Editor’s note: PMQ Pizza’s recent interview with Paul and Mary Ann Giannone about their storied career and new book, Pizza From the Heart, is being presented in a three-part digital exclusive. Framed as an oral history of Paulie Gee’s, this is part 3. Click here to read part 1 and click here to read part 2.
By Tracy Morin
From Dan Richer’s The Joy of Pizza and Tony Gemignani’s The Pizza Bible to Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast, there’s no shortage of cookbooks authored by pizza community legends. That’s why Mary Ann and Paul Giannone, founders of the iconic Paulie Gee’s, wanted to do something a little different with their new book, Pizza From the Heart.
Just take a look at the introduction, where the longtime sweethearts recall their “meet-cute” moment in a Brooklyn disco in 1976. “He came up to me and said, ‘I know you. I see you on the RR train,’” Mary Ann recalled. “And I said, ‘Likely story.’”
In fact, there’s a fun story behind many of the recipes in the book—or, at least, a comment or two from Paulie or Mary Ann that makes for a breezy read. In this final installment of PMQ’s exclusive chat with Mary Ann and Paulie, they talk about their initial reluctance to author a cookbook and why Pizza From the Heart is a lot more than that.
Part 3: The Making of Pizza From the Heart
PMQ: Let’s talk about Pizza From the Heart. How did that project come about?
Paul Giannone: Mary Ann always had this idea. She wanted to do this book, and we didn’t know what it was going to be. We thought it was going to be our story. But we came to learn, in dealing with the publishing world, that when you’re a publishing company and you’re dealing with somebody in the food community, it’s gotta be a cookbook. We didn’t want it to be a cookbook. The idea was to tell our story, our journey—very important things, like helping people and what we’ve gone through. But we knew that it had to be a cookbook.
Mary Ann’s idea, basically, was to use my recipes. I was not a chef; I would just cook at home. I would make stuff the way I wanted it. I’d say, “Oh, I like that dish that I had here. Let me figure out what they did.” Sure, I used recipes. I used The Essential New York Times Cookbook. I used a great Italian book called Italian Regional Cooking by Ada Boni. But my favorite cookbook was a book that has no pictures in it, which is Bruculinu, America, by Vincent Schiavelli, the actor who was in Ghost.
In any case, Mary Ann’s idea was to take my recipes I was cooking at home and put them in the book.
Mary Ann Giannone: So it’s not just a pizza book. That’s not what we wanted. That’s really not who we are, even though we are in the pizza business—
Paulie: Pizza community!
Mary Ann: Right, pizza community. I feel like the pizza for us was just a vehicle. When I say things like this, people always look at me like I’m crazy, but we’ve been able to do so many things in our life that we would never have done before. And it’s not just the pizza.
Once you read the book, you’ll see. I’ve had so many comments from people already, and it really came out the way I wanted it to come out. Because I didn’t want it to just be recipes. There are a lot of wonderful pizza enthusiasts out there, pizza makers—people that are a lot better at it than we are, right? We’re not really, like, pizza purists. Paulie’s not going to sit down and write a whole chapter just about dough. It’s just not who we are. There are a lot of recipes in there for pizza, for people to make it at home. We had to pare down a lot of our commercial recipes to make it for residential use in different types of ovens. And that was challenging.
Recipe: Paulie Gee’s Ricotta Be Kidding Me
I just feel like there’s a lot of us in the book. Everybody who knows us has said that to me, including Scott [Wiener] from Scott’s Pizza Tours. We’ve known him forever; he came to our house for a pizza tasting in 2008, so we’ve traveled in the same circles with a lot of these people, and I sent him a first pass of the book. I sent it to a number of people in the industry. And it was a little intimidating, because, you know, we’re not Dan Richer [from Razza Pizza Artigianale], who’s wonderful. He’s been so amazingly supportive about this book, but we’ve known him a very long time also.
Related: Unsexy Operations: Dan Richer’s Approach to Training Staff and Facility Management
We’ve had such a wonderful response from people, even just writing a blurb for the book. I mean, Peter Reinhart wrote a blurb for me. Dan wrote a blurb for me. Chris Bianco wrote a blurb. Anybody I reached out to. It was just so humbling and heartwarming. I can’t even tell you, I was blown away by it, because I don’t think we feel we’re in the same league as them.
Paulie: We’ve been successful, we’ve been popular, but what we’re offering is more of a dining experience. I think that’s why people came to our original wood-fired restaurant. It was a very seductive environment. And we did the same thing with the slice shop. We decided that we would create a place that was the slice shop of our youth and touch people in that way. It’s very effective, but that’s what has made us popular.
Is there pizza that’s better than ours? Absolutely. There are great pizza people doing it: L’Industrie [in Brooklyn] is a great example right now—excellent pizza. Mamas TOO! and Lucali. These are all slice shops that are making very special products. But what we’re offering is different: The slices that we do are like slices from 50 years ago. It’s like a slice of time.
PMQ: Was it difficult to incorporate your personal story into the book alongside the recipes?
Mary Ann: That was the hardest part of the book. Well, I don’t know—the recipes, getting all those together, testing stuff and all that, that was definitely challenging. But I feel like it was the hardest part for me. I had a co-writer, which was very helpful. We did a lot of Zoom calls. She asked a lot of questions. I wrote some stuff initially.
When we opened the business, I had a good friend of mine say to me, “You know, you really should be journaling some of this stuff, writing some of these things down, because there are always crazy stories in any business.” And I did do that for a couple of years, when we first opened. When I went to start my first proposal, I went back to that journal and transcribed it, and that’s how I recalled a lot of things. Because, you know, you kind of forget—it’s been 15 years. There’s so much that has happened, I can’t even recall it all. And that was the biggest challenge of the book, trying to get as much of the story in there as possible.
PMQ: What else do you think makes the book unique?
Mary Ann: The recipes are great, and all his home recipes are in there, and the photography is amazing. We got a really great New York photographer. Everybody who’s called me about it said the photography was just incredible. I’ve looked at a lot of other books now since, and he was fantastic, the whole team that he had. But it was very hard to try to sit and put it all together.
Because besides the pizza business, there’s more to our story—we’ll be married 46 years in June. We met in New York. We worked in the city together, down in the World Trade Center. We went to school together at night—we never finished anything, but we went to school together at night—and we had different jobs, and we had kids, and we had a house, and then we decided to come back to Brooklyn. That was never in the plan.
I really wanted to use this as more of an inspirational tool than anything. And the only way I was going to do it was to do what they said, which was to do a cookbook. It has to fall on a shelf. That’s how it was presented to me. And that’s fine. But I said from the get-go, I wanted certain things in there, and I really think they did a fabulous job with that.
PMQ: What was the publishing process like?
Mary Ann: Sarah Zorn was our writer, and since the time that we finished the book, she was nominated for two James Beard Awards for her cookbooks. So she’s been doing this a long time, and everything that has happened with this book has just been serendipitous. I’m not kidding you—she was actually the first person that wrote about Mike’s Hot Honey in Brooklyn 15 years ago. I had a couple of great offers, and I took the one where I really loved the people on the call, and I felt like they were going to have my best interests at heart. My agent is right here in Brooklyn, the David Black Literary Agency. I just love everybody that got assigned with us.
The agent said to me, “I’m looking for a co-writer for you, and I only have one person right now that’s available, Sarah Zorn.” I said, “Wait a minute, I know that name.” We were in her first book, Brooklyn Chef’s Table. She profiled about 50 new restaurants in Brooklyn—by now, a lot of them are closed—and we were in that book. She has gone on to do so many books since then, and I just felt like, of course I would have her. We know her! It was just crazy. There are so many stories like this. I’m just part of it, too, telling the story, but it’s been very inspirational to people. And I felt the story had to be told, because we were much older coming into this. We had no restaurant experience.
Paulie: Well, that’s not true.
Mary Ann: I never worked in a restaurant.
Paulie: When I was, I think, 15, in Brooklyn, there was a very nice Italian restaurant near where we live. It was called Scarola’s, and they had the insight—this is a long time ago—to open up a little place that just did takeout. There’s no place to sit, no place to eat, and they hired me, and I started working on a Friday night. I spent more time on the phone speaking with the people who called in to order pizza than I should have, and they fired me. By Sunday, I was gone. They said, “Don’t come back.”
And there was a roller-skating rink, Park Circle in Prospect Park, and for a while I used to make egg creams, like behind the candy counter. And I would do that until they fired me there, too. I can’t tell you why they fired me from there—it’s too embarrassing.
PMQ: Looks like it was their loss! How many locations has Paulie Gee’s grown to by now?
Paulie: We have two places here in Greenpoint. And we created a franchise company, helping other people open up their own shops. There are four places in Chicago: a wood-fired pizzeria, a slice shop, a hybrid and a catering company. And we have a wood-fired place in Columbus, Ohio, right now. We had a place in Baltimore, and we’re reinventing that now, kind of spinning it into a more of a New York-style slice shop business.
And we’re about to open up another slice shop here, in Gowanus in Brooklyn. Those are two brothers that came to work for me. They said they wanted to open up a pizzeria, maybe a Paulie Gee’s.
Mary Ann: One of them is working in both our shops. The other one’s just working at the slice shop. But we’ve known them now for a couple of years. And one of our pizza makers who has been with us for quite a while in Greenpoint started with us when he was 18; I think he’s 27, 28 now. He started working with us in Greenpoint, and he wrote something for the book, also. I went back to people and got their stories, so it’s very interesting. It’s not just about us—it’s about all the relationships and the people that we’ve met.
Paulie: It’s important to mention that we’re always looking for people who want to have their life saved the way our life was saved. I’m always looking to help other people open up their own shops, and that’s really our focus. We could have created a conglomerate, but that’s not what we wanted. We wanted to take what we learned and allow other people to capitalize on that in exchange for, you know, a little cold, hard cash.
Join the Pizza From the Heart Q&A and book signing at the original Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn on May 3. Watch for their upcoming events in Chicago on May 20 and in mid-September in San Diego, at Tribute Pizza. Learn more on Paulie Gee’s Instagram page.
