Thursday, August 3rd, 2023

By BEGONIA CHU

Dominic DeAngelo has been tossing pies behind the counter of Dom's, his Bensonhurst pizza restaurant, for over thirty years now. “I took over from my dad in the ’90s...he took over from his in the ’60s.” Not your everyday outer-borough storefront pizza joint, the DeAngelo clan has always taken a near-academic approach to the study and implementation of the New York slice. “We go from borough to borough, comparison shopping. We almost never find a slice that's better than ours, but when we do, we steal what’s good about it! We’ve only done it a few times, but yeah, we’ve tweaked our recipe over the years based on slices we’ve sampled. Keep it subtle enough so’s not to alienate our regulars, but different enough to attract some new clientele. Only the best. Only the best.”

So late last year, DeAngelo thought it was a joke when his son suggested he head around the corner to a recently-opened franchise of the internationally known chain of pizza restaurants Papa John’s. “I was like, ‘Are you nuts? That American cheese and Russian dressing on a soda cracker from West Virginia?’” But his son persisted. “‘Just try it,’ he told me, ‘The kids are into it. What can it hurt?’”

The Papa John’s chain has made headlines over the years not just for its pizza (more on that in a moment) and not only for its aggressive marketing strategies, but also for its sometimes less-than-tactful (now-former) CEO John Schnatter, the Kentucky backwoods teenager who, in the late 1970s, started selling his own pizzas around the back of a local filling station in his hometown of Mabel, in the far southwest corner of the Bluegrass State. In and out of youth detention centers for petty crimes throughout his childhood, Schnatter said he found both pizza and Jesus when he hit eighteen and could now be tried as an adult: he went on the straight and narrow, or rather, the round and wide, learning to toss large family-size pizzas for his Fulton County neighbors hungry for something other than deep-fried squirrel brains and barbecued catfish.

The rest, as they say, is history. Within fifteen years, Papa John’s became the most successful pizza chain in the world, opening restaurants in locations as far-flung as Algiers, Minsk, and Tehran. But as the chain's fortunes began to soar, so did Schnatter’s ego, perhaps most notoriously at the very public opening of his flagship Tehran restaurant, where he crowned himself “The Shah of Pizza”. Needless to say, that did not go over well with the ruling imams, and Schnatter had to make a quick getaway in his private jet in order to elude what most likely would have been a very severe criminal penalty. The restaurant stayed open though, and its profits precipitated an explosion of Papa John’s throughout the Islamic Republic (though no pork toppings, please). You can’t keep a good pizza down, it seemed.

But is it a good pizza? Critics, especially in major urban areas like Chicago and New York, were quick to criticize the quality of

Schnatter’s product. “Papa John’s crust? More like papadam crust!” screamed one Chicago Reader headline. Former New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton, speaking with Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2011, likened the recipe to cottage cheese and ketchup on lightly toasted Wonder Bread. Unfazed, Schnatter stood by his original gas station ingredients (first sourced from his nearest Piggly Wiggly supermarket in the next town), and, befitting his increasingly outsized ego, became ever more bold in his outspokenness on cultural matters. In a 2014 cover story of Pizza Rules!, a well-known industry magazine, Schnatter was quoted as saying, “Deserving or not, I would never promote a Jew to an executive position, and as for blacks, well, let’s just say I’ve never met a deserving one.” Sales finally began to take a hit, and as for his increasingly exasperated executive board, those profit losses were the last straw: Schnatter was ousted as CEO in 2017, and a long-time African-American employee was finally promoted to the corporation’s board in 2019.

Now Schnatter is back. Giving interviews on CNN, MSNBC, and the PBS Newshour last year, he declared himself “refreshed and renewed” after his downfall of six years ago. Looking fit and dressed casually in a pullover shirt and neat seam-creased bluejeans, Shnatter assured the public that, with the help of both a good life trainer and Jesus Christ, he has abandoned the excesses that led to his precipitous fall from grace, and has even written an open letter of apology to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, for his infamous gaffe.

And the public have eaten it up like a pie fresh from the oven. Since last year, Brooklyn’s hipster enclave of Williamsburg has witnessed the opening of no less than three new Papa John’s locations, and the lines are perpetually around the corner. Over in Park Slope, two new restaurants have appeared with similar success among the young and the restless. Even jaded Manhattanites have gotten in on the act, with two new ever-bustling locations near the Google headquarters at 16th and Eighth.

Having lived in New York for three years as a reporter for this paper, I believe my own pizza credentials are now legit, and I’m here to report that...I like it! It still has the same delicious taste I remember from my youth in Taipei. I app-ordered a family pie, delivered to my door in less than two hours. After a quick reheat in the microwave, I bit into a slice (no folding necessary), and my mouth was greeted with a kaleidoscopic melange of sausage, pineapple, and pepperoni, along with a hint of mild cheese and sweet tomato, all atop a gooey crust that melted in my mouth. Indeed, Papa John’s offers a refreshing alternative to the stodgy New York slice that’s almost never served with the toppings that really make the pie.

And as for Dominic DeAngelo’s taste test? “I stand by my convictions. The kids can wash this stuff down with PBR if they want, but it ain’t for me...I may have to fire my son!” he jocularly informed me. To each his own pizza, I guess.