By Brian Hernandez
Every year at Pizza Expo, somewhere between the competition floor and the endless rows of booths, I wind up having at least one conversation that oddly sticks with me longer than the show itself. This year, it was with an author named Juergen Barbusca, author of Van Life.
We got to talking on the show floor the way a lot of people do at Expo. One conversation turns into another, somebody mentions where they traveled from, somebody else starts talking about pizza, and before long you realize this industry is filled with people carrying stories around like old concert tickets tucked into a wallet for 30 years. Yes…I still have my Bonaroo ’06, Tom Petty and Pearl Jam ticket stubs. But I digress.
At one point, Juergen and I briefly connected over travel and the whole romanticized idea of life on the road. Anybody who knows me understands I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time purposefully getting lost. But that was really just the jumping-off point. The real story was the one he handed me later.
Juergen had been covering a Nova Scotia pizzaiolo named Silvio Schatz, who had traveled from Bayport, a tiny coastal community about an hour southwest of Halifax, to compete in the International Pizza Challenge against some of the best pizza makers in the world. Schatz works at Dear Emma, Pizza & Wine Bar (yes, the comma is part of its name), a small seasonal restaurant near Lunenburg alongside Canada’s Atlantic coast.
Reading Juergen’s piece later reminded me of something easy to forget during all the noise and spectacle of pizza industry events. Not everybody comes to these competitions chasing trophies or social media. Some people come looking for experience, and that’s what I liked most about Juergen’s story. It wasn’t trying to manufacture drama or turn pizza into some overproduced reality competition. It simply followed two guys from a small restaurant in Nova Scotia as they stepped into one of the biggest pizza events on the planet and tried to navigate a completely unfamiliar world.
You can read the story here. It’s a very engagingly written piece, and there’s something refreshingly human about that, as well as the story itself. Silvio had only been making pizza for a couple of years before stepping into a competition field packed with international champions, career competitors and seasoned veterans with years of experience behind the peel. Meanwhile, according to Juergen’s story, these guys were still figuring parts of the process out in real time.
“We came into this competition like two blind mice,” Schatz told Juergen. “We had no idea what to expect and brought just a few ingredients from home.” At another point, Schatz admitted, “We also didn’t know you could practice your pies on-site, so we wound up scrounging around the show floor hoping suppliers would have what we needed.”
Honestly, that’s pizza competition at its best. Underneath all the branding, seminars and wall of ovens, pizza competitions have this strange ability to throw people from completely different worlds into the same orbit for a few days. You’ll see lifelong competitors standing beside first-timers. Small-town operators talking shop with international consultants. Old-school pizza guys debating fermentation with people young enough to have discovered pizza through TikTok.
And somewhere in the middle of all that noise are the storytellers quietly documenting it, and reading Juergen’s article reminded me there are still corners of the pizza world we don’t hear enough about. Small restaurants in coastal towns. Young pizzaiolos trying to test themselves on bigger stages. People who aren’t building personal brands or chasing influencer status but simply trying to make great pizza and see where it takes them.
Juergen’s story captured that perfectly, especially toward the end when Schatz reflected on competing against seasoned veterans from around the world. “It’s not the best score,” he said, “but I’m happy with it given I was up against competitors with multiple awards to their name. We make great pizza at our restaurant and I’m heading home with lots of enthusiasm.”
Brian Hernandez is PMQ’s associate editor and coordinator of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team.
