By Rick Hynum
The Great New York State Fair, taking place this week in Syracuse, New York, will stretch over 13 days with live concerts featuring bands like the All-American Rejects and ZZ Top, plus a three-ring circus, the Great American Drone Show and—if you’re into that kind of thing—corgis racing about on their short little legs.
But for Nick Sanford, the event is something else, too: It’s essentially the world’s largest test kitchen for his wood-fired menu at Toss & Fire, a three-store pizza brand (plus three food trucks) that has earned renown across Central New York for its artisanal pizzas since 2015.
For 10 years now, Sanford has been tossing and firing pies at the fair. And not just any pies—not just the pies you will always find at his shops. The fair is about wildly creative experimentation and an opportunity to get in front of roughly 1 million potential fairgoers and wow them with pies they won’t find anywhere else.
“The fair has become such a big part of our story, and it gives us a chance every year to have some fun, get creative and make things we wouldn’t normally put on our menu,” Sanford says. We’re really proud of what we came up with this year and can’t wait for everyone to try it.”
There’s plenty to be proud of. This year Sanford’s team is debuting three new pizzas that push the envelope, such as the Girl Dinner Pizza piled with a Caesars salad and garlic Parmesan fries as well as the Buzzer Beater Mac & Cheese Pizza, featuring fried chicken, spicy mac and cheese, roasted orange bell peppers and caramelized onions. There’s also the Fair Deli Gambino Pizza with an olive oil base, fresh garlic, mozz, dollops of marinara and meatballs, finished post-bake with whipped ricotta, Mike’s Hot Honey, fresh basil and shaved Romano.
Other new items include Zab’s Sweet Heat Chicken Wings, flavored with Zab’s St. Augustine wing sauce (made with datil peppers for a signature slow burn and naturally sweet heat) and Zab’s Hot Honey, and the Parmesan Bacon Garlic Chicken Wings, deep-fried and tossed in garlic butter with Romano cheese and candied bacon. And finally Sanford and his squad will serve up the new Deep-Fried Garlic Knots tossed in garlic butter, topped with Pecorino Romano and served on a stick with housemade vodka sauce for dipping.
Toss & Fire will also bring back some popular favorites, like the Spicy Vodka, Chicago Beef and SummerCuse pizzas.
We asked Sanford to tell us more in this Q&A:
PMQ: You mentioned that the State Fair gives Toss & Fire a chance to “make things we wouldn’t normally put on our menu.” How do you approach developing pizzas specifically for the Fair? Do you try to get a little weirder or more adventurous than you would at your brick-and-mortar stores?
Nick Sanford: Definitely. The New York State Fair gives us room to have a little more fun and push things further than we normally would in the restaurants. Guests come to the Fair every year looking for those over-the-top items, so we definitely lean into that a bit.
We try to balance the menu with things that are just really good and approachable, while also having a few items that make people stop, look at it and say, “That’s crazy,” and then order it because they have to try it. Over the years, we’ve done things like poutine pizza, pickle pizza, chicken and waffles pizza, lobster mac and cheese pizza, birria pizza, Korean BBQ and plenty of others since we started doing Fair-exclusive items.
At the same time, we never want something to be weird just for the sake of being weird. There still has to be a really good pizza underneath the idea, and it still has to taste like Toss & Fire. The Fair just gives us a little more freedom to be adventurous and have fun with it.
PMQ: Is this also a way of testing new pizza ideas? How likely is it that some of these pizzas will show up on your menu as LTOs or even permanent items?
Sanford: Absolutely. The NYS Fair is probably one of the biggest test kitchens we have. We get a huge number of people trying these pizzas in a really short period of time, so you learn pretty quickly what connects with people.
We pay attention to what sells, but also what people are talking about, what they come back for, and what they ask us about once the fair is over. Our pickle pizza—from the first year we did fair exclusives—is now an everyday pizza on both our restaurant and food truck menus, and we’ve brought other fair pizzas back as LTOs over the years.
At the same time, I think there’s something special about keeping some of these pizzas exclusive to the fair. The limited availability creates a lot of excitement around them and gives people something to look forward to every year. So some ideas may eventually make their way onto our regular menu, while others are better left as something you can only get during those 13 days.
PMQ: Are there stories behind the three new pizzas? For example, the Girl Dinner pizza sounds like it might have been designed around a social media trend.
Sanford: Every pizza has a story! The Girl Dinner definitely plays off the whole “girl dinner” idea. We actually held a contest, and one of our customers, Danielle, came up with the concept. As soon as I saw it, I knew it had potential because the name and idea are so recognizable. It sounds a little ridiculous when you describe it, but when you actually eat it, it just works—which makes it a perfect fair pizza.
The Buzzer Beater Mac & Cheese is a play on Syracuse University basketball. With G-Mac taking over as the new head coach, it felt like the perfect year to have a pizza that gives a little nod to Syracuse basketball. It has spicy mac and cheese, roasted orange peppers to represent SU, and fried chicken. It’s a really great comfort-food combination and definitely feels very Syracuse.
The Fair Deli Gambino is a collaboration with my friend Zach, who owns Fair Deli, a food trailer and restaurant here in Syracuse. He came up with the idea as a pizza version of one of his menu items. It has those classic Italian flavors that people already know and love, so that one was a pretty easy win for us.
PMQ: So how much testing goes into these specialty pizzas before you’re willing to serve them to tens of thousands of Fair attendees? Are you mostly testing flavor, or do speed of service, food cost and ease of execution play just as big a role?
Sanford: The process for this starts months earlier when we try to get a list of ideas. Then we narrow down that list and figure out what we actually want to workshop in our commissary kitchen.
Flavor is always the first test. If it doesn’t taste great, nothing else matters. After that, we start looking at the practical side of actually serving it at the Fair. When you’re making thousands of the same pizza over 13 days, the process has to be fast, consistent and realistic for the team. We want the 500th pizza to come out just as good as the first.
We look at how quickly it can be assembled, how many different ingredients it requires, how those ingredients are held during service, food cost and how easy it is to train the team on it. All of those things matter when you’re operating at fair volume.
We usually work through several versions of each item, adjusting ingredient quantities and figuring out the best way to build it without sacrificing the idea or the flavor. We’ve definitely had pizzas over the years that tasted great but just weren’t realistic to execute at that kind of volume. For us, it’s really about finding that balance between something exciting and something we know we can serve consistently all day long.
PMQ: Do you view these fair-only pizzas primarily as revenue generators, marketing vehicles, product-development experiments—or some combination of all three? What makes an exclusive item successful from your perspective?
Sanford: It’s definitely a combination of all three. Obviously, we’re running a business and we want them to sell, but I think the bigger value of the fair exclusives is what they do for the Toss & Fire brand.
The fair gives us a chance to show people our creative side. Someone might have never been to one of our restaurants, but they try one of these pizzas at the fair, take a picture of it, share it with their friends and remember Toss & Fire afterward. That’s incredibly valuable to the company.
It’s also one of the best opportunities we have to experiment because you’re getting feedback from such a huge and diverse group of people.
For me, the ultimate sign that we created a successful fair item is when people are still talking about it after the fair is over. If customers are messaging us asking when it’s coming back or telling us they came to the fair specifically to get that pizza again, that’s a pretty good indication that we hit on something.
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
