Caroline D’Amore grew up doing her homework in a pizzeria. Now she owns one.
The daughter of pizza restaurateur Joe D’Amore—who owns and operates D’Amore’s Pizza, based in the Los Angeles area—Caroline D’Amore has made a name for herself as Pizza Girl. It’s a name she says she earned from her father growing up around the family business, and it is also one that she lends to the “pink-and-mortar” pizza shop she just opened in Venice Beach, California.
For years, D’Amore said she wanted little to do with the family business of pizza. In the 2000’s, she enjoyed a career as a model, actress and socialite, earning a reputation for hanging out with A-listers like the Kardashians and Hiltons. D’Amore apparently warmed to the idea of running a pizza business in recent years, at least partially due to her becoming a mother—she launched her Pizza Girl pasta sauce in 2019 with fellow moms in mind.
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“It was so hard to find organic sauces that had no added sugar or fat—and there wasn’t a single jar that represented the moms of my generation,” D’Amore said on her website. “Us millennial moms care about every single ingredient but still want that high-quality taste with a fresh spin on packaging.”
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The success of Pizza Girl’s pasta sauce propelled the Pizza Girl brand on to new revenue streams. The brand now touts a Pizza Girl pizza grill, as well as the new pizzeria in Venice Beach. Over the weekend, the new Pizza Girl storefront held a grand opening event that included free slices of pizza. In footage from the event posted to social media, A’more is seen telling interested customers about the new shop’s pizza.
“It has no hormones, or antibiotics,” D’Amore said. “It is just the cleanest, yummiest pizza you will ever have. Because we didn’t forget to make it taste good.”
D’Amore appeared on Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars last year where she was one of three finalists. The details of the Pizza Girl origin story became known to a wider audience: prior to the pandemic, D’Amore had built up an impressive retail business with her pizza sauce. When organic tomato farms were shut down at the beginning of the pandemic, she no longer had sauce to bottle and she ended up having to relaunch her business in 2021.
These days, Pizza Girl tomato sauce is available directly from the Pizza Girl website and is sold in select grocery stores in California. Pizza. Girl has three different pizza sauces: Arrabbiata, Marinara and Vodka.
The new Pizza Girl shop actually isn’t the first pizzeria D’Amore has owned. In 2012, she opened up a D’Amore’s Pizza location with her then-husband Bobby Alt. She lost the shop in a divorce, according to a 2021 story by PMQ. This time, D’Amore appears to be the sole owner of Pizza Girl.
