By Rick Hynum
Photos courtesy Jorge Gera & Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co.
If you’ve read the classic 1980 novel A Confederacy of Dunces, you’ll recall Ignatius J. Reilly, the haughty, rotund ne’er-do-well who peddles subpar hot dogs on the streets of New Orleans—with little success and zero charm. He eats more “weenies” than he sells, insults his customers, and eventually belches and blunders his way into politics.
Think of Queens, New York, native Robert Garvey as the anti-Ignatius, with much better luck and people skills (and cooler hair). Now the co-owner of Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co. in Chicago with his wife, Dana Hokin, Garvey started in the food business with his own hot dog cart, back in the glory days of punk rock. He was just 18. After getting muscled off Manhattan’s more profitable street corners by thuggish weenie cartels, he found himself one night in front of the legendary music club CBGB. And out stepped club owner Hilly Kristal.
“I had been pushing my wagon up the Bowery, and every corner I stopped on, someone was telling me to take a hike within an hour,” Garvey recalls. “I passed CBGB at Bleecker Street, and there were at least 100 people outside the club. It’s 11:00 at night, and I said, ‘I bet they’re hungry.’ And they were. So I set up my hot dog stand, and shortly after, [Kristal] came out. He asked what I was doing. I told him, and he said, ‘Good idea.’ I said, ‘You don’t mind?’ He said, ‘No, you thought of it. It’s yours.’”
Garvey worked that corner every weekend for two years. “I was selling hot dogs to The Ramones, Patti Smith and others,” he says. “Joey Ramone spent many nights sleeping on the hood of my car.”
The secret to Garvey’s hot dogs? “I made my own fresh sauce and onions,” he says. “Not just the people at the shows, but all the cabbies around the city would come to my stand to get those onions. So, even at 18, I was pretty food-obsessed.”
Needless to say, he still is. But now, people come from all over for his pizza, and his riverside spot in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood is quite secure, thank you, not to mention spacious and jaw-droppingly beautiful.
“I was selling hot dogs to The Ramones, Patti Smith and others. Joey Ramone spent many nights sleeping on the hood of my car.”
—Robert Garvey, Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co.
But for Hokin and Garvey, the road to their phenomenal success—50 Top Pizza last year named Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co. one of the best in the world—has been the one less traveled. When they talk about their “journey,” they’re not just rehashing a timeworn cliché. It’s a motif with a lot of deep thought and life experience behind it.
“We didn’t sit in a boardroom and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s get into the restaurant business and come up with a pizza concept,’” Hokin says. “It came out of our home. It’s an extension of who we are. It’s not a made-up-around-a-board-table marketing story. It’s a true story, and if anyone wants to hear these stories, we’re happy to take them on that path. I’ve always said, ‘All roads lead to Robert’s Pizza.’ It’s a result of our very different career paths and a winding road where everything came together. And here we are in pizza.”
The Journey Begins
Recounting those career paths in full would take up more space than print allows. Garvey worked in the produce business, sailed the seven seas as a merchant marine engineer and earned an MFA in playwriting. Hokin taught studio art at Carnegie Mellon University (where she met Garvey, now her husband of 35 years), then took over a resort hotel in the Caribbean with three F&B outlets and a marina, where Garvey put his engineering skills to good use. “All of those things went into our toolbox for this restaurant, and we’ve complemented each other in these various career paths [to arrive] where we find ourselves today,” Hokin says.
After the couple moved to Chicago, Garvey, then a pizza novice, spent the better part of a decade crafting his own dough recipe—another journey of sorts. He read books by Nancy Silverton and Peter Reinhart, visited pizzerias and tried to pick the brains of every pizzaiolo he met. “Everywhere we went—and I’m not exaggerating—if there was pizza on the menu, Robert would walk to the kitchen and see if he could talk to somebody,” Hokin recalls, laughing. “And I would say, ‘Oh, God, don’t! No, no, you can’t!’ It didn’t matter where we were.”
At that time, pizzaioli weren’t exactly forthcoming with their secrets. “Every chef would basically give me one tip,” Garvey says. “They’d say, ‘Try this,’ and give me one tip. So I’d go to the next restaurant [with that tip], and they’d say, ‘OK, now try this.’ It was just an accumulation of all these different tips from different restaurateurs.”
“We didn’t sit in a boardroom and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s get into the restaurant business and come up with a pizza concept.’ It came out of our home. It’s an extension of who we are.”
—Dana Hokin, Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co.
Undeterred, Garvey kept plugging away in his home kitchen, working with a wild yeast sourdough starter. He also brought his doughs to industry trade shows and tried the pies out using vendors’ ovens on the floor—again, much to his wife’s dismay. “I said, ‘They’re not gonna let us bring our dough in, you know,’” Hokin laughs. “But, sure enough, they let us test-drive all these ovens. It was very helpful, because we could see how Robert’s dough performed in different types of ovens.”
“I literally went through hundreds of recipes,” Garvey says. “I baked off thousands of pizzas. I improvised and improvised and improvised. At about eight years in, I spun this crust and said, ‘Wow, that’s one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had. And I made it in my [gas-fired] home oven.’ I was pretty shocked by it, frankly.”
But Hokin and Garvey still weren’t planning to open a pizzeria. They mostly made pies at home for friends, gauging reactions and fine-tuning the recipes. “We lived in an apartment building in downtown Chicago,” Hokin says. “We had so many pizzas on any given day that Robert would walk down the street at 10:00 at night and offer slices to valets and doormen. That’s another example of me saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, you can’t go around offering pizza on the streets of Chicago. They’re going to think you’re crazy!’”
Even so, Garvey adds, “No one ever turned me down.”
Beautiful, Not Fancy
In June 2016, Garvey, by then certified through Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli, and Hokin finally took the plunge, opening a space near the current location of Robert’s Pizza. It was too small to accommodate customer demand, so after a year, they closed it down and started over. Their current 142-seat restaurant opened in June 2019, and it’s breathtaking, with an open kitchen, floor-to-ceiling windows offering a view of the Chicago Riverwalk, and a waterside patio adorned with flowers and greenery—all thanks to the couple’s esthetic sense and background in theater arts.
“It’s beautiful, but it’s not fancy,” Hokin points out. “It tells a story, and that story is this idea of a journey.” The pizzeria itself drew inspiration from a cross-country trip Garvey and Hokin took in 1997 in a 1966 Mustang convertible. “We drove her from Chicago to Montana, and I shot Polaroids every 4½ miles,” Hokin says. “I had a thousand images from that road trip, and those inspired the palette and feel of the restaurant.”
Even a slice of Garvey’s pizza takes customers on a journey, she adds, “because from the first bite to the last bite, the experience shifts—it’s a very different flavor profile.”
“We weigh everything. There is nothing that isn’t weighed, including the yeast, flour, tomatoes, water. And that allows for consistency.”
—Robert Garvey, Robert’s Pizza and Dough Co.
“It’s really about the care and time we put into the dough,” Garvey explains. “Every step is measured, from the way we mix the dough to the amount of fermentation to the way we stretch it and bake it. Even the way we put pizzas in the oven, there’s a system we follow….I do a two-day ferment on all of my dough and then a nice, long rise. So it tends to be very delicate. You won’t see us tossing the pizzas in the air; it’s so delicate that it would open up to, like, a 3’ diameter almost immediately. So the way we handle the dough is very, very specific. We weigh everything. There is nothing that isn’t weighed, including the yeast, flour, tomatoes, water. And that allows for consistency.”
Finally, the kitchen team bakes every pie for six minutes at 650°. “I’m looking for a nicely brown bottom, but also a little bit of black char in the crust,” Garvey says. “It’s not burnt, it’s just caramelizing the natural sugars in the flour. And when you do that, you literally change the flavor of the pizza. If you can get a little bit of that black char and caramelize those sugars, you get a much different, much more complex flavor from the dough. Those little nuances were my obsession for years and years, and that’s what makes our dough special.”
An Exemplary Restaurant
There’s plenty more that’s special about Robert’s Pizza. As theater lovers, Garvey and Hokin aim to create a full-blown experience for guests, especially in the colder months. During COVID-19, they trotted out their first annual Howl-o-Ween event, which included a pet parade and costume contest. With a professional photographer on hand, they awarded baskets of treats to pups wearing the cutest, scariest and most creative outfits, kindling warm memories and laughter as another cruel Windy City winter moved in. There’s also a Thanksgiving pizza plus whole apple pies in November, while Christmas brings The Nutcracker Pizza in a collab with the Joffrey Ballet.
And the hits keep coming with a ticketed dinner series that puts Garvey’s world-renowned culinary team to the test. The latest series kicked off on December 5 with a Mediterranean pizza theme: the Chickpea Croquette, the Seafood Shakshuka, the Roast Lamb, the Loukaniko. It returned on February 22 for The Orient Express Dinner, and April 10 features a Latin American theme. Even if guests can’t pronounce half the words on the menu, their mouths and bellies get the tastebud-tickling message.
From pizza making to marketing, operations and employee culture, Hokin and Garvey could teach a master class in pizzeria management—if they only had the time. With systems and processes covering the full gamut, they have built an exemplary pizza restaurant, even offering health insurance and 401(k) benefits to their employees.
So is expansion in the cards? “I think we’re at an inflection point now,” Garvey says. “We’ve been growing so quickly that we really haven’t had time to do a deep analysis of the business. Over the next three to six months, we need to really analyze the level of business, how we run everything, the staffing requirements, food requirements, prep requirements, etc. And then we’ll ask, what’s our next step? So we don’t really have an answer for that yet.
“We’re very happy where we are,” Garvey adds. “But I think we’re in a position that, if we choose to, we definitely can grow into another location. I think that’s something we’re going to answer over the next few months as we analyze just how we got to where we are. Because it’s been quite a ride!”
Rick Hynum is editor in chief of PMQ.
