Story by Rick Hynum | Photos by Katie Helo
Vinnie’s Pizzeria has thrived for 66 years, but it was never known as the best slice joint in Brooklyn—the competition is stiff, after all, and its previous owners weren’t exactly hung up on artisanal quality. But the funniest slice joint? That’s a different story.
Before he and his partner sold Vinnie’s two years ago, Sean Berthiaume turned it into a viral sensation with stunts like an edible pizza box made of pizza and a pizza topped with tiny slices of pizza. The clever menu boards, spotlighting recipes inspired by pop culture and featuring Berthiaume’s own art, earned renown too, as he riffed on everything from Stranger Things (“Stranger Wings” and “The Demogorgonzola”) to classic films (“Taters of the Lost Ark” and “Smokey and the Bean Dip”).
So when Coby Chafets and Adam Richardson took over Vinnie’s reins, they had some big, floppy clown shoes to fill.
Not a problem. If anything, they’ve made Vinnie’s even funnier with their Reels and TikTok videos. Chafets, the wry, shrewd, fast-talking New Yorker, brings verbal wit, goofy characters and a hint of Groucho Marx to every scene, while Richardson, with his impish grin, malleable face and imposing physical presence, can get laughs just by striding haughtily into the room. Their videos, which earn thousands of likes and views every day, smoothly meld canny marketing with screwball comedy—it’s like “SNL for pizza,” as Chafets says, and it’s a laugh-out-loud blast.
But more importantly, these two pizzaiolos have also made the Brooklyn pizza institution a better place to eat.
“A refrain from our previous job at (famed New York City restaurant] Don Angie was, we take the food really seriously, but not ourselves,” Chafets says. “When we took over Vinnie’s, it was equally our mission to keep the stuff that works—the general vibe and attitude and everything that it meant to people—and to level up the pizza and make it part of the general New York pizza conversation in a way it hadn’t been before. So the food is always front-of-mind for us now.”
‘Does This Bring Us Joy?’
Give credit to Berthiaume: He took an otherwise ordinary slice shop and landed it on Jimmy Kimmel Live. His quirky humor, Chafets says, “was baked into the identity of the Vinnie’s that I came up in and learned from. But I don’t think anybody was writing home about the food.”
After managing Vinnie’s for years, Chafets left to attend culinary school, then did an externship at Don Angie under Adams. When the chance to purchase Vinnie’s arose, he says, “My first thought was, I should do it, and my second thought was, I can’t do it without a partner. And my third thought was, the only partner I would consider is Adam. Having worked for him, I saw the effect he had as a leader. It’s incredibly easy and common for the head chef, even at their best, to be a little short or bad-tempered with people, but Adam wasn’t like that at all. When the line cooks were at a bar after work, we’d say, ‘If Adam ever leaves the restaurant, I’ll follow him wherever he goes.’”
Chafets and Richardson made the leap to pizzeria ownership together in 2024. On the culinary side, they saw opportunities for improvement but needed to tread lightly—too much change too quickly might scare longtime regulars away. “Looking at each item on the menu, we asked ourselves, ‘Does this bring us joy?’ And if it didn’t bring us joy or if the quality wasn’t up to our standards, we either changed it or got rid of it,” Richardson says. “Coby completely redid the dough recipe and got rid of all the bromated and bleached flours that we’d inherited. We upgraded our pizza sauce and our mozzarella as well. We’re even taking fresh oregano and dehydrating it overnight.”
Chafets, in fact, eliminated bromated flour several months before New York’s state legislature passed a controversial ban on the dough additive, classified as a possible carcinogen, earlier this year. He has little patience for change-averse pizza makers who have publicly complained that the ban will force them to alter their dough formulas. Determined to preserve Vinnie’s legacy as a classic New York-style slice shop, he sought out the advice of more experienced pizzaioli, then put his head down and got to work.
“All I had to do,” he says, “was go in by myself on Mondays for four months and mix dough over and over again until I figured out how to do it with the new flour. And guess what? The product is better, and I don’t have to lecture my customers about anything. You’ve never seen a video of me in the walk-in, going, ‘This is our dough, and we use non-bromated flour.’ I feel like that’s a conversation for pizza heads and…thoroughly uninteresting to the average person. It’s lame. It’s our job to know how to make pizza, and it’s the customer’s job to eat pizza with their friends and enjoy it.”
And there’s more to enjoy now. Newly designed menus include a list of culinary “brags” on the back page, reminding customers that Vinnie’s is no ordinary slice joint—from its housemade chili crisp and garlic confit with lemon juice to Parmigiano Reggiano purchased in large hunks and freshly grated in-house. “We make a fantastic vodka sauce, which is actually vegan,” Richardson says. “It’s made with coconut milk, but it doesn’t taste coconutty. It’s a great, creamy, spicy vodka sauce and makes a fantastic slice with our cup-and-char pepperoni. It’s one of our best sellers.”
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SNL for Pizza
Meanwhile, every day brings a new LTO pizza or menu item. And that’s where the “funny” starts. Not funny weird—although certain specials can be a little odd—but funny ha-ha. For each special, Chafets, with his team’s help, dreams up an unhinged video that’s almost guaranteed to stop the scroll on Instagram.
Sous chef Alessandro Duncan turning cartwheels as he describes Vinnie’s take on garlic wheels (“I’m doin’ cartwheels for Gar Wheels!”)—and getting dizzier by the second. A pompous “Head Chef Adam” lording over the cooks until Duncan brings him a duck confit slice with an orange and cherry sauce (it’s so tasty he’s rendered cross-eyed with joy). An employee named Sadie rapping about a pie called “Sadie’s Delight” but reading the lyrics straight off her phone. Chafets as a singing cowboy touting a pie topped with “cowboy stuff” (“Cookin’ up some seasoned beef / eatin’ it with my cowboy teeth / well, that’s all part of doin’ cowboy stuff”)—and don’t blink or you’ll miss a brief cutaway to Sadie and Alessandro galloping down the sidewalk on stick horses.
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It’s hilarious, but is it good marketing? The answer, we believe, is an unequivocal yes. All of that inspired silliness keeps Vinnie’s Pizzeria popping up in social feeds with a consistent message: Vinnie’s is the fun, welcoming go-to spot for something new, flavorful and innovative every day. For instance, the Gar Wheels video, posted in late July, garnered more than 27,000 views and 1,700 likes on Instagram in one day, plus nearly 3,200 views and 552 likes on TikTok. “Sadie’s Delight” racked up 39,200 views and 2,164 likes on Instagram alone.
Chafets even tore a page from Berthiaume’s book, inventing a pizza topped entirely with ingredients sliced into triangles. “This is the first time ever in history,” Chafets proclaims, “that a slice of pizza has ever been made where all the toppings are the same shape as the slice. We’re talking about triangles, baby!” Posted in early July, that video garnered 111,000-plus views and 8,333 likes just on Instagram.
“I grew up a huge comedy nerd,” Chafets says. “I loved SNL. I fell in love with the old DVDs of the best of John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.” As a kid, he shot and edited his own funny videos to amuse himself and his friends, a skill that would prove useful later in life, as he immersed himself in the back-of-house madness and mayhem of restaurant life. “The funniest people and the funniest things I’ve ever heard or seen have been in kitchens, not comedy clubs,” he says. “They’re all working super-hard, they’re all punchy, they get to know each other really well. It’s like a pirate ship. So we made the decision to just start pointing the camera at them rather than trying to write scripts or manufacture [the humor].”
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Richardson likens a restaurant kitchen to “an island of misfit toys.” He adds, “It’s an amalgamation of people that you’d normally never meet in the outside world. But here in this place, we all come together to do a job, and I love that. All these personalities, all these strange and delightful people that we employ are just fantastic.”
No one at Vinnie’s is required to appear on camera. But the born performers bring their own fresh ideas and improvisational chops that foster a spontaneous and joyful vibe. “I’m reading a biography of Lorne Michaels, and I keep thinking, wow, in many ways, we are running Saturday Night Live for pizza,” Chafets says. “It’s a little bit like running a sketch troupe.”
‘A Hardnosed Third-Party Deal’
But it’s not all fun and games and duck confit at Vinnie’s. Behind the comedic masks you’ll find a pair of savvy businessmen who are committed to across-the-board excellence.
“We really pride ourselves on our hospitality,” Richardson says. “If you come into our store, I guarantee you’ll get a friendly hello. You’ll get a person that will walk you through all the slices. They know that’s 70% to 75% of their job—being the face of the store, bringing their best moods—and we try to make sure they get that same energy from us as well. It will trickle down to your people.”
Where Vinnie’s service suffered, however, was at the customers’ doorsteps, thanks to unreliable third-party delivery aggregators. Chafets finally cut all but one loose and hammered out a hardnosed deal that has reaped significant savings. “I showed Grubhub how much they were going to lose if we dropped them and what they had to do: 0% for the first year and 1% increases per year for the next five years, capped permanently at 5%. Those are the only terms under which I would ever allow a third party to have anything to do with our business at this point.” (There’s more to the story behind that Grubhub deal—look for it in a future issue of PMQ’s e-newsletter, Pizza Pulse.)
Currently, Vinnie’s annual sales stand at $1.7 million, a solid figure for a shop that seats just 12 people. And its culinary street cred keeps rising with Richardson and Chafets at the helm. “I can’t say we’ve gotten that much busier,” Chafets says, “because we’re a small shop, so there’s a limit to how much volume we can do. The main difference is how impassioned the customers are to be here. And now they want to try everything on the menu. The whole staff gets recognized on the street, and people are just really, really happy to be with us.”
And there are more positive changes to come. “We’re not just going to be resting on our laurels,” Richardson says. “It’s wonderful to look back at everything we’ve accomplished in the two years since we took Vinnie’s over. But can we make things better? Absolutely. Watch us in the future because I guarantee we’re going to come up with something great.”
Rick Hynum is PMQ’s editor in chief.
