If you ask Frank Brija and his son Adem, Patsy’s Pizzeria means New York pizza—and vice-versa. Even with 15 locations, the legendary brand has never ventured outside the Empire State. Until now.
The latest Patsy’s has opened in Greenwich, Connecticut, under partners Ben Celaj, Eddie Brahimi, Sergio Celaj and Steve Haxhiaj. It’s a milestone moment for the company, which was once the favorite pizza haunt of Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio and Dean Martin and has roots in New York City going back just shy of a full century. But Frank first needed some convincing. “I never left New York,” he told the Greenwich Free Press.
The Brija family also agreed to some menu additions for the Greenwich store, an unexpected shift for the 91-year-old brand. The new partners already own Il Monello Italian Restaurant and Tuscany Steakhouse in Manhattan, and their fare will include both Patsy’s famous New York-style pies as well as other items—like steaks, lamb chops and veal chops—from their non-pizza restaurants.
“I think Patsy’s will be the perfect fit,” Celaj said in the Greenwich Free Press article. “This is our first time working together with Patsy’s because we have high-end steak houses and Italian restaurants in the city, so we’re merging two businesses. We’re going to have great food, great pizza and a great ambiance.”
Haxhiaj, a New Yorker, agrees. “I go to Greenwich a lot, and I’ve been around the great restaurants here, but I thought that area needed something like this,” he told Patch.com.
Patsy’s calls itself “New York’s original coal-oven pizzeria” and “the undisputed premier pizza dynasty in New York and arguably in all of the United States.”
Italian immigrants Pasquale “Patsy” Lancieri and his wife, Carmella, opened the original location in 1933 as a simple pizzeria and clam bar in what was then the heavily Italian East Harlem district. The concept took off thanks in part to an innovation for that era: “We were the first pizzeria to sell by the slice,” Adem told PMQ when Patsy’s was inducted into the Pizza Hall of Fame.
New York celebrities, from crooners like Sinatra and Martin to Oscar-winning directors and actors, flocked to the joint for those real-deal thin-crust New York slices. While getting ready to film The Godfather, director Francis Ford Coppola brought several of his stars to Patsy’s to soak up the atmosphere. Among them: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton and Robert DeNiro.
When the American Film Institute gave Keaton its lifetime achievement award in 2017, Pacino remembered how those actors all met for the first time at Patsy’s. As Pacino told the story, “[Brando] was there, the godfather, at the head of the table, and I remember he got up early on…and walked over to Diane. He said, ‘Hi, Diane, I’m Marlon Brando.’ And she looked up, shook his hand and said, ‘Yeah, right, OK, good. That’s fine. OK, right.’ And that’s Diane.”
Patsy Lancieri died in the 1970s, but Carmella continued running the pizza shop for nearly 20 more years, with Frank Brija as an employee. Carmella retired in 1991 and sold the restaurant to Frank, who began expanding the concept through franchising in the mid-1990s.
Adem personally runs the East Harlem store, using all of Carmella’s original recipes and doing his best to keep things as they always have been. That location still fires its pies with the original coal-burning oven purchased by the Lancieris.
“My father likes the saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’” Adem told the Greenwich Free Press. “The oven is really big and could fit 20-30 pizzas at a time, but you don’t fill it up. The pizza is cooked in about 90 seconds at about 1,000° degrees.”
Even the dough mixer is practically an antique, dating to the 1940s. “People think the dough machine is a museum piece,” Adem said. “I tell them, ‘No, that’s what made your dough today.’”
But with so many items from the new franchisees’ other restaurants, the Greenwich location represents a departure from Frank and Adem’s longtime philosophy. “You have to pick an identity and stick with it,” Adem previously told PMQ. “[Some] places try to do too many things now. If you keep it simple, make a good pizza with fresh toppings, you can have a solid business. We tell our franchisees, follow the blueprint; our name will fill the place, but it’s your job to keep them coming back.”
