A few months ago I wrote a blog entry stating that I believe that pizza will be the next big thing. About a week after posting the article I was inundated with phone calls from perspective clients all over the world who now want to open a chain of pizza restaurants.
My new clients are from Italy and while they are very knowledgeable about the different styles of pizza including Roma, Napoli and Sicilian they had a very different concept in mind that required us to expose them to a whole new level of thinking and visiting restaurants that very few people knew about.
Our team and clients started eating pizza at 11:00 AM up in LA with the first stop being PitFire Pizza whose motto is, “the Crust You Can Trust” and then on to Vito’s and then Mozza (which happens to be my favorite). After we left LA we headed to La Dolce, Upper Crust Pizza, Pizza Bakery and Urban Coal Fired in San Diego and called it a day around 11:00 PM.
The next day we headed to San Francisco where we had an appointment with Tony Gemignani who is a 9 Time World Pizza Champion and president of the World Pizza Champions Inc., the most winning pizza team in the world. Tony is the first competitor in pizza history to win both acrobatic and baking titles in Italy’s Championships. Tony was the Neapolitan Champion at the 2007 World Pizza Cup in Naples, Italy for the Best STG Neapolitan Pizza Margherita. Tony is also the only Two Time Food Network Gold Medalist and is a certified master from the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli. He is the author of the cookbook PIZZA and is inducted into the Guinness Book of World records. Tony has won more World tiles and international awards than any competitor in history. If we were ever going to learn anything new about pizza Tony G was our man.
Being from New York and having traveled all over Italy I thought I knew a few things about pizza but after our 3 hour lunch with Tony it made me keenly aware that there was a lot more to know about pizza than buying 000 flour, fermentation and using a wood oven for baking. Tony serves five different types of pizza using five different style doughs and cooks the pizza in different ovens ranging from gas, electric, coal and wood fired and even a retroflex depending upon the style of pizza he is coking. We ordered ten or more different pies with toppings to really understand the nuances of the art of pizza making. We could hardly move after eating so much pizza but we somehow mustered up the energy to finish our pizza eating journey.
From Tony’s we moved on to A16, then to Delphina and 00 which is a new restaurant. Delphina and 00 were great experiences and served delicious pizza but nothing will ever equal 3 hours of nonstop pizza eating with Tony Gemigani who takes pizza to a whole new level. Pizza and flatbreads are both popular and very profitable. If you want to explore ways of incorporating pizza or flat breads on to your menu give us a call.