By Charlie Pogacar
Joe Scarnato, co-founder, co-owner, and CEO of Vero Chicago Pizza, has a lot of theories about why so many native Chicagoans move to the Phoenix, Arizona, area. There’s the weather, of course—the city’s dry heat is a pleasant contrast to the damp, windy winters back home. There’s also the fact that the Chicago Cubs host spring training each year at Sloan Park, a 15,000-seat stadium in Mesa, Arizona. Scarnato submits one more theory: that Florida—and all its heat and humidity—was already claimed by snowbirds from New York. Chicagoans wanted a place to call their own, so they landed on Arizona.
No matter the reason for the migratory phenomenon, Scarnato and his family aren’t complaining: Thanks in part to the large presence of native Chicagoans in Arizona, Vero Chicago Pizza has scaled its brand to eight locations, and counting, in the Phoenix area. Just about everything the brand does is authentically Chicago, from its award-winning deep-dish and tavern-cut, thin-crust pies, to its full lunch menu featuring the famous Italian Beef sandwich with hot giardiniera. Pizzas are named after Chicago landmarks, and each recipe is made exactly as the Scarnatos prepared it when they ran pizzerias back in Chicago.
But Vero Chicago Pizza would not be as successful as it has been without some key tweaks that have made it a favorite of native Chicagoans and Phoenix locals alike. One of those tweaks is offering a third and more traditional pizza style for those unfamiliar with deep-dish and tavern-cut pizza. It’s something of a happy compromise between the two styles: a pan-cooked pizza featuring a butter crust with cheese on top and ingredients underneath.
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“We talk about this all the time,” Scarnato said. “We would never have 8, and be on the verge of announcing a 9th location, if we were just relying on people immigrating from Chicago. The proof is in the pudding: [other Chicago-based brands] shut everything down within two years of coming out here. All that’s left is Lou Malnati’s, and even they have had to reconfigure how they do things. We thrive on the thin, the pan, and the deep dish pizza—and we’re huge proponents of the idea that everything else we do on the menu we have to do really well to have success out here.”
Formerly known as Buddyz A Chicago Pizzeria, Vero Chicago Pizza made its debut in Arizona in 2013 (more on the name change later). Vero was first opened by Joe Scarnato, and it’s now run by him and his longtime business partner, his brother, Tim. Voted the best Chicago pizza place in all of Arizona by the Washington Post, the business has become a multigenerational family affair: Three of Joe’s sons—Taao, Tarin and Alex—have a hand in running it and have helped Vero Chicago Pizza convert into a franchise model.
Vero’s success in Arizona was not preordained. On the contrary, the brand was competing against some of the biggest names in Chicago pizza when it launched. Around the same time the Scarnatos launched the Arizona arm of their business, Chicago’s “big three”—Lou Malnati’s, Giordano’s and Gino’s East—were all at various stages of attempting to grow in the Phoenix market. Only Lou Malnati’s remains in Arizona, and it claims the same number of locations—eight—as Vero. So how did an independent, family-run business beat out the chains? To understand that, you have to know a bit more about the Scarnatos’ back story.
Youthful Dreams
When Joe Scarnato was not yet old enough to drink at bars, he was in a successful rock ‘n roll band called The Code, which was courted by Elektra Records (now owned by Warner Music Group). The band released a six-song EP via cassette and a 12-inch single that received some airplay.
Meanwhile, Scarnato’s older brother, Tim, was playing collegiate soccer, first at Illinois State and then at Northern Illinois. At the time, Major League Soccer—America’s top-tier soccer league—was but an idea. Upon graduation, Tim Scarnato began working in the hospitality industry around Chicago and started eyeing possibly opening up a pizzeria. When he pitched the idea to his younger brother, Joe, he found a willing partner, the music business a fading dream.
As the great grandchildren of an immigrant from Calabria—a southern region of Italy—the Scarnatos had entrepreneurship in their blood. Their dad, uncles and grandfather ran an auto repair and gas station business as a family, and they hammered home the idea of making your own way without relying on anybody else. The pizza business, then, held a lot of appeal.
“We knew we wanted to do something where we were our own boss,” Scarnato said. “It was what was all around us, so that was definitely in our heads.”
The DELCO Years
In 1992, the Scarnatos opened their first pizza shop, Pizza Italia, a DELCO joint in the suburbs of Chicago. Riding a wave of early success, the duo went on to open several shops in the Chicagoland area—which were rebranded as Buddyz Pizza—and ran them the way you might assume a couple of 20-something-year-olds would.
“Our way of managing multiple operations was my brother and I just going around in a circle and being at the store every day,” Scarnato said. “We didn’t really have procedures in place at that time. Things were just in our head, or maybe we wrote them down, but if we weren’t there, we felt like nothing was going to get done. So that was really difficult for us in the beginning.”
The saving grace, Scarnato said, was that they gradually honed in some manageable hours that would work for them rather than the other way around: The shops were typically open from 4–9 p.m.—a decision they reached after analyzing their numbers and realizing 90% of the business was happening during those hours.
“So we just thought, what is the point of being open until midnight?” Scarnato said. “If you’re a carryout/delivery business but you’re doing 10% of your business from 9 to midnight…all it did was make my brother work more.”
The Restaurant Biz
Having accomplished more than most on the DELCO side of things, the Scarnatos began eyeing a new challenge. They figured: We may be in the pizza business, but we’re not really in the full-on restaurant business yet. “Let’s have a bar,” Scarnato recalled them saying to one another. “In Chicago, at the time—and still—there were advantages to having a bar. So we wanted to see if we could adapt, and we did, fairly successfully, to people sitting down in our restaurants.”
The first full-service Buddyz Pizza—not to be confused with Buddy’s in Detroit—was opened in the suburbs, and it performed well. The success was enough that the brothers opened a second Buddyz location in downtown McHenry, on a lake, with a large outdoor seating area for people to enjoy beverages and watch the scenery. The Scarnatos quickly found they had gotten themselves back into a situation they had been trying to get out of: They were back to working seven days a week, sometimes until 3 a.m., and busting out a blanket and pillow in their office to get some shut eye before firing back up and doing it all again.
“It was almost to the point of it being too huge, too successful,” Scarnato said. “I was like, wait, I don’t want to be in the bar business. I want to be in the restaurant business.”
Cactus League
By 2013, Tim and Joe both had children of varying ages. Each winter seemed a little longer, and the duo began thinking about their next move. It was Joe Scarnato’s wife, Heather, who pointed the business partners in the right direction: She was moving to Arizona. She had spent time there during college, and both she and Joe had family in the area. So the family relocated, and Joe Scarnato looked for jobs outside of the industry. About two months later, he felt the next move in that way you feel something deeply in your bones. He had to get back into the pizza business.
“I had gone on one interview thinking maybe I’ll get out of the business,” Scarnato said. “But very quickly I was right back to where I started: I was like, I can’t work for anybody. That’s never going to work, and it’s certainly not going to work after all this time.”
Shortly thereafter, Scarnato found a location in a town called Queen Creek. At the time, Scarnato said, it was “basically in the middle of nowhere,” but you wouldn’t know it now. As the suburbs exploded around Phoenix, so, too, did Queen Creek: the city has tripled its population in the past 15 years, going from about 25,000 people to over 75,000.
Within three months, Scarnato had opened the first Buddyz—now called Buddyz A Chicago Pizzeria—in Arizona. Scarnato credits that third style of pizza—the pan-cooked, buttercrust pizza—as being a “door opening product,” one that helped unlock success in the new market. “It gets people in the door who would otherwise maybe be afraid and think, oh, well, that’s just a Chicago-style pizza place.”
Eventually, Tim and his family moved out to Arizona and became involved in the business. Little by little, the next generation of Scarnatos became ingrained in the business.
Vero Chicago Pizza
By fall 2020, Buddyz A Chicago Pizzeria, got thrown an unexpected curveball. It came in the form of a letter from Buddy’s Pizza, the famous institution credited with the invention of Detroit-style pizza. As Buddy’s became a private-equity-owned brand with national growth aspirations, it reached out to the Scarnatos about the name of their pizzerias.
According to Scarnato, the correspondence was as friendly as it could’ve possibly been. There was no animosity, or request for money, but the Detroit Buddy’s was asking for a name change to clear up confusion. Instead of viewing this as a gigantic headache, the Scarnatos chose to view it as an opportunity.
“It’s funny, we had been trying to trademark the name for years,” Scarnato said. “We kept going through different parts of litigation and finally it came to a head: We weren’t going to get the name. As we sat there, we thought, maybe they’re doing us a favor. If we’re going to [franchise], maybe we need to rethink what we do.”
A rebrand was the answer. The Scarnatos settled on the name “Vero”—the Italian word for “true”—and added “Chicago Pizza” to further differentiate it. Vero worked on a number of levels. They liked that it had four letters—there are four stars on the Chicago flag, and they viewed that as a branding opportunity. “That’s been a really big piece of our marketing,” Joe said.
The Family Franchise
Vero Chicago Pizza began franchising its stores in 2021. It was a new challenge for the Scarnatos, but one that was made easier by the energy and vision of the younger generation. As hard as Joe tried, he could not talk his middle son, Tarin, out of joining the family business. Tarin began a degree in environmental science, but he couldn’t shake his family roots: He pivoted to a hospitality degree.
Joe’s eldest son, Taao, designs Vero’s restaurants, logos and just about everything else. Alex, a third son, has joined his brothers in being instrumental in translating Joe and Tim’s vision into a cohesive brand that could be operated by franchisees from outside of the family.
“The transfer of what we do to a franchise format was not easy,” Scarnato said. “It was helpful that we had a relationship with the current franchisees—they were either customers or former employees—and they never doubted what we did would work. They also knew there would be hiccups, but they trusted us from the start.”
One thing nobody ever doubted, including the Scarnatos, was the personal approach the business would have as a franchisor. The empathy for owner-operators runs deep in a family that has paid its dues in the space for over 30 years.
“We grew up in this business,” Scarnato said. “We know what it’s like to be owner-operators. So we try to translate that on a daily basis: We know what they’ve gone through, and we’re sympathetic to that. It’s also made us think about how we can be more efficient in everything that we’re doing and making.”
