By Charlie Pogacar
Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, the legendary, New York City-born pizza chain, stokes its coal-fired ovens between the lunch and dinner dayparts each day. It’s a necessary part of the Grimaldi’s tradition, one that ensures its ovens are cooking at peak temperatures and churning out a consistent, differentiated product.
The stoking process is in place at all of the brand’s 40-plus locations, and Grimaldi’s employees will be the first to tell you that the oven downtime—when the pizzeria is still open, but is not actually able to sell pizza—is a challenge to explain to customers. A pizza restaurant that’s open, but isn’t actually selling pizza?
“If I am the host, and I get 30 people coming in the door during that hour [when the ovens are being stoked], I have to explain the process to each customer,” said Hector Godinez, corporate chef at Grimaldi’s. “It can be difficult, but we try to make sure all of it is said with a smile, and we hope that we might get the message across that, hey, we’re doing something a little different, right?”
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With that in mind, the brand has recently re-launched its Stoking Social Hour, a time period when guests can order anything on the menu—other than pizza—for a discounted price. Participating Grimaldi’s locations offer guests $10 cocktails, as well as $3 off starters and salads and $2 off beer, wine and mocktails between 3 and 5 p.m.
The promotion was initially launched prior to the pandemic, but was subsequently discontinued when capacity restrictions and labor shortages made it too challenging to continue. The brand recently relaunched Stoking Social Hour as a way to drum up business during an off-peak daypart.
Godinez said stoking the ovens takes up to one hour. In other words, if somebody comes into a Grimaldi’s restaurant looking for pizza, the promotion is a great way to sell that customer on sitting at the bar for a small bite and a beverage until the oven is back up and running.
“Say you’re a husband on the way home and your wife calls you up and says, hey, we want pizza for dinner,” Godinez imagines. “You might come to a Grimaldi’s and say, well, I’m a little early, but guess what? Now I can sit at the bar and have a drink and a charcuterie board and wait for my pizza before I go home.”
The promotion is also a great opportunity for customer education. The Stoking Social Hour helps team members package the surprising news—”Yes, we are open, no, you can’t order pizza”—in a positive light.
“It’s definitely a good way for us to educate our guests on what our pizza style is, how our pizza is made and what Grimaldi’s is all about,” Godinez said. “If we pitch it right—hey, we’re 20 minutes into our stoking process, we can have a pizza out to you in about 20-30 minutes, you can have a salad while you wait—then we can tie in the history behind pizza making in New York and explain why we do it that way.”
The proud history of Grimaldi’s goes back nearly a century. Founder Patsy Grimaldi’s uncle—also named Patsy—owned Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem. It’s where the younger Patsy—who passed away in February 2025 at the age of 93—learned to make pizza, starting in 1940 when he was just 10 years old.
Decades later, in 1990, Grimaldi opened his own Patsy’s Pizzeria in Lower Manhattan in 1990. Later, he renamed the pizzeria Grimaldi’s Pizzeria, but he always held a fervent belief that coal-fired ovens, which were increasingly rare in New York City by the 1990s, simply cooked better pizza. Even after Grimaldi sold his business to Frank Ciolli in 1999 and Grimaldi’s began to grow via franchising, the pizzeria fought to honor Grimaldi’s Old World ethos—and for good reason, Godinez believes.
“Most people have been around a bonfire,” Godinez said. “With a wood fire, you have all of that smoke, which affects how the pizza tastes. Whereas with coal, it’s a lot cleaner. It’s better for the environment, and it burns hotter. Obviously, it’s a bit of a pain with the stoking process midday, but in the end you can definitely feel how much cleaner and better our pizza tastes.”
“We’re doing something different,” Godinez said. “We think it’s something a little better, too, but it’s difficult to explain it to somebody and give them the full picture. But at the end of the day, if we do it right, people will realize we’re old school. We are Old World, and that’s a key part of what we do.”
