Pizza: A Love Story

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.

- 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!

Sally's, Pepe's or Modern?

Yes.

- 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.

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.

- 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.

- 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.

So New Haven accumulated,

largely through their efforts

an unusually large and unusually geographically focused

immigrant population of Italians.

- 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,