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Deciding to open a pizzeria is a risky endeavor. You have to have great recipes, dependable employees, business sense and a little luck. Sometimes the luck you’re handed isn’t so good. If you have ever felt like the daily grind was enough to make you want to throw your hands in the air and quit, then you need to hear Todd Duvio’s story. Having lost everything in Hurricane Katrina, from his pizzeria to his home, his story demonstrates how never giving up can get you through those days when you just want to walk away from it all.
Todd owns Brooklyn Pizza in Metairie, which is just outside of downtown New Orleans…right in the middle of the flood-ravaged scenes you watched on TV a year and a half ago. “We opened Brooklyn Pizzeria in February of 2005,” Todd said. “We took our life savings and rushed to get open. Seven months later we were doing well as a new start-up business. We were starting to cater to the New Orleans Saints at training camp a couple of times a week and starting a few other things…and then Katrina came. She wiped us out.
“The Saturday before Katrina hit, we stayed open until midnight, where we normally close at 9 p.m. We left and drove to Dallas to get out of the city. We watched the television and saw what was going on. We lived in the area they were showing and based on the images we were seeing, we knew the water was rising really fast, but didn’t know how much water was there at the shop. By the end of the evening we knew the restaurant was lost because of some of the video footage of the area. As far as our house, we weren’t sure. I knew we were going to have to do something, so I immediately starting thinking about how to get back in business and started thinking about a trailer. I found a carnival pizza trailer on Ebay that was in Arizona and we borrowed some money to buy it. I contacted the guy and he took it off Ebay and sold it for less than he had it listed for.
“Ever since I was a kid, I have been an entrepreneur and I wasn’t going to give up. I had to get back. My wife was saying “No way” but my whole family is from the area. The whole key was survival. Our biggest thing was that we had to come back, so five days later I got a business pass and got back into the area. My two sons go to a private school here (John Curtis Christian School, where I went to school and played football), and we wanted to get back to something that they knew.”
When Todd returned to the area, he walked through the water and discovered they had three to four feet of water in the pizzeria, and their house had the roof ripped off and about three inches of water in it too. “The water stayed at two to three feet at the pizzeria for about 13 days, and once they got the pumps working, it went down to a couple of inches in one day,” Todd explained.
While Todd was waiting on the trailer, he gutted the entire restaurant himself. Once the trailer arrived, it took him about a month (on October 1st) to get the trailer ready to go, but he couldn’t get food and supplies. Sysco, one of his reps, was down. Roma, which was supplying him from Orlando, wasn’t getting in to the area either.
“I used several Roma products in my recipes, so I had to figure out a way to get supplies,” Todd said. “Roma was getting food into Gulfport, Mississippi, so I would close the shop and get in my truck on Wednesdays and drive seven hours, which was normally a one and a half hour drive, to get food. We did this for about four to five months. Eventually I was able to start getting Roma products out of Texas, but they didn’t have everything I needed.”
Todd and his wife got the pizza trailer running and just the two of them ran it. “I was moving $1,700 to $2,000 a day out of a 17-foot trailer,” He said “I was making dough three times a day and it finally started to level off around Christmas, when other places started to reopen. We worked out of the trailer for about eight months while we were in the process of rebuilding the restaurant.”
The struggle wasn’t over yet as he had problems with insurance companies, such as not having content flood insurance, which they were supposed to, but the agent said they didn’t. They lost nearly everything, but determined to survive, they never gave up.
“My in-laws helped us buy the trailer, but that was it,” Todd said. “Because of the trailer, we were able to get some cash coming in to help rebuild. We shut the trailer down for about a month to get the pizzeria open. We got no charity and we did it all on our own.”
Todd is back in business and his restaurant’s doing great considering the post-Katrina state of New Orleans.
He still has a container out back in which they store things, and his house is still only about 60 percent complete today. He put the trailer to use by setting it up to sell pizza along one of the Mardi Gras parade routes. I asked him if there was ever a point where he wanted to throw his hands up and quit.
“No, no because I am not that type of person,” he said. “If I was a single person, maybe, but I have a family and they have to live. The guys at SliceNy.com did an article and Publisher and Editor Adam Kuban helped out. There were two articles that appeared in papers up there. The place has a New York theme and I was able to get some photos and maps and stuff to help redecorate thanks to the exposure. I didn’t want to ask for money, although we could use it, but that would just be cheesy.”
When you think you have it rough, pull this article out and think about how bad it could be. It’s people like Todd and his story that show that with determination, you can survive. If you would like to see more photos of Todd’s restaurant, both before and after Katrina, go to pizzerianeedshelp.blogspot.com.