By Charlie Pogacar
After Danny Huber’s mother passed away in 2021, he and his young family of four started a new chapter and moved from Chicago to Atlanta. Once there, he did what any pizza-obsessed person would do: He Googled “pizza near me.” What he found only furthered his nostalgia for home—and reminded him how much he missed his mom, too.
Sometimes, if you want something done right, you do it yourself. Huber began tinkering with recipes in his home kitchen, trying to recreate the cracker-thin-crust tavern-style pizza he’d grown up eating at Ledo’s Pizza, a beloved independent shop in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago.
“You’d go [to Ledo’s] after sports games. People were smoking inside, parents were drinking pitchers, kids running around,” Huber told PMQ Pizza. “And the most Chicago lady you’ve ever seen would yell ‘47, your order’s ready!’ into the mic. When I think of pizza, I think of those memories.”
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That’s the core of Bertolozi’s Pizzeria, the pop-up-turned-brick-and-mortar—inspired by his late mother—that will open soon in the Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta: Take the Chicago tavern-style experience he grew up with and drop it into an Atlanta neighborhood that needs it. The shop is set to open in December, Huber said, but his long-running pop-up has already made an indelible mark on Atlanta’s burgeoning pizza scene.
“The Atlanta market really doesn’t have true Chicago tavern-style pizza,” he said. “There’s maybe one or two places, but some of them are using frozen crust. People love it, but it’s not the real thing, in my opinion.”
‘It’s All Intertwined With Family’
Huber named Bertolozi’s in honor of his selfless and hard-working mom, Joyce Bertolozi. The tributes don’t stop there, either: “The Joyce” is one of Bertolozi’s best-selling pizzas, featuring cupped pepperoni, ricotta, hot honey, basil, oregano and shaved Parmesan.
“When I first started doing pop-ups and someone said, ‘Oh, my God, The Joyce was amazing,’” Huber said. “It’s the coolest feeling in the world to hear people say my mom’s name.”
Huber wants everyone to know that his mother was a Chicago public school teacher who “sacrificed everything” to put her two sons through college. His pizza pop-ups began in the wake of her death and became his way of honoring her.
“For me it was like: all that money she saved, all those sacrifices—I get to put that into a legacy,” he said. “I get to make sure everybody in Atlanta knows who she is.”
The menu at Bertolozi’s features other menu items named after family members, and the shop’s decor underscores those family ties. A muralist is coming to paint the logo on the wall, alongside the Chicago flag and family photos. His cousins around the country—from the Bertolozi side—are cheering him on. “It’s all intertwined with family,” he said.
How It Started
Huber didn’t move south to open a pizzeria. His wife, Jackie, is from Georgia, and she received a promotion that took the family back to her home state. The couple has two young kids—Sammy, a boy, age 6, and Frankie, a girl, age 4—and saw a future for their family in Atlanta.
As Huber began making pizza at home, he leaned on friends from the pizza world. That includes Tony Scardino—better known as Professor Pizza—someone Huber calls a mentor and sounding board. Scardino helped Huber dial in a specific style: cold-cured dough using methods that go back to 1950s Chicago taverns, topped with more modern ingredients.
“We use the cold-curing process Pat’s [Pizzeria] was doing back then. [Our fermentation process] takes about a week,” he said. “But the modern twist is that I’m using toppings like whipped ricotta, basil, oregano, giardiniera, and [eventually] a vodka pie with stracciatella.”
Huber’s menu includes other elevated takes on Chicago classics. While he will sell a standard sausage, green pepper and onion pie, he will also sell “The George,” featuring sausage, Giardiniera, shaved garlic, basil, oregano and shaved Parmesan—another nod to home, named for his Great Uncle George.
Like a million modern pizza stories, friends told Huber, “You should sell this,” when he started making his own pies. Unlike most people, he actually did it. He started an Instagram and Facebook, got invited to do pizza at a brewery, and people loved it. Then, a coffee shop inside a struggling food hall asked him to run their pizza program. He went in under their name, then eventually phased them out and made it Bertolozi’s.
“And then it just blew up,” he said. “We were rated [a 4.9] on Google. People were driving an hour or two to come get our pizza.”
How It’s Going
The brick-and-mortar store will open off Roswell Road in Buckhead, a posh neighborhood of Atlanta, in a busy plaza anchored by Publix. The shop covers 1,300 square feet with a patio. Rent is $4,750. He bought a fully equipped pizza spot for $100,000 after negotiating the price down.
“The numbers make sense,” he said. “In the food hall I was giving 25% of gross. We were paying six to seven grand in rent based on our sales. I never wanted to be in a food hall—I just knew I had to do it to get to the next phase. But now I’ve got this legacy location where you get access to the city. If we do this right, this is the perfect spot [from which to build out a nearby] store 2 and 3.”
He inherited a classic Blodgett gas deck oven—fitting for the tavern-style approach—and, having learned on a Gozney, he’s in the middle of re-learning the bake. It’s been an adjustment for Huber, who is open about the mental challenges he’s faced going all in on pizza.
“One day you’re super confident, the next day you’re scared,” he said. “That’s just entrepreneurship. You wake up at 2 a.m. thinking about interest rates and restaurant failure stats. Then somebody tells you, ‘You should own 40 restaurants, your pizza is amazing,’ and you’re like, ‘Yeah, maybe I should.’”
He credits his wife, Jackie, for backing his uncompromising vision. Even as he shut down the pop-ups and depleted their savings to launch the brick-and-mortar shop, she supported him.
“There’s been moments where I’ve gone to her and I’m like, should I get another job? Should I do this?” Huber said. “And she’s like, it’s your dream—you need to do it. You should do it.”
Right now he’s got two employees. When the shop opens, he expects to have hired three or four more. He’s putting his main guy on salary and “handing him the keys” to help run the shop while they expand the menu to Italian beef, Chicago dogs and a few other Chicago-adjacent items.
The shop will serve as a connection to Huber’s mother, his family and his childhood. He hopes it will be so much more, too.
“I want Bertolozi’s to be the place people go and make memories,” he said. “If we get consistency, hospitality and cleanliness right, there’s a lot of room for future stuff. But right now I just want to be part of the community and showcase what we’ve been working on. It’s been a grind. I just want it to work.”
