And that was how our friendship began. During the course of it, over dozens of Suprema slices, he told me the story you’re about to read.
A young Sal Riggio
CHAPTER 10
Pizza Suprema
Even straight out of the oven, the slice at Suprema had that crisp crunch one expects from a good slice. The ratios on this slice were superb; there was ample grease, and the whole thing was moist without being sloppy. The sauce, which BBC thought might be the best part (though none of us could agree on a best part of this delectable slice), was integrated very nicely with the cheese (which was absolutely delish), so that they were discernible from each other in flavor but still totally enmeshed, creating a wonderful texture atop the crispness of the crust. And the crust’s flavor was unstoppable!
—Slice Harvester Quarterly, Issue 5, “Twenty-Third to Forty-Second Streets,” visited on July 17, 2010
In April 1937, Maria Riggio—wife to Giuseppe Riggio, mother to Jovanna, Lucia, Rosalita, and Vita Riggio—realized she was pregnant for the fifth time. The baby was conceived before her husband had returned to America, where he was attempting to build the family fortune in the coal mines of Illinois. He had left Maria and the four girls in Burgio, the provincial Sicilian comune, or village, where they had lived their whole lives. Burgio, with a current population of a little over three thousand (smaller than the student body at my suburban high school), was only slightly larger in the thirties. We’re talking about a tiny town, in a rural province. I imagine it was a lot like Fellini’s Amarcord—beautiful scenery, cool ancient buildings, dusty streets, and everyone’s a pervert. Well, maybe not that last part.
Maria’s brothers, who worked her husband’s land for her, were stealing her money, leaving her with barely enough to feed herself and her four daughters. For her fifth pregnancy, she desperately wanted a son. She had been hoping for a son during all her pregnancies, but her body seemed to create only more women. Blame the patriarchal culture she was immersed in, but this was a problem for her.
Maria went to see her aunt Cecilia, who was a sort of provincial Catholic mystic. She explained her problem—that she needed a son to carry on the family name, and was scared she would have another daughter. Her elderly aunt put a comforting, wrinkled hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, child. All will be well. Trust in God.”
Maria came home from seeing Cecilia, lit a candle, said her prayers, and went to bed. That night she had a vivid dream. She saw her father-in-law, Salvatore Riggio, standing in the center of a large hall, surrounded by the entire family. In front of him was an enormous round loaf of bread. In one hand he held a knife, which he used to cut the loaf into triangular wedges. He distributed these wedges one at a time to everyone in the family. When he handed Maria her piece, she woke up in a sweat, but she knew everything would be okay. She would have a boy, and he would bring abundance and prosperity to the family.
Sal Riggio, named for his paternal grandfather, was born seven months later, on the twenty-seventh of November. Though his memories of his youth in Italy were of scarcity and hunger, he always seemed preternaturally lucky. His family likes to say there was an angel looking over his shoulder. Once when he was five, little Sal went out to a field with some older boys to play. They played a children’s gambling game, in which kids would stand coins upright like dominoes in the dirt and take turns throwing pebbles at them. Whatever coins the player toppled were his to keep. Sal had never played the game before and seemed like an easy mark for the older kids, but he proved to have an aptitude for it. After a few rounds, he had won half of the other kids’ money.
Although he was only five, Sal realized quickly that these kids were going to kick his ass if he kept taking their money, so he devised a plan: he would lose on purpose until he was left with the money he’d started out with, and then he would go home. The problem was, no matter how hard he tried to sabotage himself, no matter how badly he threw his pebble, he couldn’t seem to lose. Things were getting tense. Sal didn’t know what to do, but he kept trying to miss. And then, just as he had taken almost all of the other guys’ coins, as tensions were boiling and a beating was imminent, he heard his mother calling him home for dinner. Sal tossed a handful of his winnings on the ground as a peacemaking gesture and ran home, narrowly escaping calamity. He didn’t get his ass beaten, but those kids never played with him again.
When he was nine, Sal’s family made their way across the Atlantic to America, where he met his father for the first time. Giuseppe had left the coal mines and relocated to Bushwick, Brooklyn, and rented a modest apartment at 76 George Street, where Sal spent most of his childhood. The apartment wasn’t big enough for the whole family, but Sal’s sisters got married one by one and moved out.
Bushwick in the forties was a changing neighborhood. “The Germans moved out when the Italians moved in,” Joe told me with a laugh during one of our many conversations about his father’s life. Giuseppe took a job in Brooklyn as a box burner, which was actually a job back in the day. Think about that for a second. Think about how different society was less than a hundred years ago. Burning boxes was unskilled labor; it was toxic and exhausting and didn’t pay well, but Giuseppe had saved up some coal mining money, and working as a box burner was enough to get by.
Sal’s whole family was “in pizza.” It started with Sal’s eldest brother-in-law, Pino, married to Sal’s sister Jovanna, who opened up J & V Pizza on Eighteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst in 1950 with Rosalia’s husband, Vinny, who still owns the place. In fact, the other night Aaron Cometbus and I took the N train out to Eighteenth Avenue at around eleven p.m. to check out the place, and let me tell you, the pizza is not the best I’ve ever had, but the store is a Dream Come True—totally dark and cavernous, with a couple of boisterous, half-friendly/half-terrifying pizza men and a TV playing some unrecognizable old movie on cable. As Aaron and I ate our slices, I noticed an older white woman in a sundress with her hair shellacked into some sort of peculiar helmet and straight-up black circles around her eyes as though she were a raccoon in a kabuki theater. She was watching the television intently, slowly sipping a can of cola through a straw.
She slurped her last sip of soda and began to collect her many bags just as Aaron and I were finishing our pizza. I thought maybe this lady was a longtime regular and could give me a rundown on how things had been Back In The Day, so I turned to her as she passed our table and asked, “You been coming here a while?” as casually as I could.
She blinked her eyes twice and stared at me for a few seconds before she began to speak in the most adorable outer-borough falsetto I have ever heard. “Oh yeaaah, ya know, I like ta come heeah en eat aliddle pizza, trink a soda, en wash the tel-o-vision. Today I only got a soda, though, becaurse I went ta da theata an it costa lotta money fah theata tickets, so I only got a soda. Now I wanna use tha bah-troom, but the man is mopping and he won’t let me.” Then she blinked a few more times and walked off into the night.
But anyway, back to 1950. Sal’s brother-in-law Pino lived across the street from a pizza shop in Bushwick that did a pretty good business, and he wanted in. So he called Vinny, because, as Joe puts it, “Vinny, being Neapolitan, knew something about pizza,” and they opened up J & V. Family legend has it that Pino was the first guy in America to shred the mozzarella instead of just laying it on the pie in slabs.
But Sal wasn’t necessarily interested in the family business. He was a smart and bookish kid who excelled at school, a model student at Bushwick High with aspirations of becoming a doctor. He worked summers at J & V, where he learned to make pizza, but he didn’t want to work with his hands like his father had.
In 1954, when Sal was seventeen, Pino and Vinny’s partnership was on the rocks, and Sal’s father offered to buy him Pino’s half of the business. Sal refused. He wanted more for himself than to sweat his life away in a hot pizzeria. That same year, Pino’s daughter, Rose, who was Sal’s age, and her older husband, Tony, opened up Valenti’s Pizza on Fifth Avenue in
the Italian enclave of Park Slope. Everyone around Sal was getting into pizza, but Sal had no interest.
Straight out of high school, Sal took a job for Western Union as a messenger. He loved learning the streets of New York so intimately, but it was grueling work that sometimes required him to go to dangerous neighborhoods. The place he hated most in the whole city was the Main Post Office, at Thirty-First Street and Eighth Avenue. The neighborhood was filthy and decrepit, teeming with violence, seemingly forgotten by City Hall. Sal swore to himself that whatever he did next, he would spend as little time as possible in that urban hell.
By the end of his first month as a messenger he had worn holes in the bottoms of his shoes, and had to spend an entire week’s pay on a new pair. He resolved to work his way up the chain at Western Union, and was eventually promoted to the position of dispatcher, where he worked in an office and wore a collared shirt. But the pay was just as lousy, even though the job sounded more prestigious. Like Joe told me, “They may give you bigger titles, but they don’t give you bigger paychecks.”
By 1960 Vinny had paid off the loans he’d taken out to open J & V, and the shop was starting to turn a pretty substantial profit. Vinny had never had money before, but once he did, he knew what to do with it. He bought a house, nice clothes, a new car every year. He bought his wife jewelry. He sent his kids to military school. Sal looked at himself, slaving away at Western Union for a pittance, and looked at Vinny, who seemed to have it all. Sure, he had spent years drenched in sweat, slinging pizza from morning till night, but he had something to show for it. What did Sal have? A fancy-sounding title and no money.
So he opened up his first pizza shop, Elegante Pizza, on Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge. Sal’s partner in the business—we’ll call him Tony Bologna—was a shifty layabout who spent more time flirting with the female customers than doing actual work. In 1963, Sal went back to Burgio for six months to meet Maria, his soon-to-be bride in what was essentially an arranged marriage between family friends. He left Tony in charge of Elegante, knowing full well the place might not even be open anymore when he got back.
The way the Riggio family tells it, and I have no idea whether this bears out historical fact, in the sixties, pizza was a regional food in Naples, but hadn’t spread all over Italy. It was images of teens slamming slices on Friday night in American pop culture that popularized pizza throughout the rest of Italy and the rest of the world. To illustrate this fact, they cite a conversation between Sal and Maria’s grandmother, also named Maria.
Grandma Maria cornered Sal in the kitchen of the family home, pointing an imposing, gnarled, girlfriend’s grandmother’s finger into his face. “How do you plan to support my granddaughter? What do you do? Why should we let you take her away to America?”
“I run a pizza parlor,” he responded nervously.
“Pizza parlor? What’s this?”
“I make and sell pizza.”
“I don’t understand; what is this stuff? What do you actually do?”
“PIZZA!” He was starting to get frustrated. “It’s a food from Naples. I make dough, I roll it out flat, I put sauce and cheese on it, and I cook it in the oven.”
Grandma Maria laughed a mean-spirited laugh. “That’s how you’re going to make a living to support my granddaughter? Okay, Mr. Baker. Good luck.”
Six months later, Sal and Maria returned to America and found Elegante in shambles. Tony Bologna swore up and down to Sal that the pizza shop hadn’t turned a profit the whole time he’d been gone. Rather than fight Mr. Bologna for his fair share of an already failing business, Sal sold Tony his half, and he and Maria opened up a new shop on Myrtle Avenue in Fort Greene. This proved to be a bad idea.
By the mid-sixties, Fort Greene had gone from a thriving working-class enclave to a grim, blighted wasteland. The Navy Yard had been decommissioned, and the Fort Greene Houses, which had previously housed Yard workers, had fallen into such disarray that they were described by Newsweek as “one of the starkest examples of the failure of public housing.” They were characterized by “windows broken . . . walls cracking; light fixtures inoperable; doors unhinged; elevators that are clearly used as toilets.”1
So, Myrtle Avenue in the mid-sixties was not a hospitable place for a pizza parlor. Rather than stick around the neighborhood and try to build connections to a community that clearly didn’t want them there, Sal and Maria set their sights elsewhere. They knew they wanted to open a shop in Manhattan, but they weren’t sure exactly where. They began to spend each day driving around the city in Sal’s old Dodge Rambler, scoping out FOR RENT signs in windows. This was before Craigslist.
They drove all over the city, to no avail. One day about two weeks into their quest, Sal and Maria were pointed to a luncheonette at 413 Eighth Avenue, just south of Thirty-First Street, whose owners were looking to sell their lease. The space had a great interior, but the location was a nightmare for Sal. It was less than half a block from the Main Post Office he had spent so much time at as a messenger, in the neighborhood he hated more than any other, the neighborhood he swore he would avoid at all costs. Sal refused the space, though Maria had a good feeling about it.
For five more months, Sal and Maria drove around Manhattan. They widened their search to Brooklyn, but still came up empty. Every few weeks they would find themselves passing 413 Eighth Avenue, the FOR RENT sign still in the window. Maria would say, “Let’s make them an offer.” But every time Sal would decline.
After another month of nothing, they basically just said “Fuck it” and took the spot on Eighth. It was provisional; it was temporary. Sal knew how to open a pizza place, and he knew he wouldn’t have to stay in this most-hated locale for very long if he didn’t want to, but he knew he had to go somewhere. He wanted to start a family with Maria, and he couldn’t do that in good conscience without a solid source of income.
Sal had used the money from selling his half of Elegante to buy a house on Sixteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, so there was a home in which the family could begin, and now, with the lease for the storefront signed and filed, he had a business. The build-out was easy: they kept the floor from the luncheonette (it’s still there today), installed a few banquettes, and put in a pizza oven and a counter. He didn’t even bother to name the place—he just put up a big sign that said PIZZA, and that was that. Sal’s nameless pizza parlor was open by the summer of 1964. Soon after, Maria was pregnant. What perfect timing! The following spring, Maria gave birth to Mariella, their first daughter.
Business was slow at first, but it was enough for Sal to support his family and to fly his mother to the States to live in the house with them. He was the son, after all. It was his responsibility to care for her. And of course it didn’t hurt that she could help with the child care.
Sal kept his costs low by providing as little as possible to his customers. He used misprinted boxes from other pizzerias, served his slices on pieces of wax paper instead of plates, and bought only unbleached paper bags, because it all saved a few cents. He never gave anybody a napkin unless they asked, and if they did ask, he would give napkins out one at a time. People would ask him for garlic powder, and he’d say, “No garlic”; they’d ask him why, and he’d say “ ’Cause it gives you agita.” Maybe it gave him agita (which is Old People for heartburn), but that’s not why Sal didn’t have garlic powder. He didn’t have it because he deemed it an unnecessary extravagance.
One place Sal never cut corners, however, was his pizza. He imported flour, tomatoes, and cheese from Italy, and he busted his ass to perfect his recipe. He only sold plain, round pies—no Sicilian, no white slices, no pepperonis or mushrooms. He only made plain pizza, and he worked tirelessly, constantly tweaking the ingredients to improve his pies.
In 1967, Sal’s mother passed away. Two months later, the RCA Technical School opened up around the corner on Thirty-First Street, and Sal’s pizza place became a popular hangout spot for blue-collar students looking for affordable meals. The sudden boom in business see
med like a parting gift from Maria Riggio. In 1968, construction of Madison Square Garden was completed across Eighth Avenue, and though the main entrance to the Garden is on Seventh Avenue, that back-door traffic, combined with the steady trickle of RCA students, was more than enough to sustain a pizza place.
In 1969, Sal and Maria’s son, Joe, was born. In 1972, their second daughter, Joanne, was born, and the Riggio family moved two blocks down to Fifteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst, where they bought a house across the street from Sal’s sister Rosalie. It was definitely a nicer house, but in order to maintain the middle-class life Sal wanted for his family, he worked twelve hours a day, six days a week. In order to ensure that his kids would not suffer the spare, hungry childhood he had, Sal basically had to sacrifice his relationship with them. He never taught his son how to ride a bike or throw a ball; he wasn’t there when his daughters took their first steps or said their first words; but they had a roof over their heads, and they had food to eat. That was what mattered to Sal. He could give up his own life to pull his family out of the cycle of poverty. Maybe if he worked hard enough, they could at least have relationships with their children.
Nineteen seventy-two was also the year that Sal finally perfected his slice. Ten houses down and across the street from the Riggios, a guy named Tony Dara lived with his family. Tony owned an industrial bakery that supplied all of Brooklyn’s public schools with bread. He and Sal became friends, and one day while he was in Hell’s Kitchen, Tony stopped into Sal’s place for a slice.
“It’s pretty good,” he said, “but the dough could use a little work. This sauce is unbelievable, though. You let me show you how to make the dough a little better and you’ll have the perfect piece of pizza.”
Slice Harvester Page 13