By Rick Hynum
How do you build a pizzeria from scratch when you’re flat broke? Maggie and Giovanni Canepa rolled the dice, but their success with Canepa’s Pizza Shop, located in Warrensburg, New York, didn’t come down to luck. They worked their tails off—and served the kind of pizza the locals wanted, even though Giovanni, an experienced pizzaiolo straight out of Sicily, has different tastes.
Situated in the Adirondack Mountains, Warrensburg is a destination site for outdoors lovers during the warmer weather months. But the Canepas knew from the start that they couldn’t power a brand-new pizzeria to success on the sales from just six months a year. When winter blows in, it’s the locals who keep the lights on, so they call the shots. And they don’t want anything too fancy. They just want it to be delicious—and familiar.
For his part, Giovanni leans a little more to the fancy side. He grew up on an olive farm outside Palermo and knows a top-quality, Italian-grown ingredient when he tastes it. He even owned and operated a pizzeria in Palermo before falling hard for Maggie, uprooting his life and moving to the States.
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“It’s a little bit impossible here to find the product that I was using out there [in Sicily],” he says. “You can get close. You can lie to yourself if you want to. You can buy the best quality ingredients you can find, but, still, it’s not the same. If you try to import them, some things stay fine in a can, but others just don’t. Also, in Sicily, it’s very specific—like fresh Mediterranean herbs, the oregano. Sometimes it’s out of this world. The mozzarella is so fresh. My dad comes out with the best and the freshest olive oil the world has ever seen. So even those simple ingredients will change your pizza. They will.”
But, despite Giovanni’s perfectionism, the Canepas are also realists. After all, they founded Canepa’s Pizza Shop in a hurry—and in a tight financial bind.
Down to $270 in the Bank
The couple first met in the U.S., where they were introduced by Giovanni’s cousin. It was a life-changing encounter that Giovanni, surprisingly, doesn’t even remember (Maggie has forgiven this lapse of memory but still teases him about it). Fate brought them together again when Maggie, then a college student, journeyed to Palermo for spring break. This time it was love at, well, second sight. Maggie ended up studying remotely from Palermo, and their romance bloomed.
They later moved back to the U.S., where she wrapped up her degree in English. Giovanni, meanwhile, toiled away at minimum-wage pizzeria jobs, finally becoming a manager—only to be cut loose when that pizzeria was sold. With their lives suddenly upended, Giovanni knew one thing for sure: “I don’t want to work for anybody else. I know what I’m doing.”
Giovanni sank every penny they had into a bunch of used equipment to open their own pizzeria. That move took Maggie, still freshly graduated, by surprise. “I was like, ‘Alright, maybe we can try something,'” she recalled. “And then immediately he went out and bought all this equipment without us even having a space for it, and I went nuts because it was the only money we had. I think it was, like, $13,000, and we didn’t even have that.”
They were down to less than $270 in the bank with bills to pay, but Maggie believed in her husband—and herself. They found a space that would work and opened their restaurant—mostly a carryout spot—in the waning days of 2014. “We opened on December 29, in the middle of the holidays,” Maggie said. “My parents were, like, ‘Why are you opening now? Just enjoy the holidays with the family.’ And we’re, like, no, we really have to pay rent on the 1st.”
“We thought, maybe we’ll make a couple hundred dollars and can pay half the rent,” Giovanni said. “The landlord will be happy with something instead of nothing. At the end of that day, we made $1,700. That was crazy!”
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Local Collabs and Rachael Ray
After opening, the Canepas worked day and night for nine months straight without a day off. Two sons later joined their family, raising the stakes for the pizzeria’s success. But Maggie and Giovanni were up for the task. Maggie handled the front-of-house, balanced the books and applied her English-degree skills to marketing the business. (In fact, it was her smartly crafted pitch email that led to this article.)
“I was also the paperwork pusher—navigating the local and county laws and all of that,” Maggie said. “And, as an English major, I was very comfortable with that sort of thing. And then, little by little, I just kind of taught myself the business and the books.”
Meanwhile, together they worked out a tricky balancing act between satisfying the locals’ more traditional pizza tastes and the higher expectations of tourists looking for a culinary adventure. Toward that end, they forged a partnership with a long-running business next door, Oscar’s Adirondack Smokehouse.
The result: Two collaboration pizzas, created by Giovanni, that sent sales soaring skyward.
First there’s the Local Flavor, a white pie featuring meatballs, bacon, red onions and pickles, with the true stars being Oscar’s Smoked American Cheese and Oscar’s More Than Mustard.
As for the latter ingredient, Maggie explained, “The name is what it is. It’s more than mustard, and it tastes very unique. I don’t think I’ve ever tried anything that tastes like it. I’m not exactly sure what they put in it, but it just makes the pizza….And since the second we put it out there and put their name on [the menu description], we can’t stop selling it.”
Then there’s the Smoked Buffalo Bleu, a powerhouse of flavors anchored by Oscar’s Smoked Bleu Cheese, along with buffalo sauce and grilled chicken.
“They’re just very popular, locally and regionally,” Maggie said. “It’s crazy. We also do other things with their smoked bleu cheese, like we put it on the Four Cheese pizza. So it’s been a great collaboration. They’re actually trying to get Dave Portnoy to try it, for whatever reason. But I’m like, hey, you do whatever it takes!”
Even if Portnoy doesn’t take notice (and he should), another, even bigger celebrity already has: Rachael Ray. The celebrity chef, a fan of Oscar’s, featured Canepa’s Pizza Shop in a 3 ½-minute segment on the Rachael Ray Show in 2022 (shown below).
Deep Thinking Soulmates
Artisan pizzas like the Smoked Buffalo Bleu and the Local Flavor—plus newer fusion pies like the Korean BBQ and the Chicken Bang Bang—give Giovanni a chance to put his culinary talents on full display. He still dreams quietly of opening another pizzeria, perhaps in Saratoga, New York, where he can go all-out with the Sicilian flavors he loves the most. But the Canepas are young, just in their 30s, and there will be time for that.
Meanwhile, their focus remains on the community that has supported them, to the point that they now own their building and other nearby properties. Although dine-in is limited, Canepa’s Pizza Shop is the kind of family-friendly place where everyone feels at home, no matter where they come from.
It’s even a place that makes folks stop and think—and maybe learn. A beautiful mural, painted by local artist Hannah Williams, stretches across one wall of the shop and serves as a conversation starter like none other. It showcases three inspirational figures that are important to the Canepas: Nikola Tesla, Janis Joplin and Mahatma Gandhi.
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No silly cut-outs of some goofy chef in a big white hat here. The Canepas are far deeper than that. “We picked someone for science, the arts and spirituality,” Maggie says. “We thought we found the perfect three people to represent those things. And I wanted a woman up there, too. Giovanni is big into Nikola Tesla, who’s a bit underrated. Edison got all the glory, and Tesla was the underdog.”
The mural serves as both eye-catching décor and a conversation starter that brings the Canepas—who started out as underdogs themselves—and their customers closer together. “It’s like a window or a portal on the wall that makes you stop and think,” Giovanni says. “It makes you ask questions.”
It also sends some customers straight to Google when they get home, and enlightenment is sure to follow.
As Maggie explained to PMQ in her pitch email about the mural, “The greater—and most simple—meaning is that life would be boring without the greats of the world who inspire [people] to find their passion, and their passion moves society forward.”
Above all, the mural encourages Canepa’s Pizza Shop patrons to follow their dreams—just as the Canepas did. “Although we make pizzas, and it seems very small,” Giovanni says, “it’s our contribution to society—to make people just think bigger than they are.”
And Giovanni will keep thinking bigger too, especially with the occasional nudge from Maggie. Several of the more unusual specialty pizzas on the menu have been her idea. “The truth is, I don’t like change,” Giovanni admitted, with a laugh. “My punchline is, ‘Hey, don’t change everything. It’s working out well for us. It’s been 10 years. Why are you changing the menus? Who’s gonna want Korean BBQ? Nobody wants that!’ I’m very conservative. So then she just goes and buys the ingredients anyway, and I have to deal with it.”
He laughs again. “I put my spin on it and do what I think will work well. And, honestly, that’s been the story of our life.”
“Yeah, I have an idea,” Maggie said, “and he just makes it better.”
“Our strong suit on everything—and not just on the pizzas or the menu—is that it’s a soulmate type of thing,” Giovanni added. “She is what I’m not, and I think I’m what she’s not.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ Pizza’s editor in chief.
