Patsy Grimaldi, a Man Who Left His Mark on Pizza in New York

“He is a crucial bridge, maybe the main bridge from the early, early days of pizza in New York — brick ovens fueled by coal,” Pete Wells, who stepped down several months ago as The New York Times’s restaurant critic, told me. “That’s the kind of oven he learned to use when he was 12 or 13 at his uncle’s place in East Harlem.” His uncle was Pasquale Lancieri. His restaurant was called Patsy’s. A later owner of that Patsy’s took issue with the name Grimaldi had given his pizzeria, so the Patsy’s in Brooklyn became Grimaldi’s.

But back to Grimaldi at the Patsy’s in East Harlem.

“At first he’s busing tables,” Pete said. “Within a few months, they send him back to make the pizzas. He is learning how old-school New York pizza was made when the pizzerias were run by the generation that came over from Naples around the turn of the century. That style becomes the thing that he knows.” It was not what pizza eaters in the 1960s and 1970s knew, after gas ovens came along — and produced a different kind of pizza, with a golden crust.

When Grimaldi opened his Patsy’s in 1990, “he brought everybody’s attention back to how great that brick oven was, with high heat that cooks really quickly with minimal but pure ingredients,” Pete said. “He brought everybody’s attention back to how great that could be.”

That brought people to Brooklyn. “Within weeks, celebrities were going out there,” Pete said. “I can’t think of a pizzeria in New York that was that kind of a scene. It hit on every level. Critics and pizza freaks were going crazy over it. One of the things it did, besides saying this style of pizza is very traditional to New York, was to say a pizzeria could be a fun, cool place that everybody wants to get into.”

There were celebrities, real and presumed. Once, according to New York magazine, Warren Beatty called and persuaded Grimaldi’s wife, Carol, to save him a table. When Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, showed up, Patsy Grimaldi looked at her and said, “So, are you in the movies, too?” And, when the crime boss John Gotti was on trial, his lawyers took lunch to their client by picking up a pizza at Patsy’s, wrapping the slices in aluminum foil, slipping them into their briefcases and carrying them into the courthouse.