Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at why a pizzeria owner named Patsy Grimaldi was a bridge to the early days of pizza in New York. We’ll also get details on changes to strengthen state oversight of New York City that Gov. Kathy Hochul asked for after deciding not to remove Mayor Eric Adams for now.
First there was Patsy’s, then Grimaldi’s and Juliana’s, and somewhere along the way there was Patsy Grimaldi’s. A celebrated pizzeria owner who died last week at 93 had definite ideas about how to make pizza.
The owner, Patsy Grimaldi, who died last week at 93, didn’t make pies to be anything like those at Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s or Famous Original Ray’s.
“He is a crucial bridge, maybe the main bridge from the early, early days of pizza in New York — brick ovens fueled by coal,” Pete Wells, who stepped down several months ago as The New York Times’s restaurant critic, told me. “That’s the kind of oven he learned to use when he was 12 or 13 at his uncle’s place in East Harlem.” His uncle was Pasquale Lancieri. His restaurant was called Patsy’s. A later owner of that Patsy’s took issue with the name Grimaldi had given his pizzeria, so the Patsy’s in Brooklyn became Grimaldi’s.
But back to Grimaldi at the Patsy’s in East Harlem.
“At first he’s busing tables,” Pete said. “Within a few months, they send him back to make the pizzas. He is learning how old-school New York pizza was made when the pizzerias were run by the generation that came over from Naples around the turn of the century. That style becomes the thing that he knows.” It was not what pizza eaters in the 1960s and 1970s knew, after gas ovens came along — and produced a different kind of pizza, with a golden crust.
When Grimaldi opened his Patsy’s in 1990, “he brought everybody’s attention back to how great that brick oven was, with high heat that cooks really quickly with minimal but pure ingredients,” Pete said. “He brought everybody’s attention back to how great that could be.”
That brought people to Brooklyn. “Within weeks, celebrities were going out there,” Pete said. “I can’t think of a pizzeria in New York that was that kind of a scene. It hit on every level. Critics and pizza freaks were going crazy over it. One of the things it did, besides saying this style of pizza is very traditional to New York, was to say a pizzeria could be a fun, cool place that everybody wants to get into.”
There were celebrities, real and presumed. Once, according to New York magazine, Warren Beatty called and persuaded Grimaldi’s wife, Carol, to save him a table. When Beatty and his wife, Annette Bening, showed up, Patsy Grimaldi looked at her and said, “So, are you in the movies, too?” And, when the crime boss John Gotti was on trial, his lawyers took lunch to their client by picking up a pizza at Patsy’s, wrapping the slices in aluminum foil, slipping them into their briefcases and carrying them into the courthouse.
Pete said that Grimaldi would point at customers who had a passing resemblance to a celebrity and say something like, “Hey, look, Marisa Tomei is here tonight.” One Patsy’s regular became “Mel Gibson.” Pete said the man “maybe kinda resembled” the actor and director “if the light was bad and you had lost your glasses.”
Grimaldi and his wife sold the restaurant in the late 1990s, when he was in his 60s, thinking they would retire. They “unretired” in the 2010s when the new owner moved the restaurant next door, and they leased their old space all over again. They called the new restaurant Juliana’s, after Grimaldi’s mother, because they had sold the Grimaldi’s name in the deal in the 1990s.
Frank Ciolli, who had bought Grimaldi’s from the Grimaldis, said that they were attempting to “steal back the very business they earlier sold to me.” But this week Grimaldi’s was polite, saying on its Facebook page that Patsy Grimaldi was a “true icon in the pizza world” whose “commitment to quality set a standard that continues to inspire us every day.”
The pizza menu at Juliana’s is almost disarmingly simple, with three kinds of “classics” — margherita, marinara and white — plus calzone. There is a limit on toppings — only two to a pie. There are also five “pizza specials” with set ingredients like grilled chicken, Monterey Jack cheese and guacamole. No changes, no substitutions.
Matthew Grogan, a former investment banker who became a partner with the Grimaldis, said Patsy Grimaldi was against the five pizza specials when he and Carol Grimaldi suggested them. But Patsy Grimaldi soon came around, Grogan said.
“He loved them,” Grogan said. “Same with meatballs. He didn’t want to serve meatballs. I said no, they’re too good.”
Weather
Today will be sunny and breezy with a high near 34. Tonight will remain breezy with a mostly clear sky and a low temperature around 21.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Rules are in effect until Feb. 28 (Losar).
The latest New York news
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New York sues vape makers: Attorney General Letitia James sued 13 companies that make and distribute popular vaping devices, seeking a permanent ban on products that are ubiquitous in corner stores and smoke shops.
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Murder charges in an inmate’s death: Five New York corrections officers were charged with murder and other crimes in the killing of a state prison inmate. They are accused of beating him to death while he was handcuffed.
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Searching for answers: The police said that Emil Williams pointed a gun at an officer outside a station house in Bayside, Queens. Four officers fired at him. A neighbor said everything about Williams, who would have turned 80 next month, had been “normal.”
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What we’re watching: On “The New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts,” Brad Lander, the city comptroller; Chris McNickle, a historian; and Nicholas Fandos, who covers politics for the Metro desk, discuss the turmoil at City Hall and its implications for New York’s future. The show airs at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. [CUNY TV]
Hochul won’t remove Adams but wants more state supervision of city affairs
The will-she-or-won’t-she question was answered on Thursday, for now. She won’t.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said that she would not remove Mayor Eric Adams. But she wants new oversight measures that would limit Adams’s independence.
Adams became the first mayor in the modern history of New York to face criminal charges when he was indicted last fall. He is now fighting claims that he agreed to a quid pro quo, accepting the administration’s promise to drop the charges in return for supporting its effort to find and deport undocumented migrants.
Hochul had spent days deliberating how to handle the crisis around City Hall as growing numbers of Democrats called for Adams to resign — or for her to remove him from office, which she has the power to do. She said she understood why New Yorkers were outraged but framed the changes she proposed as part of a broader fight to protect the city against President Trump.
“The Trump administration is already trying to use the legal jeopardy facing our mayor to squeeze and weaken our city,” she said. “I call it the Trump revenge tour, and I have to stand in its way.”
Among the oversight measures to increase state supervision of city affairs were these:
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Creating a new post for a state deputy inspector general who would focus on New York City’s operations.
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Setting up a fund for the city comptroller, the public advocate and the City Council speaker to hire outside counsel to sue the federal government if the mayor is unwilling to do so.
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Allocating additional funds for the state comptroller’s office to review the city’s finances.
Hochul said she intended for the new provisions, if approved, to expire at the end of the year, when Adams’s first term will expire, with the potential for renewal. She called them “a first start in restoring trust” and urged Adams to work on his own to regain the city’s confidence.
In a statement, the mayor said “there is no legal basis for limiting New Yorkers’ power by limiting the authority of my office,” but indicated that he might not fight Hochul.
METROPOLITAN diary
Keep Moving
Dear Diary:
It was a cold, windy day in December, and I was on my way home after taking the train to the city from a day spent in Philadelphia.
I was walking to the 34th Street R train station behind a family whose members were walking at various paces and taking up most of the sidewalk in a way that no one could pass.
“Ellen,” I heard the father say to his wife, “put your phone away and walk faster! You owe it to the people.”
I could have hugged him.
— Kristina Moris
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A Man Who Left His Mark on Pizza in New York appeared first on New York Times.
