Jesse Wisinski raised more than $2,000 for the pizza-focused nonprofit Slice Out Hunger in a single day on July 25—and he’s not even a professional pizza maker. Not yet anyway.
What he is, though, is a pizza lover and a lover of people.
“My philosophy is simple,” he recently told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Pizza is just an excuse to love people.”
Wisinski is a software engineer by day and an aspiring pizzaiolo by night, and he has been chronicling his journey of discovery on social media, including through videos on YouTube and Reels on Instagram.
He has no storefront, commercial kitchen or even much of a pizzeria résumé. But Wisinski turns his Brighton Township, Pennsylvania, home into a makeshift pizza shop every Tuesday, taking orders after finishing his day job. He typically makes as many as 20 pizzas in an evening, prepping and topping the pies in his kitchen and baking them in a $50 used gas oven that he found on Facebook Marketplace and keeps in his garage.
He modified the oven with a metal pizza peel that allows him to push the baking temperature above the oven’s normal 550-degree limit. His pies generally bake in seven to 10 minutes, depending on the style.
But the operation gets considerably more complicated when Wisinski scales up. For the July 25 Slice Out Hunger fundraiser, he made 59 pizzas—cheese or pepperoni—over roughly nine hours, with his wife, Allison, and a friend pitching in. Wisinski had started preparing three days earlier, making eight batches of dough and then portioning it into balls for a 90-hour cold fermentation.
“I’ve been doing it for about a year on a smaller scale, so I knew what I was getting into,” he said in the Post-Gazetteinterview.
Wisinski’s stated goal for the fundraiser was humble: $1,000. By the end of the night, he had doubled that. A few days later, in an Instagram post, he wrote, “This event reminded me why I started The Best Pizza Shop. Pizza has a way of bringing people together.”
‘There Are No Secrets’
On Pizza Tuesdays at Wisinski’s house, everything is carefully staged before the first customer arrives: dough, sauces, pepperoni, pecorino Romano and mozzarella, along with pizza boxes labeled with each customer’s name, order and pickup time. An Alexa device serves as his kitchen timer—a system he arrived at after, by his own admission, burning more than a few pizzas along the way.
Wisinski’s interest in pizza dates back to his teenage years, when he began making it at home with his parents. The son of two native New Yorkers, he also grew up eating the real thing on family visits to the Big Apple and later worked briefly at Anthony Jr.’s, a favorite neighborhood pizzeria in Monaca, while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
But he only became serious about mastering the craft much more recently. After spending hours talking about pizza with a friend on a road trip, Wisinski began studying books and videos and experimenting at home. Soon he was making more pizza than his family could possibly eat.
So he began giving the extras away.
That eventually evolved into Pizza Tuesday. Wisinski created an online form through which people could request pizzas—either for themselves or for someone else who could use a little kindness. Customers who wanted to help cover ingredient costs could donate $15, but making money wasn’t really the point.
The pizzas themselves have steadily become more sophisticated. He offers thin-crust pies as well as an oil-rich, Sicilian-inspired Grandma pizza, with red sauce, pepperoni and his family’s vodka sauce among the topping options. Gluten-free pizzas are available, too.
Social media has become his primary means of spreading the word. Under the handle @thebestpizza.shop, Wisinski shares his experiments, techniques and recipes on Instagram and YouTube, where he hopes to build what he calls a pizza-learning platform. His approach is deliberately open-source: “There are no secrets,” he told the Post-Gazette.
In many cases, Wisinski provides details about a specific pizza he’s making for a specific customer, even tagging them in the Instagram post. He also shouts out the products he’s using, from brands like Grandé Cheese to the pans from LloydPans.
In a June 9 Reel, he even vied for Dave Portnoy’s attention by doing a humorous impression of the pizza reviewer, clad in overalls, making loud, over-the-top exclamations, and pausing now and then to curse out random passersby.
Those posts keep bringing more and more customers to his door. And they’re impressed. For example, Lauren Ionadi discovered Wisinski after her brother shared a post about pizzas he had donated. She was quickly won over by his thin, crisp crust and cup-and-char pepperoni. “I’d be here every week if I could,” she told the Post-Gazette.
And Joe Campbell, who now lives in Denver but grew up nearby, had been following Wisinski online before arranging to pick up two pizzas during a visit home. “I’m a fan for life,” Campbell said.
For Wisinski, though, the pizzas—and even the growing social-media following—appear to be secondary to the connections they create. What started as an obsession with learning to make better pizza has become a way to feed neighbors, help strangers and, perhaps, eventually build a new career.
For now, every Tuesday night, his suburban home becomes a pizzeria of sorts. And the price of admission is largely whatever customers feel like giving.
