Colin Caplan of Taste of New Haven, which offers food-and-drink tours of that city’s best restaurants, has his eye on a Guinness World Record: the largest pizza party on earth.
How hard can it be? Well, Caplan and his community partners, including Big Green Truck Pizza, will have to break the previous record set in Tulsa less than two years ago. That’s when Andolini’s Pizzeria and the World Pizza Champions drew 3,357 pizza lovers to a University of Tulsa basketball game for a pizza blow-out on January 21, 2023.
But New Haven doesn’t play around. “We are gonna crush that,” said Mayor Justin Elicker at a press conference on Tuesday. “Not by having 3,357 people, but our goal is 5,000 people.”
The Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast: Meet Colin Caplan, New Haven’s Apostle of Apizza
The event will take place during the New Haven Grand Prix bike race on Friday, September 12, followed by the annual A-1 Toyota Apizza Feast that night.
Big Green Truck Pizza, which operates eight mobile units across Connecticut, will roll out four trucks to make the pies, along with other brick-and-mortar hotspots like Abate Apizza & Seafood Restaurant. It will reportedly take at least 625 large pizzas to feed a crowd of 5,000.
Overseeing this monumental task for Big Green Truck Pizza will be owner Liane Varipapa Page, who purchased the company from founder Doug Coffin in 2021 after working and learning under him for 10 years.
Six of Page’s eight trucks are restored 1947-48 International Harvester KB5s, each one customized with a wood-fired oven, refrigerator, espresso machine, hand sink, storage space and more. The truck beds’ sides detach and convert into prep and serving tables.
“No one is going to really know what [New Haven pizza] is about until they come here and try it,” Page said in an interview with NBC Connecticut recently.
“When I started Big Green Truck Pizza, a pizza party was just a bunch of teenagers around a coffee table with cardboard boxes,” Doug Coffin, the founder of Big Green Truck Pizza, told the New Haven Independent. “The idea that 5,000 people would come out to eat our pizza is just extraordinary.”
But New Haven’s pizza scene is pretty extraordinary, too. “Pizza is kind of our love language to the rest of the world, and we want the world to come and celebrate what we love and what we do best,” Caplan said at the press conference.
The pizza party will run from 4-7 p.m., and tickets will sell for $15 apiece—that covers the two slices, a bottle of water and a drink ticket. A judge from Guinness World Records will be on hand to enforce the organization’s strict rules, which require participants to stay for the full event and eat a minimum of two slices. Volunteer stewards—one for every 100 attendees—will tally up the total attendance and verify that the slices are eaten by all party-goers.
“This is serious,” Caplan said in the Independent’s story. “This is like playing a pizza game—and we have to play by the rules.”
The New York Post says it’s a “cocky” move, but then again, New Haven has been playfully challenging NYC for the title of America’s pizza capital for several years now, backed by the full force of Connecticut’s state leadership.
New Haven is one pizza-proud city. Its most famous and venerable brand, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year. Last month a stage production titled Family Business: (A)Pizza Play, debuted and ran for three weeks at the local Broken Umbrella Theatre. Also in June, Connecticut’s Office of Statewide Marketing and Tourism launched a brazen—but funny—billboard campaign at iconic New York sites like Times Square with a message that read, “The Nation’s Best Pizza—Not You, New York.”
“As a former long-time New York City resident, I’ll admit their pizza is good,” Anthony Anthony, chief marketing officer for the State of Connecticut, said at the time. “But it isn’t the nation’s best. That title belongs to us. This isn’t just a food fight, but if it were, Connecticut would win.”
Related: New Yorkers Roll Their Eyes as New Haven Takes U.S. Pizza Capital Claim to Congress
