Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurant owner whose coal-oven Pizzeria won new fans in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge for the oldest pizza style of New York City with carefully made cakes that helped start a national movement in the direction of Artisan Pizza, died in Queens on 13 February. He was 93.
His cousin Frederick Grimaldi confirmed death in the NewYork Presbyterian Queens Hospital.
Grimaldi started selling cakes in 1990 under the name Patsy's. In those days, legal skirmishes periodically disrupted the pizza candidate of the city, and it was not long before threatening letters from another Patsy brought him to rename the place that Patsy Grimaldis and then just Grimaldis. Many years later he reopened his restaurant with a name that pays tribute to his mother. Today that sign reads the pizza from Juliana.
Under each name, the pizzerias of Mr Grimaldi moved long rows of dinners outside, on Old Fulton Street, who were hungry for home-roasted peppers, white pools of fresh mozzarella and soft, delicate crusts baked in a few minutes through a burning stack of anthracite coal .
Just like the chefs he trained, Mr Grimaldi denounced the techniques he had learned in his early teenagers who worked in Patsy's Pizzeria in East Harlem, owned by his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr Lancieri was one of a small brotherhood of immigrants from Naples, including the founders of Toto's Pizzeria Napolitana in Brooklyn and John's van Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, who introduced New Yorkers in Pizza at the beginning of the 20th century.
Mr. Grimaldi reached back to that origin when he opened his own place with a newly built coal ober after a long career as a waiter. At the same time, in the minute's attention he brought to his trade union in a pig shop in Queens, for example, while other pizzerias bought theirs from large distributors anticipated on the legions of ingredient-oriented pizzasaioli who would do that follow him.
“It was the first pizza in Artisan style” in the city, Anthony Mangieri, the owner of Una Pizza Napoletana in Lower Manhattan, said in an interview.
“He was really the first place to open that Old-School connection, but thought a little further ahead, a little more food-oriented,” he said.
Patsy Frederick Grimaldi was born on 3 August 1931 in the Bronx to Federico and Maria Juliana (Lancieri) Grimaldi, immigrants from South -Italy. His father, a music teacher and hairdresser, died when Patsy was 12. To help his mother and five brothers and sisters support, Patsy worked at the pizzeria of his uncle, first as a bus boy, then as a student in the coal oven and eventually like a waiter in the dining room. Apart from a short leave in the early 1950s to serve in the army, he remained until 1974.
Patsy's Pizzeria kept late hours during those days, and Mr Grimaldi was practiced in taking care of entertainers, mobsters, off-duty chefs and other creatures of the night, including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Rodney Dangerfield, Joe Dimaggio and Frank Sinatra.
The band he formed with Mr. Sinatra lasted decades. Mr. Grimaldi delivered personal deliveries of Patsy's – two large worst cakes – when Mr. Sinatra stayed in the Waldorf Astoria in his suite. In 1953 they met in Hawaii, where Mr. Sinatra 'filmed' from here to eternity '.
“What are you doing here?” The singer asked the waiter. Mr Grimaldi was sent by the army to play Bugle in an army band.
Grimaldi met his expectant wife, Carol, in a night club in New York and took her to Patsy's Pizzeria on their first date. They married in 1971.
A short time later, Mr Grimaldi Patsy's left behind tables in a series of restaurants, including the Copacabana and the Jazz Club Jimmy Ryan's. He was 57 and worked in a Brooklyn Waterfront Cafe when he noticed an abandoned hardware store in Old Fulton Street with a 'for rent' sign in the window and a paid phone enclosed on a wall nearby. He took the phone and called the number. Not long after, he showed off with the nuanced, elementary pleasures of coal -fired pizza for people who had never tried it before.
Matthew Grogan, an investment banker, ate only a few weeks after it was opened in Patsy. Until that moment he thought he knew what good pizza was.
“I said:” I have lived fraud all those years. This is the best food I have ever had, “he remembered in an interview (later he founded Juliana's with the Grimaldis.)
Others seemed to agree, including critics, writers of restaurant guide and customers. Some of them were known, such as Warren Beatty, who brought Annette Bening, his wife. (“So, are you in the films too?” Mrs Grimaldi asked her.) Others were unclear until Mr. Grimaldi decided that they looked like someone famous. “Mel Gibson is here tonight!” He would call. Or: “Look, it's Marisa Tomei!” He was more discreet when the actual Marisa Tomei entered.
According to a non -published history that Mrs Grimaldi wrote, when the Mafia boss John Gotti was on trial in 1992 in the federal courthouse in the center of Brooklyn, his lawyers became frequent takeout customers.
“We would wrap every slice in foil and they would place it in their attaché cases so that John could have our pizza for lunch,” she wrote.
In 1998, the Grimaldis decided to sell the pizzeria to Frank Ciolli and to try their hand in retirement. It didn't take. Nor did their relationship with Mr Ciolli, who opened a series of Grimaldi throughout the country that they believed they did not hold the standards they had established in Brooklyn. When they heard that their old restaurant was being deported, they snarled the lease.
Mr. Ciolli, who moved Grimaldi to the building next to the door, approached to prevent them from reopening. Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi, he claimed in a sworn explanation, tried to “steal the company that they sold to me earlier”.
A truce was eventually reached. Nowadays the lines outside Juliana's are often indistinguishable from the lines outside of Grimaldis.
Mr Grimaldi, who lived in Queens, is survived by his sister, Esther Massa; a daughter, Victoria Strickland; And a grandson. His wife died in 2014. A son, Pat, died in 2018.
An alcove in Juliana holds a small Sinatra sanctuary. The jukebox in his forerunner, Patsy's (aka patsy Grimaldi's aka grimaldis), was filled with Sinatra records, interspersed with a few by Dean Martin. Mr Grimaldi maintained a strict policy without delivery with one exception: for Mr. Sinatra.
