area, because to them,
it was a blighted area, to
the people who lived there,
it was home, a neighborhood.
With people who spoke the same language.
- Frank Pepe was considered
a leading business man
and his business was going to be
one of the sort of feature businesses
that would actually
help the others to stay.
Sally's was also considered
sort of a featured business
that hey it's bringing people
down, let's keep it there
and I think the Italians,
since they still lived
in that area they did not want to leave.
Areas like Hamilton
street, Franklin Street,
East Street, Grand ave,
they had lots of Italians
living there, they has
Polish communities there,
German, Irish communities,
African-American
and Jewish communities, all of which
were forced to uproot, but they weren't
as connected together as the
Wooster square community.
And part of that reason
is because of the strength
of those businesses and
businessmen like Frank Pepe,
but also because of the churches,
the societies that were
all located right there.
It's kind of like looking at a web,
if a web is too strong you can't break it.
Getting into the 60s, just
after the highways were finished
you've got a city that's
literally been flipped upside down
and its roots ripped out, it's bleeding.
There's a lot of racial tension,
there's civil unrest, the whole country
was going through this,
you had the Vietnam war,
people feel like they
don't trust the government
and they're angry, everybody
was starting to look
at each other in a different way,
and you had the riots of 67,
National Guard was brought into New Haven,
they had curfew for about a month,
people could not go out after sundown.
- There was tremendous
white flag in the 70s.
Everyone moved out.
- I felt that the apizza places have had
their own definition in the city,
through good times and through bad.
Because you always knew who was there,
what you were gonna get, and
that it was gonna be special
so through good times and bad times,
you know, through tough economic times,
through good economic
times, they've shown up.
To have those three places
in that close proximity
is amazing, so yeah I would say
for the size that New Haven is,
I would say it is the pizza capital
of the United States.
- If you wanna settle a dispute,
your money's gonna be
on the New Haven pie.
You're gonna want the New Haven pie
to go out back and settle
your dispute for you,
'cause it's gonna win
whatever fight, you know,
the Chicago, eh it's a little doughy,
it's a little thick,
it's a little sluggish.
New York, I think over the years
has just sort of lost its humph.
But New Haven can still pack a punch
and still sort of, will win the fight.
- (chuckles) yeah I mean
Chicago's pizza's not pizza,
I mean it's like casserole
it's just, you know,
a bunch of stuff you know put in a pan.
- This is not pizza!
This is tomato soup in a bread bowl!
- What we do is pizza,
what we do is, horizontal.
- This is an above ground
marinara swimming pool for rats.
- We figured out a unique way to do pizza,
largely based on our Italian heritage,
in Connecticut, in New
Jersey and in New York.
- We did have a contest,
it was Sally's pizza
versus a Chicago pizza, and the two people
who were involved in
the Chicago side of it
were my then colleague Rahm Emanuel,
who's now the mayor of Chicago.
- [Interviewer] Right.
- And Bob Juliano who
works with Unite here
who was also from Chicago.
So they brought in pizza from Chicago,
I brought in the pizza from Sally's.
- So send out this tweet which turned out
to be pretty inflamatory, claming that,
the only place that good
pizza existed was in,
you know, the New York metropolitan area,
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
And as it turns out, lots
of people around the country
are pretty perocual about their pizza
and I found out about
all sort of unique styles
of pizza that I didn't know existed
\people responding to that tweet.
Detroit square, Detroit style pizza, yeah,
who knew, it's not a
thing, Detroit style pizza
is not a thing and I had to break that
to my colleagues from
the Michigan delegation.
- And we had this fundraiser,
and people had to vote.
Overwhelming Sally's and the
Chicago pizza got two votes.
Emanuel and Juliano and that was it.
- [Interviewer] And being from Chicago,
how do you feel about Chicago,
versus New Haven pizza?
- Oh.
Don't strike me dead but
Chicago pizza isn't even pizza
this is the stuff.
- Betsy Carp is taking
her pizza half cooked
and will warm it up when she arrives home.
- New York city.
- Where?
- New York city.
- Why are you taking the
pizza back to New York City
which probably had some of
the best pizza in the country?
- Because it's the best
pizza in the world.
- I don't wanna insult you,
I don't wanna tell you it's not as good,
so I say to them right away,
you gotta try the pizza here
you know what, I love my
pizza, it's like my wife.
Here's a pretty woman.
No I love my wife, I
go home I love my wife,
it's the same thing with pizza.
Here's a great pizza, no, I'll go home
and I love my pizza at home,
so I'll have my pizza at home.
- New Haven is not known
as well as New York
but we have 23 to 30
cities around the country
that have New Haven style pizza.
- I believe the best known pizza joint
in D.C. is Pete's New Haven style pizza.
- The reason is is cause people
from the New Haven area
moved to somewhere else
and they find that they can't have,
there's nothing good out
there that comes close
to what they grew up with.
- Even though their pizza
is not the exact same
as Modern or Sally's or Pepe's,
it's a pretty reasonable facsimile.
- They either have a family background
or they get a recipe and
they start making pie.
It often comes with Foxon Park Soda.
- Grandfather actually came
here around 1910, 1911,
opened up Hamilton Bottling Works.
Another soda company,
he went back to Italy
'cause his family was there.
Few years later he came
back here to the States,
and there just wasn't enough room for him.
With that he looked for property
he looked to do something,
came across this spring here in Foxon
and then he made the
deal, bought the property.
New Haven was always
noted for a good pizza.
So as people grew up in
the area in New Haven,
has pizza there and had Foxon Park
because of the relation my grandfather had
with the original owners
of these pizza restaurants.
People that worked for
these pizza restaurants
went off on their own, and
it just seemed to be a fit
to take Foxon Park with them.
- So they'll bring out Foxon Park,
they'll put up New Haven memorabilia
like all around the restaurant.
You know you got San
Francisco, Portland Oregon,
Hoodriver Oregon, San
Diego, did I mention that?
All these cities on the West Coast,
they all have New Haven style pizzerias,
there's one in the keys,
there's two in southern Florida
Chicago.
- I grew up in New Haven
in the Westville section.
- I recognized righ away that you know,
this is a place in which,
if it could be executed
as it is in New Haven,
as well, or similarly,
it will be well received.
People aren't stupid, you
give 'em a great product
they're gonna embrace it, so that's where,
you know that's where
it started, you know.
And we always wanted to
have a pizza like Sally's
in Chicago and we
couldn't, Chicago's known
for deep dish pizza, not
known for thin crust.
I was introduced to Rick
Nielsen of Cheap Trick.
And Rick invested in Piece.
- I bought what I liked,
and that way it's like
buying art whatever,
it's like if you're thinking oh man,
I'm gonna make a big
investment, it's gonna do great,
then if it doesn't do
great then it's like,
oh, God, look at this ugly thing.
So you gotta get stuff that you like
and so with Piece, it was
an investment opportunity
that I had to be involved.
- You know, I thought that
pizza might be something
that united us, apparently
pizza divides us in this country
just like many of the
other hot political topics
due these days so we'll
have to find something else
that brings us all together.
- The passion for pizza
in New Haven is unriveled
anywhere else in this country.
And that makes me very very proud.
It's also, you know,
whenever I'm not in New Haven
and I tell someone oh I
represent Ward 8th in New Haven,
they say I don't know what that means,
what's Ward 8th, I say well you know,
where Pepe's and Sally's are
and immedeately even if they
haven't been to New Haven
in decades or have never been
they will know exactly where that is
because it is really one
of the hearts of New Haven
one of the hearts of the
whole state. (soft music)
- God, what's that smell,
sure as hell isn't pizza.
- Clams, it's New Haven style pizza.
I had it when I was at
Yale. (dramatic music)
(knocking rythmically)
- Yale's on its way up,
that's why I started my
own line of colleges.
287 campuses, we took over
all the old circuit cities
(dramatic music)
- No one's coming to save you
because we're deep inside
one of Connecticut's
30 beautiful state forrests, 30.
- Please don't kill me,
I still haven't tried
the famous seafood pizza
at Sally's in New Haven.
- New Haven, right before a
certain shady restaurant owner
move from there to New York city,
bringing his disgusting
New Haven pizza with him.
- I think New Haven pizza as a community
has the best pizza in America.
(soft string music)
- And the difference
between pizza, good pizza
and great pizza, the
kinda pizza that's special
it isn't a recipe that's a
combination of ingredients,
it's alchemy, it's the
way those ingredients
react to on another,
it's the way the crust
accepts the sauce that accepts the cheese
that accepts the clam.
- The first record of clams on a pizza
is actually at Sally's.
On their menu from the early 50s
there was a clam and tomato pizza offered.
It wasn't a white clam pie,
it was with tomato sauce.
Fast forward about 10
years, maybe into the 60s,
Frank Pepe was experimenting,
and he found that if
you put clams on a pie
that had no red sauce, you put olive oil,
garlic and romano cheese, that it was like
the perfect combination it tasted like
a little bit of ocean,
a little bit of pizza
and a little of you know,
kind of Italian food
that you might have like a
pasta vongole, pasta with clams.
That hit a lot of people's tastebuds,
that was the one that stayed.
It was not on their menu
until probably the 70s,
but it was served in the 60s.
Pepe died in 6 so that was his recipe
and that's what they're known for.
It carried on from his tradition.
It's kind of his, you could almost call it
his last gift to America.
- Is there any secret ingredient?
I mean what is it that
makes New Haven pizza
in many people's opinion,
the best pizza in the world?
- I can only speak for here and it's TLC.
I mean, every pie that comes
out here we take pride in
it's not to produce a product,
it's to make a great product.
(soft music)
- The secret is the feel, the sensitivity
of the person handling the pizza,
of the person putting it together,
that's what makes one
different from another,
it's the human element.
- My passion about the product
is always balancing the ingredients
and I find that to be a big challenge
in this very simple way,
you could just be dealing
with four or five ingredients
simple, you know, water,
yeast, dough, flour rather
and tomatoes grated and
oil, and that could be very
very challenging to achieve
a very beautiful experience,
tasting experience.
Yeah to get it right.
- [Interviewer] What's in the water here?
- A lot of pollution.
(water running)
(faucet dripping)
- If you don't have a
good base, a good crust
it all doesn't work and
I think it's because
of the water and the flour that we got
it makes pizza here different
from some place else.
- Could the water be, it could be.
You know maybe that's why
Lender's Bagels does so good.
Could be.
- Yeah, that's a crock of shit.
- I don't think you will ever know why.
I don't think scientifically
you could probably
find out why it is, I don't know.
- Well, no no, I'm gonna
tell you the truth.
Not a crock of shit.
- Kenji Lopez-Alt managing editor
who was a scientific bent,
right, so our foodlab column.
And he once conducted an experiement
with the owner of Motorino
which a really good
woodfire pizzeria in New York
where he made crusts with
many different kinds of water,
it's like the bagel water thing too,
everyone talks about oh you can't make
good bagels in Kansas
City cause of the wate,
I just don't think it's true.
I'm not scientifically
oriented so I am not
offering a defenetive opinion.
- It is without a doubt not the water.
- It really could be the water.
- You can't have a great bread product
without great ingredients,
that includes great water.
- You know it's the atmosphere
that's more than the water.
So when you try and make
dough say in Denver,
you know at a mile up,
compared to making dough
in Louisiana where you below
the, you're below zero,
and that is the difference of the dough
being able to fermentate and
rise more than the water.
- When it's hotter we
have to make adjustments
when it's colder we have
to make adjustments,
if it's humid, if we
know it's gonna be humid
we have to make adjustments.
- Here's the funny thing about water,
and this was told to me in New York City,
this was told to me by
Pizziolo in New Haven.
You can have really
good pizza in New Haven
you can have pretty
good pizza in New York,
but you can also have pretty shitty pizza,
and that's using the same water.
(crust crackling)
- Being a doorman at an
upscale hotel in New Haven,
people come in from all over the world.
They say Eugene, they said inside
that you know every about
New Haven, so tell us,
where can we go have a
pizza with the children?
I says Wooster Street.
The excitement of getting
in and having that pizza
is in great demand.
Sometimes people just wait
in line for an hour or so
because they have to have it.
The guests when they do
go and they wait in line
you know what they do, they
bring the box back to take home
I had a lady said, I'm
gonna take this home
and I'm gonna put it in a frame.
What could be better than that?
- The lines started in the 70s.
Especially at Sally's and Pepe's
and then Modern actually had
a little bit of a later bloom.
- I remember back in the early to mid 80s
the line would be like,
like 100 people out there.
And Sunday we would open up at 2:30.
When we opened up the door, we seat 150,
the whole place would fill up,
and there would be a line outside.
So there's 150 plus people waiting at 2:30
on a Sunday to come in for pizza.
- All of a sudden pizza
became a big thing.
And that's when it started getting.
Before we kept our heads above water,
well above water, and
then it just escalated.
- The late 80s was really, we were busy,
we were very very busy and
the amount of pumped our
was astronomical, then
now, it's mind boggling.
We're pumping out, let's
say on a typical week
during the summertime, we're pumping out,
six, seven, 800 pies a day.
- We have three ovens so we're
able to handle the capacity
the line however still does form
but it does move quickly.
- I think it's part of the experience.
- Well I don't know how to set the scene
that you would have
people standing in line
and it's snowing.
- I never remembered waiting
in line when I was a kid.
- I waited in those
lines, cold, rain, snow.
- [Announcer] If you want
a taste of Sally's Pizza,
prepare to wait hours, this
line formed on a rainy Sunday
an hour before the place opened.
- It's worth it.
Sometimes you wait an
hour, hour and a half,
and then you sit down,
it's another 45 minutes.
- Between outside and inside, two hours.
- [Interviewer] What do
you think's the longest
anyone's ever waited to get in?
- Hours.
Couple hours.
- [Interviewer] Do you wonder why?
- Well my father used to wonder
what's the big deal, it's just bread
with a little stuff on it.
- I've come here once
and it was like 20 below,
waited over an hour, I didn't care.
- [Journalist] So the rain is nothing?
- This is nothing.
- I often thought, and it's very odd
but there was several times in my life
that I thought and this goes back
to the cold war that this would be
a great film for the Russians.
To see how people have to stand in line
for food in America.
(soft music)
- In general I try to not
eat pizza after a show
because it's easy to
eat pizza after a show,
or too easy, but so New
Haven is one of those places
where I make an exception to that effort
and I just completely give into it.
So it would be unfair of me to say
that I'm a pizza expert
and I try pizza all over,
because I try to resist it,
but I just know better in New Haven.
I know better than to fight it.
- Well we've had many
celebrities here over the years.
(soft upbeat music)
- I'm Henry Winkler, I'm here
to talk about Pepe's pizza
in New Haven, only the best pizza
in all of America, I've
had pizza everywhere.
Pretty good in L.A. very good in New York,
Great at Pepe's Pizza.
- Bill Clinton and Hilary.
She had a fundraiser in our parking lot,
and they raised a quarter
of a million dollars.
This was when he was first
running for president.
- [Journalist] But where
did the candidate go?
He was over at Pepe's,
spreading on the sauce,
tossing on the mozzarella, and
slicing up his very own pie.
- [Announcer] It was a campaign stop
that brought shock and awe
to Pepe's Pizza in New Haven,
unannounced, Bill Clinton
walked through the doors
and started shaking hands
and reliving old memories
of him and Hilary
on their first date in New
Haven, while they were at Yale.
- They were constantly here
when they were at Yale.
Didn't look anything
like themselves today.
- President Reagan came here.
- Robbin Williams.
- Sammy Davis Jr.
- Neil Siemen.
- Danny Devitto.
- Johnny Mathis.
- Bill Murray.
- Garry Trudeau.
(soft upbeat music)
- Of course Sinatra, well
everybody knows about him.
- Tony was in high school,
and Tony was kind of a rascal.
He would go play hookie from school
and one day, found himself
going down to Hoboken New Jersey
to you know have a good time,
maybe go to visit family
or do whatever and while
playing on the street
he met you with a guy named Frank Sinatry.
Who was a budding musician.
When Frank has his first show in New Haven
it was a show at the Golfe Street Armory.
- There were so many
places around New Haven
that had big bands come in and out.
- It was in 1941 in march,
and they literally flew in that evening
from Providence Rhode
Island into New Havenm
it was the Tommy Dorsey Band
the Pied Pipers, including Frank Sinatra.
And they were hungry it was like 12:30,
1:30 in the morning, they asked Tony,
hey, is your brother's restaurant open?
- So he calls his brother and he says,
keep the ovens going, I
wanna bring the band over.
- They showed up a little
bit later and ate all night.
I guess the story is that
when Frank went up to pay,
Consiglio sent Tony and Sally's mom
she said we got this, and the
quote is, we love you guys
you know, we don't want you to pay.
So Frank never forgot that, you know.
That was the kind of
passion and connection
that that family showed to
anyone who was their friend
anyone who was their family.
He really was a Sally's friend diehard.
And anybody that Frank knew or Tony knew,
they'd bring 'em over to Sally's
and tell 'em you gotta try Sally's.
- I worked at the Paramount Theater
and while at the Paramount Theater,
Frank decided he wanted a pizza.
So we get one of the drivers
and sent me all the way from New York
up here to Sally's to get
apizza and bring it backstage
at the Paramount theater.
- Early on, Tony would do the driving.
He'd come down either, he said it was
an hour and a half ride and don't forget
this is before I95.
And then of course the
pizza would be cold.
But on the third floor,
the Paramount theater
had a tailor, he was
there in case somebody
popped a button, something got ripped,
something had to be changed.
And he had sort of a little oven.
So Tony would go up
there, reheat the pizza,
bring it down and they'd have hot pizza.
- There was one time when
someone called me at home,
and said, do you know
Spielberg's standing outside,
waiting in line at your restaurant.
And I was like, Steven Spielberg?
He's like yeah I go, I gotta go there.
And I've never left my house for anybody,
and I walked over to him,
just wanted to say hi
and he was so genuine and just so nice.
Other customers are going bym
saying hi to him, he
would sign stuff for 'em,
he was just a normal, everyday person.
And I give people like that so much credit
because he didn't use card
blanche to try and get in
try and cut the line, can I get this first
can I have that, my
people are gonna call you,
there wasnjt any of that.
- [Interviewer] Is it true that
Spielberg sent a private jet
to Tweed to pick up pizzas?
- He was here, he flew in, and
had a whole bunch of pizzas
delivered to him, we
delivered 'em down to the jet
to bring 'em back to California,
to show everybody what real pizza what.
Because he said there's no
pizza in California like this.
- That is insane.
Got no plates, all on trays, look at that.
80 year old oven, look at that amazing,
stop hiding captain, and
there's the team there.
Thank you, screw Pepe's.
(indistinct clammoring)
(giggling)
- Well the New Haven Coliseum opened
and I met Ricky Consiglio in 1977.
And I started to order pizzas backstage
for all our concerts and we'd order
10 to 20 pizzas at one time.
I started to get artists
to play in New Haven
'cause they wanted the pizza
- Just in the last few months we've had,
Witney Houston eat Sally's
Pizza, U2 ate Sally's Pizza,
the Grateful Dead have
eaten Sally's Pizza,
Pat Benatar.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer loved it,
Beach Boys loved it,
James Taylor loves it,
Linda Rondstadt, Dave Matthews in 2008
sells posters at every one of his concerts
that relate directly to the show.
He had a guy holding pizza on each poster
I could go on and on, because we had it
for every single show.
- This is, you know, way way way pre 9-11
we were performing at the
Royal Albert Hall in London.
My musical director, Joey Mullati found up
the greatest surprise for us,
he somehow got his wife Pam
to bring about six pizzas onto the plane.
She brought half a dozen Sally's Pizzas
from JFK to London and came backstage
and they were waiting for us
and it was an impossible
it was like, what?
It's my favorite venue in the world.
And I was having my
favorite pizza in the world
and the pizza took over
everybody's attention basically,
took presidence.
- As we sit here editing the film,
we realize there's one
story we don't have on tape
and I don't even have
any verification for it
it might be a myth, it
might be an urban legend,
but if it is, it's the
Bigfoot of tall pizza tales.
It goes like this.
President Bill Clinton
and Vice-President Al Gore
were visiting Yale, their press secretary
calls Sally's, Flo answers the phone,
the press secretary says, the President
and Vice-President would
like to come to lunch
at your establishment.
Flo says but we're not open for lunch.
The press secretary says,
you don't understand.
This is the President and Vice-President
of the United States,
to which Flo replies,
we don't open early for anybody.
- The second story, gentleman
Joe Consiglione calls me up
local handman guy, he's an
announcer for the Red Sox.
Calls me up he goes oh Billy,
I'm gonna bring some of the
guys in from the Red Sox.
Kevin Youkilis, Larry Lucchino,
the CEO of the Red Sox
another Yale guy, and I said great,
I said I'll see you at lunch.
They came in and you know,
I was shaking all their
hands nice to meet you
Jo, nice seeing ya, so Larry
Lucchino comes up to me
and he goes, Bill nice to meet you
but I really gotta tell ya,
I'm a really big Sally's fan.
I said that's okay
because I'm a Yankee fan,
I really don't care, so he
kinda, we got a little giggle
off of that, and he sits down and eats.
And then after they're
done eating, I'm leaving,
I'm gonna go eat lunch
next door at the bar.
So I go over them, thanks for coming,
nice meeting you Jo, nice seeing you.
He's like no wait, you gotta sit down,
I gotta talk about this, 'cause I think
I'm a big Modern fan now.
I said oh yeah, I think
I'm a Red Sox fan nows.
And that was in 2004 and that's
when they broke the curse
that's when they won the
World Series that year.
And they invited me up for the parade
to bring them pizzas to all the owners
for after the parade for a private party.
- [Interviewer] So basically
what you're saying is
that by him switching his allegiance
from Sally's to Modern, is what broke
the Curse of the Bambino
and made them win?
- I did, I take full credit for it.
I told Theo Epstein that. (chuckles)
- [Interviewer] You're responsible
for them winning the World Seires in 2004?
- Yes, yup.
- I love that.
- [Announcer] The Boston
Red Sox are world champions.
- That is the power of this whole trinity.
A power fuelled by love,
family, charred crust,
a cheese called mootz
and ovens that are going
on 100 years old, that
is the power of apizza.
- But I believe that pizza
is a connective tissue.
It's something that makes
us happy, it feeds us,
it connects different people together
it's the, one of the only shared foods,
by it's very nature, I
feel extremely fortunate
to have the best pizza in the world,
right here at our fingertips.
- You know I'm just an evangelist
for New Haven style pizza and I see it
as part of my job as Connecticut's
United States Senator
to make sure that
everybody that I serve with
in the United States Senate knows
that if it's not New Haven Style pizza,
it's really not pizza.
- These places have relationships
with their customers
and I think it sort of cuts both ways.
It gives a feeling of
connectiveness and purpose
to the folks who operate
these wonderful places.
What would they do at Modern
to support community events,
they opened that place
up, they provide food,
and it defines in their
case a part of State Street.
They make that block unlike
any other block in America.
- [Interviewer] As you
look back on 30 years
of doing this, any regrets?
- No regrets, but it just flies by.
I can't even believe it
when you say those numbers.
I'm like I don't even feel
like I'm 30 years older.
It's just, I see pictures,
I see pictures of myself
and I go holy crap
I was a young little kid, you know.
I was 23 years old.
- [Interviewer] What's
your proudest moments
in this place?
- Probably my kids, and my
wife works here everyday.
It really is probably one of the last
full-blown family places.
- I mean my dearing memory
as you walk into Sally's
the first thing you do
is you don't sit down,
you go in you kiss Flo,
you go in the back,
you'd say hello to Sally
now you go to say hello
to Ruthy, Ricky or Bobby,
whatever the case may be, you talk to them
you bump elbows with
whoevers making the pies.
- I don't know we still do it the old way
people wait a long time, we're the culture
of expidiency I think.
- I think it's the vibe,
I think all of, it's like a cult.
I think us Sally's lovers
are really cultist.
And I think that with all due
respect to Pepe's and Modern
they have their own cult also,
that think they're the
best, and I think that Flo,
Ricky and Bobby really made it,
they were the leaders of the cult
and they were, they're
very strange people.
The feeling that we all had is that
we were members religion,
the Sally's religion
and I think what made it special,
of course was the quality of the pie.
- We still make 'em one at
a time, table would sit down
order, three, four, five pies,
we'd stil make one at a time the old way.
The oven's 100 years
old I feel like I'm 150.
- Pepe's very traditional,
that big gleamy white tile coal fire oven.
I can remember going in there
and Frank Pepe's wife, Mrs Pepe,
she'd be by the cash register
and they'd bring the pies out
and she would cut all the pies.
(banging)
Oh I can remember Mrs Pepe, as a kid,
doing that in her station, keeping an eye
on everything that went around.
- You know walking through
the doors of Pepe's,
you feel the history,
you feel those decades
from the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s,
of Italian-American settling
and Wooster Square and
the pizza, those chared,
ooblong pies, the clam pie, you know,
everything about it is so idiosyncrotic.
It's so Pepe's.
- Whenever my agent calls
and we're going over
tour dates for an upcoming
tour, and he says,
and New Haven, the very
first thing I think about
is I'll be at Pepe's Pizza.
- If you've been away from
this city for 20 years
and you come back, you're gonna go
to one of these places.
Because it's reconecting
you with your childhood,
great memories, with
your parents, who maybe
have since passed, I mean we do that,
fish swim upstream, you know,
New Haven goes back to the apizza joints.
(soft upbeat music)
When I was a kid I needed
dough so I worked at night
I worked for Mr.Pizza
making deliveries on my bike
I pedal by buns all over
town for all he tips I got
When I got there well I make
sure my pizza was still hot
I sing a pizza, pizza pizza,
pizza, pizza boy is here
I got your red hot Pizza
and I hope you got the beer.
One night the boss he says to me
This is a special case
You gotta take this pizza
to a very special place
red ride down the main
street look for number four
Tell it by the red light
that she hangs up on the door
So I pedal my bike across the town
the rain sheets coming down
I put my apron over the
pizza so it wouldn't drow
Then I saw number four,
right down near the end
Went knocking on that
door, someone said come in
Singing pizza pizza, pizza
pizza, pizza boy is here
I got your red hot pizza
and I hope you got the beer
I walked into that living
room almost dropped my pie
There were all these ladies
and they was giving me the eye
Laughed at me, they teasin me,
Not leave me alone, they
said how big's your sausage
How large your pepperone,
then one stood up
And let her robe fall
right down to the floor
And I said to myself oh
my God what am I in for
She said now didn't they tell you
The way that we pay
oh my little pizza boy
We'll take it out and
trade so she took me
To the parlor and she
led me down the hall
Took me up the stairs by
some pictures on the wall
She took me in a room and
she took me by the hand
And she turned that pizza
boy into a pizza man
I sing a pizza pizza, pizza
pizza, pizza boy is here
I got your red hot pizza
and I hope you got the beer
Well now I own a pizza store,
the kids they work for me
Sitting around and
waiting to make a delivery
When a call from number four
somes in as something else
I said to the kids,
now watch the store,
I'll take this one myself
I sing a pizza pizza, pizza
pizza, pizza boy is here
Got your red hot pizza and
I hope you got the beer
I got your red hot pizza
And I hope you got the beer