Patsy's Pizzeria is a historic coal-oven

pizzeria A pizzeria is a restaurant focusing on pizza. As well as pizza, dishes at pizzerias can include kebab, salads and pasta. Many pizzerias offer take-away, where the customer orders their food either in advance or at the restaurant and then take ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. Opened in 1933, it was regarded as one of New York's original pizzerias for its use of traditional New York style thin crust pizza.

History

Patsy's Pizzeria was founded in what used to be the predominantly Italian neighborhood of

East Harlem East Harlem, also known as Spanish Harlem or and historically known as Italian Harlem, is a neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City, roughly encompassing the area north of the Upper East Side and bounded by 96th Street to the south, F ...

in 1933 by Pasquale "Patsy" Lanceri. When it opened it was one of New York's earliest pizzerias along with Lombardi's,

Totonno's Totonno's is a pizzeria located at 1524 Neptune Avenue (between West 15th Street and West 16th Street) in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. It was established in 1924 by Antonio "Totonno" Pero. History Totonno was an employee at the Lombard ...

and John's. Patsy's claims to have originated the idea of selling

pizza by the slice Pizza by the slice is a fast food sold by pizzerias and food stands, making it also often a street food. The pizza slices may be plain or have various toppings. Some restaurants and pizza stands only sell pizza by the slice, while others sell b ...

. Lancieri is said to have learned his craft at Lombardi's brick-walled coal oven. New York's pizza dynasties are now in their third and fourth generations, and counting. Patsy's Pizzeria was sold and expanded after its founder's death to Frank Brija, an Albanian from Kosovo, who bought the pizzeria from its founder's widow in 1991. Brija, the current owner of the East Harlem Patsy's Pizzeria, trademarked the name and in 1995 opened Patsy's Pizzeria franchise at 509 Third Avenue, near 34th Street. Tsoulos, "a member of a Greek pizza-making clan in Queens", and his partners opened four more franchise locations in Manhattan.

Dispute over Patsy's name

The original Patsy died in the 1970s and his widow sold the East Harlem pizzeria to longtime employees in 1991, "to the chagrin of Patsy Grimaldi, her nephew, who opened a Patsy's in Brooklyn in 1990". The feuding deepened when Frank Brija began expanding his Patsy's Pizzeria franchise in Manhattan, and Patsy Grimaldi changed the name of his pizzeria to

Grimaldi's Pizzeria Grimaldi's Pizzeria is an American pizzeria chain from the New York City area with several restaurants throughout the United States. Its most famous restaurant is under the Brooklyn Bridge in Brooklyn at 1 Front Street, next door to its original ...

, which the New York Times said is the best and truest to the original. In 2009, there was a legal battle with Patsy's Restaurant on West 56th Street, founded by Pasquale (Patsy) Scognamillo in 1944 and a haven for Frank Sinatra and many celebrities, and Patsy's Pizzeria which was sold to Frank Brija in 1991.

Renaissance of pizza

A story from ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' reported in 1998 that, before the "pizza renaissance" of the 1990s, "the classic pizza was on the endangered list, treasured as an artifact of old New York but bypassed by a culture that preferred its pizzas fast, cheap and delivered." The tradition was kept alive by "just a few pizza landmarks, most famously John's Pizzeria on Bleecker Street, Patsy's Pizza in East Harlem and Totonno's Pizzeria Napolitano in Coney Island ... hozealously preserved the traditions." Environmental regulations made it hard to build new coal ovens because they could only be rebuilt or replaced under an environmental grandfather clause, "not installed from scratch." According to ''The New York Times'', "Pizza makers have become architectural historians, seeking out spaces that once housed a coal-burning oven, like old bakeries or restaurants". In 2019, a waiter at Patsy's Pizzeria returned a $423,987.55

cashier's check A cashier's check (or cashier's cheque, cashier's order) is a check guaranteed by a bank, drawn on the bank's own funds and signed by a cashier. Cashier's checks are treated as guaranteed funds because the bank, rather than the purchaser, is respo ...

to a customer who left it behind on one of their tables. The customer had left without tipping, after complaining that the restaurant didn't have enough photos of women on their walls.

Media

Patsy's Pizzeria was featured in a Manhattan-based episode of the

Cooking Channel Cooking Channel is an American basic cable channel owned by Food Network, a joint venture and general partnership between Warner Bros. Discovery Networks (69%) and Nexstar Media Group (31%). The channel is a spin-off of Food Network, broadcasting p ...

show ''

Man v. Food ''Man v. Food'' is an American food reality television series. It premiered on December 3, 2008 on the Travel Channel. The program was originally hosted by actor and food enthusiast Adam Richman. In each episode, Richman explores the "big food" o ...

'', which first aired on April 7, 2020.

References

External links