By Charlie Pogacar
When Rocco Pifferetti was learning to read and write, his teacher asked him to fill out an early classroom worksheet. It asked him to answer things like what his favorite color was (who knows), his favorite food (pizza) and what did he wanted to be when he grew up. “The pizza man,” he wrote as his dream job, butchering the spelling.
When he was 25, in February 2006, Pifferetti opened Rocco’s Pizzeria in Youngwood, Pennsylvania, thus fulfilling his childhood dream. Pifferetti jokes that he should have framed that piece of paper from his early childhood and hung it on the wall of his pizzeria. Instead, it’s been lost to time, passed around too many times between him and his mother, Sandy, before eventually disappearing.
On February 3, Pifferetti celebrated the 20th anniversary of Rocco’s Pizzeria—the shop he opened with little more than determination, a love for the craft and help from his nephew Darren, who delivered pizzas in the early days. Two decades later, the business employs more than 20 people and generates over $1 million in annual sales.
Related: Foot Traffic Guaranteed: Rocco Pifferetti Thinks Outside the Brick-and-Mortar Box
“I just had to do it,” Pifferetti said of the shop’s origins. “I had told so many people over the years, ‘Someday, I’m going to do this.’ And then it was like, OK—there’s no turning back. You’ve got to burn the boats.”
From the start, Sandy treated the pizza shop like a member of the family. Every year, she celebrated its “birthday” with cakes, balloons and candles—sometimes with more enthusiasm than Pifferetti himself.
“It was like this place was my child—and her grandchild,” Pifferretti said.
Sandy passed away at the end of January last year, a loss that made this milestone hit differently. When the 20-year mark approached, Pifferetti knew he wanted to do more than a simple promotion. He wanted the celebration to honor his mother’s pride, the shop’s longevity and the people who now help run it every day.
Planning for the 20th anniversary began about a month out, though the idea had been planted years earlier by a pizza box supplier who once mentioned custom boxes for anniverseries. This time, Pifferetti leaned on his office manager, Hope—his “backbone,” as he calls her—to help spread the word and organize the details.
The celebration included throwback pricing, giveaways for early customers and a social media campaign that even coincided with the shop hitting its 20,000th Facebook follower. But just as important was what happened behind the scenes.
The day before the anniversary, Pifferetti walked into the restaurant with Josh DeFelice—who runs Pifferetti’s separate slice shop concept, Rocco’s Slice House—and completely refreshed the dining room. Old booths were torn out, and new high-top seating went in. A bar-top counter lined the wall. A new TV was installed, just in time for the Super Bowl. Paint was touched up—all of this was done in a couple of hours, a nod to the grit, hard work and “I’ve-just-got-to-do-this” attitude that started it all.
“I want people to see that we’re 20 years in and still working on the place,” he said. “We’re still trying to make it better.”
While Rocco’s Pizzeria continues to run strong, the anniversary was a moment to step back from daily grind and think bigger about the business as a whole, fueled in part by the creative spark he rediscovered opening his newer slice concept.
After 20 years in the business, The Pizza Man wouldn’t change it for anything. “All that time went somewhere,” he said. “It went right into this shop.”
