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Most everyone who reads PMQ or goes to the PMQ tradeshows knows Chef Bruno. He can’t be missed and is one of my best friends in the business, but there is another Bruno out there that you may not know about… Louis Bruno, but most people call him Louie. On occasion you will see him working the Lisanti booth at a tradeshow and that is where I first met him. It was over a slice that Louie and I talked about the restaurant where he works in Tampa Bay, Florida. Actually it is two restaurants in one. On one side is Bellissimo Restaurant, an upscale home-style Italian restaurant and joining it with a hallway is Bona Pizza. Louie told me about many of the things they do and I thought I should 
drop by since I was going to be close to the area anyway to get things ready and lined up for the Orlando Pizza Show. And one other thing, in case you don’t know it by now, Louie is Chef Bruno’s son.
“We opened Bellissimo and Bona about five years ago with a concept of home-style southern Italian cooking on one side and pizza on the other,” Louie told me. “We went with an open kitchen design to give it more of a family feel… like you’re at home watching your mom in the kitchen. It also gives customers the chance to go up to the cooking area and see what is going on. The reason why the pizzeria and restaurant are separated is because we wanted to have a pizzeria side for takeout and delivery and a nice, quiet restaurant side. You don’t want people coming in interrupting those who wanted to sit down and have a nice dinner. If we had the pizzeria on the restaurant side, the phone would be ringing off the hook and it would be chaos. You can get the pizza in the restaurant and you can get entrees to go through Bona…you get the best of both worlds.
Cooking Style
When it comes to being a chef, Louie isn’t living off his dad’s reputation. He has cooked in various restaurants and with different styles, but was trained in pizza by his dad. “I have worked with French cuisine, did a little Continental cooking and did some banquet cooking. I touched all the fields of cooking. I went 
to work for another guy in Pennsylvania, who happened to go to culinary school with my uncle who is a master chef in Italy (Jack Bruno) but that was coincidental,” Louie explained. “He actually taught me sauté, which I love.
“The recipes we have are a combination of my style and experiences and my dad’s knowledge and things he sees when he travels. He is more old school and I am more of a new style. I believe in pre-making a couple of sauces to make things run at a faster pace and have a different presentation, where my father is more of a big bowl of pasta kinda guy, which you don’t see a lot of any more. He gives you a mountain of food, but I believe in a little less and more gourmet.”
Working With Family
Italian restaurants and pizzerias are filled with families working together and it can be tough running a business with family, but it can also be very rewarding. “My dad is on the road, so he comes and goes. When he is here he is more of the entertainment…he’s the star of the show…he will sing, sit down with you and cook special things for people that he learns on his travels. It is tough sometimes and we clash because we have different styles,” Louie explained. “We always find a way to meet in the middle. He will come back with a recipe and I will play with it for a week or two and fine-tune it and we will get something that works on the menu.”
Be Different
If you have read PMQ, you have seen some of the non-traditional recipes Chef Bruno presents, like pizza on a stick, Polish Pizza (see page 16) and other items. He really does do things like this in his restaurant…and they sell according to Louie. “I have some things like my dad’s Viagra Pizza that no one knows about outside of here. People will ask about it and we tell them if you order it you better get home in 30 minutes. The novelty catches the consumer’s eye, but the Viagra Pizza is one loved by people. We use fresh spinach, fresh tomatoes that are cut and marinated for a day in salt, garlic, basil and pepper so they can absorb all that flavor and real proscuitto. I don’t know why he came up the name, but all the flavors come together. People who have never been here before see it and you hear them laugh and chuckle when they see it on the menu. They order it because they are interested. When they come back they won’t even look at the menu and just order the Viagra pizza.”
They also have had quite a few things like Grandma’s pizza, chicken Alfredo subs and an Italianized version of the muffaletta. He says the Viagra sells a lot.
Marketing and Good Ideas
“We have what we call Customer Participation Night,” he explained. “We come up with crazy questions to ask customers. Last week we asked them how do you measure light and if they got it right we gave them 10 percent off. We ask a weird question and pick their brain. Mainly we do it on weekends because it gets crazy on Fridays and sometimes the best thing to keep people’s minds off of being hungry or waiting is to get them to think about something else and not on being hungry. It keeps the anger level down when we are running behind and keeps them a little more patient. Some will even buy the pizza and go home and get on the computer then call back with the answer. We will ask about recent movies or sports…it works. Things like this make people want to come in and makes them feel good with us.”
Louie also explained their fliers with specials. He said there is one that just breaks the bank. It is a large cheese pizza and spaghetti and meatball dinner for $9.99. They do their own handouts on the box tops and have some high school kids who distribute to the neighborhood that they pay with a couple of bucks and a slice…the power of the slice can get you a lot sometimes. “The reason we giveaway the spaghetti and pizza dinner is because it is a way to give back to customers,” Louie said. “There are some who come every day. This special is our appreciation for their business. It is all about keeping the customer happy. I could not do anything and still get their business, but this is a thing that creates word of mouth. We will have a guy who will tell his neighbor about the great special and end up getting orders from neighbors.”
Louie says doorhangers are the best advertising they do. They put six coupons on them…one is the spaghetti offer, a large pizza with four toppings and a buy two subs and get half off the third sub. On the back they have three coupons for the restaurant. One coupon is 20 percent off a $100 ticket, one for a free bottle of house wine with four dinners and one other that changes each time.
“The area is kinda upscale, but like anywhere there are times when people are short on money so the coupons can work anywhere,” he says.
Best Ideas
One of the things they did that was a great success was having the original singer for River Dance, Michael Landry, come in and do a private show. They sold dinner show tickets with dinner, dessert and wine. The place was packed and people talked about it for a long time,” Louie said. “We also have a Frank Sinatra impersonator, Chase Vaccaro, on Saturday nights from six until 11 p.m. He is fantastic. You can’t imagine…reservations are through the roof. They all want to sit next to where he is. He packs the house.
“We sponsor a drag racing car and the guy won the Tampa Bay finals three years in a row. He belongs to the Tampa Bay Motor Sports and they bring all their cars and line them up on the street. It lights up the neighborhood. There are all types of people who come to see the cars and it really brings the neighborhood out. That brings in a lot of people. All of the guys in the motor club come in and show their membership cards and get a discount.”
NY Pizza Myths
As I mentioned earlier, the way I met Louie was over a slice of NY style pizza he had made at a show in Columbus, Ohio. I asked him about the myth of only being able to make New York pizza in New York. “There are tricks, but there are tricks with anything. It starts with the dough and a good deck oven. Over years, the oven seasons and cooks a certain way. Recipes vary depending on where you are. In Pennsylvania, it was different than here in Florida. It took a good six months to get it right down here. One factor is humidity. Some people use three to four ounces of yeast. Here your dough would explode like crazy with the heat and humidity…. it changes all the aspects of the dough and what you are doing. Some make their dough, cut it and leave it sitting on the table for 20 minutes to rise, where up North you can do that, but down here in Florida you will have a monster growing from the heat. Just because you make pizza in New York, those ingredients and the way you do it might not be the same in another part of the country.
“Sauce…there is every kind of sauce you can think of in NY…some are sweet, some are chunky some are thin and some are thick. Most use a 50/50 blend, but the brand of cheese is what gives you want you are looking for. I like Grande, but I think I inherited that from my father. I have tried every cheese out there and only a few that that I tasted and worked with compare. One is Lisanti Foods’ cheese…they have a great cheese. There are other guys out there with great products, but the cheese just doesn’t cut it.”