By Charlie Pogacar
One of the stiffest pizza competitions is the Neapolitan division of the International Pizza Challenge, hosted annually at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. This year’s contest saw 107 men and women compete, with the top five contestants moving on to the finals.
One of the Cinderella stories of this year’s competition was Francesco Cirillo, a self-taught home baker who runs Pizzaa Boss, a Neapolitan-style catering company based in Central New Jersey. Cirillo competed in the International Pizza Challenge for the first time and held aspirations of finishing in the top 50 of the Neapolitan division. Instead, he blew that away, finishing eighth overall.
For Cirillo, the results emboldened the journey he’s been on since the opening days of the pandemic. A full-time finance professional with no culinary background, Cirillo stumbled into pizza making after his wife gifted him a backyard oven to help pass the time. “Prior to that, I was in the office five days a week,” Cirillo said. “Having a hobby like this wouldn’t have been imaginable back then.”
Related: Behind the Scenes With Donatella Arpaia: What It’s Like to Judge and Compete at Pizza Expo
Like many pandemic-born pizza makers, Cirillo started small—experimenting in his backyard, feeding friends and family. He frequently failed but learned along the way. What separated him from others, perhaps, was his relentless pursuit of improvement and a genuine love for the craft. “You learn from your failures,” Cirillo said. “We continue to fail until we start to succeed, right?”
Cirillo’s pizza earned accolades from friends and family, but he knew strangers would give him a real sense of where his craft stood. With his wife, Katherine, by his side, the duo launched Pizzaa Boss in 2022, a mobile pizza business, and began operating at local farmer’s markets. Those endeavors taught Cirillo a lot about the business and confirmed that his Neapolitan pies really were quite good—but they were hardly lucrative. Because the markets typically operated during the brunch window, he was barely breaking even. Eventually, Cirillo decided to expand his side hustle into a buffet-style catering business, where he pumps out pizzas, alongside Katherine, for up to 100 people.
To get ready for those catering events, Cirillo began training with purpose—running speed drills, refining his recipes and tweaking his setup. “I had to practice [privately],” he said. “Like, I was literally seeing how fast I could make a pizza from start to finish. And I was doing that for weeks and weeks on end.”
That streak of obsessiveness would come in handy when he stepped onto one of the biggest stages in the pizza world. In Las Vegas, among seasoned professionals and industry legends, Cirillo represented the growing wave of serious at-home pizza makers who have transitioned into the commercial scene. “When I started this journey, I didn’t think I would be able to do what I currently do now,” Cirillo told PMQ.
Here is a Q&A with Cirillo on Pizzaa Boss, his experience at the International Pizza Challenge and what his goals in the industry are. The conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
PMQ: You said your pop-up is ‘buffet-style’—that made my ears perk up. Is that how you do all of your events?
Francesco Cirillo: Yes. So the way it works is…We have a whole menu on our website. We have the customer pick four options off that menu—I think four is the sweet spot. Giving the customer too many options can confuse them a bit, I think.
So we serve four different kinds of pizza, and it’s a two-hour service. We’re there for two hours and making and baking pizzas, and it’s literally served buffet style. We create a custom menu for the night so that everyone knows what’s going to be available, and then it’s free game.
You grab a plate and you pick which slices you want, and that’s pretty much how it goes. As compared to everyone getting their own pizza—that’s going to take too long. Then you have to keep track of what everyone ordered.
One thing I also always try to do is have at least one of each type of pizza left over for the host of the party. Because a lot of times when you host the party, you’re not getting a chance to eat since you’re socializing.
So we bring boxes, we box [those remaining four pies] up into our custom boxes. We mark them, put a business card in them, and the host decides whether they want to give them away as favors or keep them.
PMQ: The menu on your website has 10 different pies. Which one is your favorite?
Cirillo: Oh, good question. I like the Margherita. It’s nice and simple. If I had to choose something different…We have a new menu item we just added, which is the truffle mushroom pie (Everyday we Trufflin’). I make a mushroom cream sauce, and it’s not very strong on the truffle oil. It’s pretty tasty. The Verde Bello one is great, I make the pesto for that one myself. I also make my own vodka sauce for the Drunken Calabrese—I make everything myself. Nothing is bought.
We use top quality ingredients. And, I know, everybody says that, right? But we actually do. We get our flour directly from Italy. And, no, I don’t use [a brand everyone’s heard of]. I use [a different type of flour], but we try to source top quality, and it shows once you taste our pizzas—you can tell the difference.
PMQ: I want to get to Vegas, but first, it piqued my interest that you sell frozen dough balls on your website. What is the story behind that?
Cirillo: Yeah, so sometimes I would have leftover dough, and I would ball it up and freeze it and then give it to my father-in-law. My father-in-law cooks pizza at home, and so he kind of became the guinea pig.
He didn’t want to deal with the actual dough-making process, but he wanted to make pizza. So he would always buy dough from [the grocery store], and I’m, like, what are you doing? Like, no, I’ll give you our dough. So I’m his supplier now, and I’m always giving him dough.
So when I’m making dough, I typically make some extra and freeze it, and if anybody wants it, we’ll sell it to them. It’s not like a huge revenue stream for us or anything—I don’t advertise it much—but if someone asks, we’ll do it.
And, honestly, if you have our frozen dough and let it thaw in the fridge overnight, it’s basically good as new. We’re not wasteful people, so I don’t want to throw out the dough we don’t use.
PMQ: Do you have to rent out space to prep all of your ingredients? How does that work?
Cirillo: No, and that’s another thing about private events. It’s great because we aren’t regulated in that way where you need to have a commissary kitchen. I have a dedicated area in my house that is strictly for pizza. It’s like a sun room that we converted into a dough prep station. I actually just bought my first mixer, a 30-quart mixer. Before, I was doing everything by hand.
PMQ: Alright, so tell me a little bit about your Pizza Expo competing experience. How did you end up there?
Cirillo: I’ve always wanted to go to Pizza Expo, ever since I started getting into pizza making. And every year I would tell my wife, oh, I want to go, and she’s like, go! And then I’d end up not going, and then the FOMO would set in. You see all these posts and these videos where I’m like oh, [man], I should have gone.
It’s the same thing with starting a business, right? Like, oh, we’re going to fail. I don’t know if I can do this. But until you actually do it, you won’t ever really know, right? You never know if it’ll actually work out. So you have to just do it and see what happens. If you fail, you fail, and then you move on. That’s life.
So I took that same approach with me to Vegas. I was like, not only are we going to go to Vegas for the first time, but we’re also going to go to the Expo for the first time, and I’m also gonna compete. I wanted to just go there and have fun and showcase what I can do.
I’m a self-taught baker and pizza maker at the Expo, competing against almost 110 competitors in the Neapolitan division. The Neapolitan division is very strict. It’s one of the strictest competitions…you had to mix by hand or mix with a low-speed mixer. That was one of the requirements. You had to use San Marzano tomatoes, your dough ball needed to weigh a certain weight. So there are all of these different variables and restrictions, which is why I brought my own flour, scaled and measured everything. Oh, that’s another one—you could only use 00 flour.
That’s another thing. We didn’t have a fridge at our hotel, so I mixed my dough in my hotel room—I do at least a 48-hour fermentation. They had walk-in coolers at Expo, so I would mix it at the hotel and then bring it in and put it there overnight. But then, I had to be ready by 7:30 in the morning. So… if I had taken that dough out, even at 6 a.m.—which is the earliest they would let us in—an hour and half wouldn’t have been enough for the dough to get to room temperature and to proof at the right point of fermentation.
So what I did was, that night, I went back and took the dough with me to the hotel. I lowered the A/C in our room down to like 60 degrees and let it sit at room temperature to let it rise. And it worked perfectly—thankfully, it went really well.
But that was just the craziness behind the dough-making process.
PMQ: So take me to the actual competition. What was the day like?
Cirillo: The morning of Wednesday, mind you, I haven’t even tested the ovens or the dough. I’ve never even cooked in a [full-sized oven], I’m used to Roccboxes and Arcs. So we got there a little early. I made, like, six dough balls—all you need is one for the competition—and I’m like, I’m here early, so let me just test a few pies out. And they baked well. The first pie, the bottom was a little darker than I wanted, so then I changed the positioning. Instead of launching it to the left of the oven, I launched it in the center. That was more manageable, and it worked well.
So the whole event was a little delayed. It didn’t start until, like, 9 a.m., I think. I was competitor number seven. I felt a little bad for the first guy baking. The oven was so hot, they threw in like 3 or 4 test pizzas just so the stone could cool down a bit. So that took a little while, and I’m sure everybody was nervous or whatever, but it was cool—like I said, there were about 110 competitors from all over the world. And these are like professional people, people from the industry that do this every day. So it was a great experience.
I went dressed as I would be for my events: I wore Crocs, high socks and a t-shirt. I figured I might as well go as I would when I’m going to a party and baking pizza for my customers. I’m not paying attention to anything else, I’m just focusing on my dough and making pizza.
So, yeah, I mean, I baked the pizza, brought it over to the judges in the back. They look at the pizza whole first. Then you bring it back, and they tell you to cut your three favorite slices so they can judge them.
I liked how the dough came out, how the pizza came out, I was pretty happy with it. I was still at this point where I’m expecting top 50, at best, right? So yeah, we cut the pizza up, gave it to them, and then I went home to the hotel, slept a couple of hours, and that was it for the day.
We didn’t get the results until late that night. I think it was like 10, 10:30 Vegas time. We were on the Vegas strip at the Fountains of Bellagio, and I’m checking my phone, and the results came in. I clicked on it, and I was already starting to just scroll all the way down to see if my name was on it.
So, as I click it, [I see] “Francesco.” Well, there were a bunch of Italians on the list, so I’m sure there’s other Francescos on here. And then I’m, like, oh [wow], that’s me! Holy crap. I made it to the top 10!
PMQ: Incredible stuff. What do you think your biggest takeaway from the experience is?
Cirillo: Yeah, for me, it just reaffirms the belief that what I’m doing is great, that my pizza is great, and it gives you some more confidence in what we’re doing. The whole Pizzaa Boss mission is reaching customers and believing in your product and never doubting yourself, right? Take those risks, whether they’re big or small, because you never know. Like, I could have been home looking at these videos, not going to Expo, and be back in that same place: “Oh, crap, I should’ve gone.”
But I did it, and in a big way. I ended up being in the top 10. So, at the end of the day, keep doing you, and as long as you believe in what you’re doing, you’re doing it, right? And don’t look for handouts, don’t cut corners, don’t skip steps or just do it for the money. Again, this is a true passion of mine.
Just believe in yourself, believe in your work, and, at the end of the day, as long as you check those boxes and believe in yourself, you’ll succeed.
