By Alexandra Mortati
Jackie Mazza, the culinary director of DHS Hospitality in New Brunswick, New Jersey, already knew she wanted to be a chef at the age of 5. But, although she now oversees DeeDee’s Pizza for DHS—along with six other restaurant/bar concepts—pizza was never on her radar. “It was a 20-year culmination to get to pizza,” she reflected. “I wanted to be a chef since I was a little girl. A cookbook was the first book I ever took out of the library as a little kid. I was in kindergarten, and I kept taking it out and bringing it back and taking it out and bringing it back. When I was little, I would sneak downstairs every Sunday morning, and I would make French toast. There were a few close calls where the toaster oven caught fire. Oh, and the microwave went up in flames once. There was no way my parents were letting a 5-year old make breakfast, so I have these vivid memories of my father flying out of bed.”
As Mazza got older, her dreams grew bigger and bigger, and cooking took a back seat. “At 18 and 19, I would have told you that I was going to be the first female president of the U.S. Then I took one poly-sci class in college and was, like, ‘Screw this,’ went home, and enrolled in culinary school.”
With a degree in culinary arts and restaurant management, Mazza got a job in baking and pastry. “I have a foundation in the baking world, but, looking back, I was working for people who didn’t have enough to teach. You need to really know what you’re doing in order to teach people the how and why. I was working for one of the best restaurants in the state when I decided to also go back to school for baking and pastry.”
Mazza and the chef she worked under didn’t exactly see eye-to-eye. “He was really into bread, and I have a competitive spirit, so I would tell myself that my buns would come out better than his. I set out to learn everything I possibly could about bread. I started bread baking because I wanted to prove him wrong, and I ended up falling in love with it. I was there for about seven years until I left to become the head baker of a bread bakery in New York.”
From Fatto Americano to ‘Beat Bobby Flay’
Eventually, Mazza found her way back to New Jersey, where she started her own bread business. “I didn’t have enough money for a brick-and-mortar, so I started teaching at a local culinary school program for people who need a leg up in life: people on parole, with disabilities. We had 2 blind students…It was extremely rewarding but very challenging.”
Mazza taught during the day, and the school let her use the kitchens to operate her bread business at night. “I would hire my students. It takes a certain type of demeanor to make it in this industry, and some of my students needed some extra TLC to make it in the wild. It was a synergistic experience.”
One of Jackie’s first wholesale accounts led to her next business venture. “The account was owned by four men that I became friends with. In April 2018, together we opened a Neo-Neapolitan pizza bar called Fatto Americano. It was my baby. I loved it very much. But then the world shut down in March 2020. We had some preexisting issues with the landlord that sort of reared their head again that summer of the shutdown, and we had to make the business decision to close. The one hard thing I’ve had to learn is that, sometimes in business, you have to make decisions in the best interest of the business that aren’t easy and are not what you want.”
After Fatto Americano closed, Jackie found her role at DHS Hospitality, but not before having some fun participating on competitive cooking shows. “Throughout my career I had done some Food Network stuff. I was on Cutthroat Kitchen, Beat Bobby Flay, Dr. Oz, and Restaurant Startup on CNBC,” Mazza said. “You always go into the media [appearances] thinking they’re going to change your life. They’re such cool experiences. I would do that stuff every day for the rest of my life if I could. It’s very interesting to see how other people react to it, but, realistically, those experiences aren’t much different—at the crux or the core of it—than any other day in the restaurant industry. You’re constantly having hurdles thrown at you and making snap decisions. Besides the fact that there is a camera in your face, it’s no different from any other day. The camera does add a layer of stress and pressure, but they liked me on these shows because I wasn’t afraid to make an ass of myself on television.”
Tugging on a Bread Baker’s Heart Strings
In her current role at DHS Hospitality, Mazza oversees seven restaurants, including DeeDee’s Pizza, which opened on October 1, 2024, in Highland Park, New Jersey.
For Mazza, this is kismet. “I think that everything in your life prepares you for the next thing. When my restaurant closed, I was a fractured human—my whole identity was wrapped up in my career, and when it was taken away from me, I didn’t know who I was without it…All of my experience with bread and the pizzeria has prepared me to do this.”
Initially, DeeDee’s was planned as a Roman-style pizza restaurant. “I took Massimo’s class [in Roman-style pizza], even though we didn’t have an oven and construction hadn’t started yet. I got a blue steel pan and pan sticks. You should have seen me in my living room, practicing so I’d be prepared. Anything worth doing is worth doing right. Don’t you want to do something to the best of your capabilities?”
Mazza’s excitement for Roman style didn’t end with practicing how to use the pan grips in her living room. “It’s a skillset—it’s all a skillset—but it’s such a fine-tuned skillset,” she says. “And it’s one that tugs on my little bread baker’s heart strings. I’m so, so excited to dive headfirst into the dough. You’ve got to practice all of this stuff. You can’t just forget how to work the pan grips. We were in Massimo’s class, and everybody had a chance to work with the dough, and he’s, like, ‘You have perfect hands.’ And part of my soul went off and hasn’t come back!”
Even so, plans for DeeDee’s menu had to be changed as the opening date got closer. Instead of Roman-style, Sicilian pizza became the main focus. “Time was a major factor,” Mazza recalls. “The location DeeDee’s was in had been totally gutted—the floor had been ripped, new plumbing, new electric, etc.—and it had taken about a year and a half. It had taken us so long, and the [job applicants] in the area had never even eaten Roman-style pizza, let alone worked with the dough. If I could have been there constantly on a daily basis, making the dough myself, that would have been one thing. But because this was our seventh restaurant and there are six others that also need some love, implementing Roman-style and pushing to get open didn’t necessarily seem like the smartest move at the time.”
Mazza adds, “I think that anything worth doing should be done right, to the best of your ability. And if we pushed to do Roman out of the gate, I wasn’t confident that it would have been done to my standards. So we opened with Sicilian, thinking, ‘Let’s get our feet under us. Let’s get everybody trained in our way of making pizza dough in this location and then implement Roman down the road.’”
While getting ready to open DeeDee’s, she continued to focus on DHS Hospitality properties like Clyde’s in New Brunswick. “It’s a martini bar and restaurant with an underground speakeasy,” Mazza says. “No matter what time you come to Clyde’s, it’s 10 p.m. They serve 75 different cocktails—it’s a beast.”
Among the other restaurants Mazza oversees are Tavern on George and a college bar called The Olive Branch. “Plus, I do all of the events and concessions for the performing arts center, and occasionally I get called to do a private event. I am on the go all day long….I need to grow a third leg!”
‘This Industry Chooses You’
It’s a lot, but Mazza wouldn’t have it any other way. “I feel like you don’t choose this industry, this industry chooses you. I hate the expression, ‘If you do what you’re passionate about, you never work in a day in your life.’ If you do what you’re passionate about, you work constantly! I really do love what I do for a living. When [Fatto Americano] closed, I needed to put more attention on my life outside of my career because it was important, but I’m so, so lucky that I get to wake up and do this every day. When I tell you I’m excited to dive back into the world of pizza…”
As Mazza developed a healthier work-life balance, her outlook shifted. “My elevator pitch had to change a little bit when [Fatto Americano] closed,” she recalled. “I had to figure out what it was. The transition wasn’t easy, and I’m not perfect and don’t have this perfect well-balanced life. It’s a mess—not in a bad way—it’s a learning process. There are times where I’m better at it than others, but I know when I need to slow down. I know that, personally, I need to check in with myself every once in a while, and if I’m not there, I need to figure out what I need to do to get there.
“When Fatto Americano opened, I felt like it was a culmination of everything I had worked for, but at a certain point I realized I was miserable. Which is, like, crazy—I worked so many years, I did all these things, but I was miserable! One of my best friends and I pick a new word of the year every year, and mine was ‘happy’ because I wasn’t. That January, I started going to get my nails done because ‘chefs can’t wear nail polish.’ I started doing little things for myself, but then the world shut down [with COVID-19) and that went to s—. I think even though the restaurant closing was the worst thing to happen to me, it was also the best thing to happen to me. It propelled me so much further in my personal life and career. Its pizza that got me there.”
Mazza could feel resentful about the past, but she doesn’t. “I’m so grateful for that experience. There’s a part of me that has so much gratitude. I probably would have grown old and gray in that restaurant, and I would have been fine doing it, but I’m going to be so much happier with myself now in [DeeDee’s) in a more healthy and self-aware way. I didn’t know I had the tools to get myself there before.”
Going from working for herself to working for someone else was also a major—but beneficial—shift for Mazza. “The gentleman I work for now and his family are so wonderful.”
A Woman Inspired by Women
For Mazza, her experiences and growth are impacted by her gender. “In life, most of us have learned how to handle things without hitting that frustration level that puts us over the edge. We have more finesse because we have to. I think if men had faced what women had in this industry, they would have quit by now. And I think this is probably true for most women. Throughout your career, there have been blatant ‘You’re a woman, not a man’ moments, and you are treated differently.”
But Mazza had women in her life who provided the inspiration—and empowerment—she needed to thrive in the pizza community.
“I was always acutely aware that my first pizza influence was a woman,” she says. “My family is from Brooklyn, but I have two aunts that are nuns, and my parents shipped us off to stay with the nuns for the summer in western Maryland. My first job was when I was 14. It was in Maryland, and the restaurant was owned by a French woman—you had to be 16 to work, and I lied about my age. My aunts also had friends who owned a pizzeria. Domenick was the showman out front, and Brenda was in the kitchen holding s— down. They split, and she went on to open her own pizzeria, and it’s been wildly successful. So from the very beginning my first examples of leadership in this industry were women. They were strong women who didn’t take any s—.”
Mazza also worked as a pastry chef at a restaurant called The Frog and the Peach. “There were quite a few women in the kitchen at the time, and, for most of us, it was great, and there was camaraderie. But there was a woman who couldn’t handle it. We were almost conditioned to not support each other at one point. Not that you would tear each other apart, but there was a sense of competition that still exists.”
In her current role, Mazza is not only responsible for bringing people together, but also for helping them develop their skill set. “But I’m prepared for it,” she notes. “Luckily, my experience in the culinary school has really helped me develop a sense of a teaching style and what works and what doesn’t work.”
Pizza-making brings its own set of challenges, she says, “but when you watch somebody get it and that lightbulb go off, there’s nothing better. I was teaching my students, and we were talking about fermentation and starters. And no one was getting it, but I saw the lightbulb go off for one girl. She went, ‘It’s like hooch. In prison we make hooch.’ She had associated the fermentation process with making illegal alcohol in jail. That is one of my favorite memories because, if you can take something and make an assimilation to something from their life experiences, you win that day! In a way, you almost chase the high. It’s not about doing it great once you’re in this industry, it’s about doing it great every single time and that euphoric high once you nail it.”
‘Just Keep Going’
For many in the industry, Jackie’s advice is not as easy as it sounds. “Just keep going,” she says. “This is hard like anything else is hard. It’s hard in the sense that if you’re going to get good at anything, it’s going to take work. You will have to make sacrifices you might not expect to have to make. If you are working for or with someone who isn’t giving you what you need to get to the next step, then you aren’t working with the right people.
“I’ve always been a big believer that there’s enough success in the world for everyone. One person’s success doesn’t mean someone else won’t have it. There are people out there who will mentor you and show you the way. It’s about networking and finding those people and experiences. Just because you seem to have a solid foundation in something, it’s [still] up to you to obtain the rest. You can pay for culinary school and pizza classes, but it’s on you [as to] what to do from there. That’s where the work begins.”
As for the future, Jackie aims “to knock people’s socks off with this pizza” at DeeDee’s. “I want it to be memorable. I always remember walking down to King’s Highway in Brooklyn and going to Vick’s Pizzeria and getting a slice with my sister and cousin. I have memories, and I want to be somebody’s memorable slice! That’s what I want for the immediate future. The distant future—I’ll figure it out. It’s not going to be bad.”
Self-aware, tenacious, candid and sincere, Jackie is a breath of fresh air. She goes after what she wants and gives it her all every single time. She’s not afraid to try something new and she empowers those around her to have the same confidence.
Alexandra Mortati is the marketing director for Orlando Foods and founder of Women In Pizza, a not-for-profit organization that empowers women in the pizza industry to share their stories, display their talents, inspire innovations, and connect with one another and the world. This article originally appeared on the Instagram account for Women In Pizza. Click here to learn more about the organization.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated from the original version appearing on Women in Pizza’s Instagram account. It includes new information about the pizza style served at DeeDee’s.
