← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Make Paulie Gee's Pizza at Home with a New Cookbook
00:25:31
Paulie Giannone partnered with his wife, Mary Ann, and launched a pizza empire. They discuss their new cookbook, Pizza From the Heart.
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- [00:00]
Alison Stewart
All of it is supported by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice.
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Joe Widen
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- [00:09]
Paulie Giannoni
Explorer to compare rates from multiple car.
- [00:11]
Alison Stewart
Insurance companies all at once. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Before Paulie G's name became synonymous with pizza, he was Paula Giannoni who worked in it. But after years of a career he wasn't that passionate about, Paulie and his wife Marianne decided to switch gears and focus on a true love pizza. Paula and Marianne started hosting weekla pizza parties in their backyard where they could test out some of their new recipes. Once things had been perfected, they opened their first location in Greenpoint. Paulie G's now has franchises all over the country. Now Paulie and Marianne are sharing their recipes with a new cookbook geared towards home cooks. The book is titled Pizza from the Heart 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta Salads and more. The recipes in the cookbook looked so delicious that my producer Jordan went and booked a reservation at the restaurant while she was working on this segment. True story. She's going on Saturday night. So Pizza from the Heart is out now. I'm joined now by Partners in Life and Pizza Polyg's founder Polly. Hi Paulie, Hi. And Marianne.
- [01:36]
Marianne Giannoni
Hi, how are you?
- [01:37]
Alison Stewart
I'm doing well. Thank you so much for calling. Hey listeners, Polly G and Marianne are here and they're taking your calls. What questions do you have about making pizza at home? Maybe you're looking for a perfect pizza dough recipe. Maybe you're just not into that cooking. You just want to know what to put on it. Our experts are here. Give us a call at 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC. So you worked in IT before opening the restaurant. When did to turn your passion into business?
- [02:08]
Paulie Giannoni
Well, I was looking to do something. I know it wasn't what I was doing because I really didn't have a, you know, a talent for it. And, and I wasn't, you know, getting where I wanted to and I eventually I wanted to have my own business. Somebody talked us into being multi level marketeers if anybody knows what Amway is. And, and through that I learned a lot about starting your own business and believing in yourself and making commitments and, and I had to do something. And a friend of mine knew about this restaurant chain breakfast and lunch place called L' Peep. He wanted me to open up a La Peep. There's only one here in the Northeast in Edison, New Jersey, and it did very well, and the rest are out west. And he said, I tell you what, I'll build you a restaurant. It'll be all yours, and you give me 5% of the gross, and we'll go from there. And I said, you know what? This is better than what I'm doing right now because I love to cook. We'd cook at home. We both loved to entertain. And I had to do something. Friends said, open up a restaurant. I said, I don't want to do that. I don't think so. But. So I went down that road, and I realized I became a pizza enthusiast in the mid-90s. Discovered a place in Coney island called Totono's, which I'm sure a lot of people know about, and I started going on hunt for great pizza. And at that point, while I was thinking about and looking, thank God that we didn't find a space in. In New Jersey to open up a La Peep, because then I wouldn't be here talking with you today, which is a great honor, by the way.
- [03:43]
Alison Stewart
Thank you.
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Paulie Giannoni
And so I decided, instead of doing this La Peep, that I would build a pizza oven and, you know, prove to myself that I could do it. Because that's one of the things I learned. You got to believe that you could accomplish something if you go after it. So I did that. My firm was very disappointed. Although I didn't realize it. I thought he was going to invest in the pizzeria like he'd invest in La Peep, but. But that didn't happen. But the reason I wanted to make pizza instead of opening up a restaurant, because it was a simpler process.
- [04:15]
Alison Stewart
Yeah. So, Marianne, he comes, he says, honey, my love, I want to go.
- [04:22]
Marianne Giannoni
I'm not sure if he said exactly.
- [04:23]
Alison Stewart
That way, but he said, hey, I want to go. I want to start a business. I'm thinking about a pizza business. What questions did you have?
- [04:30]
Marianne Giannoni
Well, I'm not sure that I had a lot of questions. I just kind of knew that we had to do something differently because he hated being in the corporate world as I did when I was. And he had done that for so many years. I had other careers, and I was kind of in and out of things. But, you know, and I was able to do a lot of that because he did stay in the corporate world with the benefits and all that. But eventually, you know, I could see in his early 50s he was very frustrated. And I said, if you're not going to do it now, when are you going to do it? So I guess we kind of threw caution to the wind in a big way. When I look back at it, recounting it for the book, you know, I didn't really. And I knew what we were doing, I guess, at the time. But when I looked back at it, I kept saying to myself, wow, we did that. We did that. You know, it's like we just kept going forward because I always felt it was like we were going in the right direction.
- [05:24]
Paulie Giannoni
One of the things that we learned from Amway was, keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting. Her first question was, she used to. I used this thing to build the oven in the yard, you know, in our backyard to build the oven on, because it was easier than building a whole base from scratch, she said. And she would do gardening out there. And her very first question was, what am I going to do about my plants?
- [05:49]
Marianne Giannoni
Fair.
- [05:50]
Alison Stewart
It's a fair question.
- [05:50]
Marianne Giannoni
It was a fair question at the time.
- [05:53]
Alison Stewart
What made you launch in Greenpoint?
- [05:55]
Paulie Giannoni
Well, I wanted to open up in Williamsburg. I was totally infatuated. First I was going to open up in New Jersey, trying to keep my job while I did this, which was not a good idea. A friend of mine, a very good friend, set me straight and said, look, you could take a salary enough to pay your bills. And that kind of opened because now I could go to New York. And it was much better because I knew I wanted to serve alcohol. And it's a lot cheaper to serve alcohol in New York City than it is in New Jersey. But I was infatuated with Williamsburg. One of the things that I did when I decided I wanted to do this is start talking to people who already did what I did. And two of them happened to be in Williamsburg. And when I asked one of them, Matthew from Motorino, whether if I open up in Williamsburg, would it be too close? I didn't expect him to say, yeah, it would be too close. I was like, ah, don't worry about it. Paulie in his cute Belgium accent there. But he said, yeah, that would be a little too close. So I decided, I can't do that. Fornino was the other place who was very. Both of these guys were very encouraging, very helpful. I said, well, let me. I was infatuated with Roberta's, if anyone knows about Roberta's. And I saw what they did. I mean, I love that place. I saw what they did. They went to another neighborhood adjacent to Williamsburg and created that neighborhood. Basically, I said, well, I can't go there, but perhaps I could do what they did. So I started looking around, and the other direction was Greenpoint. There it was. So, long story short, that's how we wound up there. I went there first. I went to Manhattan Avenue, where all the Polish restaurants are and dollar stores. Nothing against Polish restaurants or dollar stores. I love them both. Okay. But it wasn't what I was. I was looking for Bedford and North 7. For those of you in New York City know what that is, and that wasn't it. But I found out that there was another street, Franklin street and Greenpoint Avenue. I went to that intersection and I knew I was home. I saw then, 16 years ago what that intersection was going to look like today.
- [07:59]
Alison Stewart
Ooh, you've got vision then. That shows that you had vision of what it was going to be.
- [08:03]
Paulie Giannoni
In that case, I absolutely did.
- [08:04]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Joe, who's calling in from Allendale, New Jersey. Hi, Joe. Thanks for calling all of it.
- [08:10]
Joe Widen
Hi, Paulie. You may remember me, maybe not, but we worked together at the Port Authority in the early 80s in One World Trade Center.
- [08:20]
Paulie Giannoni
Joe, what's your last name?
- [08:21]
Joe Widen
Joe Widen.
- [08:24]
Paulie Giannoni
I'm sorry, but no.
- [08:26]
Joe Widen
No, I didn't think so. Yeah, I was in the systems group. You were doing app stuff.
- [08:30]
Paulie Giannoni
I loved working at the port Authority. Both Mrs. G and I worked at the Port Authority, and it was one of the best places to work.
- [08:37]
Joe Widen
It really was the good old days. Paulie, congratulations on your. On your new career and your success with all your restaurants. I'm looking forward to getting your book and reading it. But I have a question for you. A question for you for the home pizza, which is baking steels. What's your opinion on baking steels versus pizza stones using in an oven? Like, I've got a wolf oven at home, and I guess I could crank up 500 degrees.
- [09:06]
Paulie Giannoni
Very nice. I never used either because I went right to the brick oven in the backyard that I built myself. But from everything that I know, the baking steel gets better results. I would encourage you to get one of these new fangled little home ovens, like an ooni. Or there's one I saw the other day that's called Halo. That has a. Has a rot, you know, like a turntable in it. Gosneys are very good as well. If you have the ability to do that, that could be a better way to go. But if you're forced to make a choice between baking stones and a baking steel and a pizza stone. I would go with the bacon steel.
- [09:49]
Alison Stewart
My guests are Polly G. And Marianne. They're the owner of Polly G's and the authors of the new cookbook pizza from the heart. 100 recipes for pies, Pasta Salads and more. If you need advice on how to make pizza, you can talk to them. Our number's 2124-3396-9221-2433. WNYC, Marianne. There's two kind of pizza dough in here. There's New York style and there's Sicilian pizza dough. What's the difference?
- [10:18]
Marianne Giannoni
Sicilian is more obviously if you' you would know a square pie and it's made in a pan. And we also do a grandma slice at the Slice shop also, which is a little bit thinner, excuse me, than the Sicilian slice. And the New York style is, you know, for the large. We do a 20 inch pie at the Slice shop that would have been like a slice that we would have remembered from our childhood. We both grew up in Brooklyn and frequented a lot of pizzerias. I know every Friday night, my mother was a single working mom in the 60s, and we would order pizza and that's what we had every Friday night from Crispy Pizza, who's still there many, many years later. So that's kind of a difference.
- [11:03]
Alison Stewart
Polly, what is the secret to making really great pizza dough?
- [11:07]
Paulie Giannoni
Well, what you do is you start with someone's recipe and you experiment with it to get it just the way you like it. Because whatever you're making, whatever you're cooking, you should be cooking for yourself, for the thing that you want it to taste like. And I've always done that with all my pies. I won't serve a pizza just because I think a lot of people are going to want it. I like to make something that I love. Now, my pizza dough started by reading someone else's cookbook, a very famous baker called Peter Reinhart. The name of the book was his homage to pizza called American Pie. And he had a Neo Neapolitan recipe that I started with. And, you know, at first, actually my secret was to go to stop and shop and get a little pizza dough in a plastic bag and use that. So but in terms of the pizza dough, actually the Sicilian and New York style dough is kind of the same. The other dough that we make is like a Neapolitan style. And the difference in that is cooked in a much hotter oven. That's really difficult to do at home. You know, if you get. If you get a really good little home oven, like one of those unis or something, you might be able to. But the secret is cook for what you want to eat.
- [12:20]
Alison Stewart
We're talking about Pizza from the Heart 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta and Salads with Polly G. And Marianne. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of it. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Polly G. And Marianne. They are the owners of Polly G's and the authors of the new cookbook Pizza from the Heart 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta Salads and more. We have Peter calling in from Bayville. Hi, Peter. Thanks for calling all of it.
- [13:00]
Joe Widen
Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call.
- [13:02]
Alison Stewart
Sure.
- [13:02]
Joe Widen
So I make pizza in the barbecue, and I think I've gotten pretty good at it. But a common theme I've been finding with my pies is that the pizza underneath isn't always evenly cooked. And I like a nice, even bottom of my pizza. And I was wondering, how could I improve on that? Because I put it in basically a baking sheet and I spread the dough around.
- [13:33]
Paulie Giannoni
Do you have hot spots on the barbecue and you might just want to experiment with. Do you turn the pan around as you're cooking it?
- [13:44]
Joe Widen
No, I leave it in basically for the whole duration. It cooks in about 14 minutes. And, you know, it doesn't really have a hot spot. It's kind of inconsistent.
- [13:57]
Alison Stewart
That sounds like your answer.
- [13:58]
Paulie Giannoni
Yeah. I think you should try experimenting with, you know, moving it around and seeing what happens if you turn it, you know, halfway through the bake, perhaps, or, you know, or a few times. And that should help.
- [14:10]
Alison Stewart
We got this text that says pineapple on pizza. Yes or no? Time to end the debate.
- [14:17]
Paulie Giannoni
I have the end to that debate. Okay. Pineapple is one of my prohibitive peas. I had a number of things you don't put on pizza. They all seem to start with pea, poultry, pasta. One of them is pickles.
- [14:29]
Alison Stewart
No pickles.
- [14:30]
Paulie Giannoni
And another one is pineapple. But if you pickle your pineapple, that's a double negative, and that's okay. And that's what we do at Paulie G's at 60 Greenpoint Avenue. We have a few pies with pickled pineapple on it.
- [14:43]
Alison Stewart
How do you know, Marianne, when you're going to have double negatives work out or when you have a sweet and a savory together? How do you know when it works?
- [14:53]
Marianne Giannoni
Well, that's not a question for me because I don't come up with the recipes. I always defer to him because he's an amazing cook. He always cooked at home. We always entertained. Had a Christmas party every year for 50 people, and he would do all the cooking, and I would kind of be sort of like a sous chef and help with everything else. But he doesn't ask me questions about recipes. I think I have three recipes in the boil because I'm more of a cold dish person. I do salads, smoothies, desserts, and that kind of stuff.
- [15:29]
Alison Stewart
Well, how do you know it's gonna make her happy? How do you know when the sweet and the savory are going to work together?
- [15:34]
Marianne Giannoni
Oh, I don't think.
- [15:34]
Paulie Giannoni
I experiment with it.
- [15:36]
Alison Stewart
Experiment. She's like, I'll tell you how. Sometimes it doesn't.
- [15:39]
Paulie Giannoni
I don't know if it's gonna make her happy. When I. When I make myself happy, that's when I stop.
- [15:46]
Alison Stewart
Talk about the Hellboy pizza. This is probably what you're most well known for. It's a pizza with hot honey on top.
- [15:53]
Paulie Giannoni
Yes. Mike's Hot Honey. It has to be Mike's Hot Honey to officially be known as the Hellboy. And what happened was we had a piece of. It was. It was. I. I kind of stole it from Motorino, who stole it from Fornino. Those are the two places I mentioned earlier. And it's a basic, classic Neapolitan pie with hot soup, risotta, and fresh mozzarella. Okay. 1. When I first opened up the restaurant, I needed to save money. So I took on apprentices, people who, in exchange, was showing them what we did so that they could go out and do it themselves. I let them come in and work in the restaurant. I didn't pay them. I probably was not legal to do that at the time, and I eventually changed that. But a guy named Mike, who was making pizza at home, but more importantly, he had discovered this spicy honey when he was studying Portuguese in Brazil. And he came into the restaurant and I was chatting with him and his friends, and he mentioned that he wanted to come in and be an apprentice. He had heard about it and. And I said, sure, come in. On Wednesday my son will be here. You could, you know, he could teach you how to start stretching dough. And four o' clock will be great. And he said, okay, I'm going to bring my condiment. And I said, condiment? And. Yeah, you'll see. Okay. So he came in with. He came in with this stuff. I had. I had learned earlier that you can't make something in Some. He wanted to have that condiment on my pizza. That was his goal. He didn't care about making pizza, whatever. But I had learned earlier because I wanted to bond with our community. I went, right before we opened, I went to this Greenpoint food market. It was a floating market. It was wonderful, okay? And what happened was people would bring their stuff from home and they would sell it at these markets once a month in church basements, different places. And I met a guy there when we went making bacon marmalade. And I said, this will go to my pizza when we open. Come in. Okay? Subsequently, okay, A wonderful thing happened, okay? That market was put in the New York Times food section on Sunday. Okay? Big deal. All right. You know who reads the New York Times food section on Sunday? The health department. They said, you cannot do this. You cannot make food at home and sell it to the public. They shut them down. The one that we went to was, I believe the last one. Okay? So when the baker marmalade guy came in, his name was Ross. I said, this is great. Let's figure out what we put on. But listen, you got to make this in my kitchen. So he did that. And then when Mike came in and he wanted to do this, I said, mike, you got to make this, honey, in my kitchen. And we were closed on Mondays and he started doing it on Mondays. Him and Ross were doing it together for a little while, sharing the, you know, time slots. And that's how it all started. Then eventually we had to open on Mondays and. And he came in in the middle of the night to make it. And now you could find him everywhere. And the full circle thing on this, he just started a new company, I guess legally. I don't know how it works in Brazil.
- [19:09]
Alison Stewart
It's all full circle, comes right around.
- [19:12]
Paulie Giannoni
It is.
- [19:12]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Kathy who's calling in from Greenpoint. Hi, Kathy, how are ya?
- [19:18]
Joe Widen
Hi. I am obsessed with your slice shop. It's my favorite slices in the Brooklyn. But I've never been to your restaurant. And so I was just wondering, like, you know, I'm a little intimidated. Do I need to order a whole pizza? That sort of thing. What can I expect from your actual sit down restaurant? Do I need to like dress up? Basically. Also I want to convince my, my boyfriend to go there. He doesn't like pizza, so I need to know what we expect.
- [19:44]
Paulie Giannoni
Okay, well, in terms of the pizza, yes, you should. It's basically one 12 inch pie per person. There aren't a lot of things on that menu other than you know, other than pizza, we have some salads, actually we have some pastas now. So there are things that he could enjoy. I would encourage him. I get the feeling that if you really want to go, he's going to follow you there. Okay. Okay. And if you meet there, he better be there 15 minutes before you. Okay.
- [20:14]
Alison Stewart
Thanks so much for calling, Kathy. One of the pizzas featured here is the Hometown barbecue and Red Hook. It's a collaboration with them. It's called the Home Hometown Brisket Pie. Hometown Brisket Pie. It sounds like it shouldn't go together, but it does. How did the collaboration come about?
- [20:32]
Paulie Giannoni
Well, I needed some wooden chairs. Okay. I needed some folding wooden chairs. Somebody showed me a picture that there's this brand new barbecue place in Red Hook that had these folding wooden chairs. Very old, you know, because we had all mismatched chairs in the restaurant. That's one of the things that I tried to do. I tried to make the restaurant be casual. The staff doesn't wear uniforms. They dress like. And Kathy, if you're still listening, you dress any way you want. The staff dresses any way they want. It's not a problem. Right. But so I went to find out where he got the chairs. I met this guy, his name is Billy Derny. He's a master barbecue guy. He's amazing. And we got to talking and I got the idea that I could put his brisket on a pizza. And that's what I did. I did a little sweet and savory thing with the barbecue sauce being I used this sweet sauce, it was called sticky for some reason. And I did pickle red onions. And that's how that came about. And then we, then I got the idea to take that pickled pineapple I talked about and put that with the brisket as well. And that was another pie that we served at one time.
- [21:41]
Alison Stewart
Marianne, I want to ask you about the sake pizza.
- [21:44]
Marianne Giannoni
Okay, all right.
- [21:46]
Alison Stewart
Sake pizza.
- [21:48]
Marianne Giannoni
Well, I think what the idea behind that originally at 60 Greenpoint was that he wanted some type of. Of a vodka pie, but he didn't want to do a vodka pie and be very sort of like pedestrian. Like everybody has to have a vodka pie now. And that was even, you know, a while ago. So he decided to make a sake sauce to put on the pie. And that was also a recipe that he had made at home, which was the sake sauce.
- [22:16]
Paulie Giannoni
And the reason it came about is because early on we had an ill fated brunch and not having a full liquor license at that time. We only had wine and Beer. I couldn't serve a Bloody Mary at brunch, and you gotta have a Bloody Mary, right? So instead, I had a bloody Samurai and made it with sake. And after six weeks, we pulled the plug on the brunch, and I had all the sake left over, and I said, aha.
- [22:38]
Alison Stewart
So the backyard parties led to you being creative in different ways.
- [22:43]
Paulie Giannoni
It did.
- [22:44]
Alison Stewart
Part of what makes pizza parties so special, these backyard pizza parties we were talking about was your homemade limoncello, and you include a recipe in the book. First of all, why did you want to include that recipe?
- [22:56]
Paulie Giannoni
Because it's special. We served it from day one of our pizza parties, and I like the way I make it more than I get it in Italy. I go to Italy, they serve it. It's just too strong. And I make mine a little milder. And it meant everything. If you look on our original logo, there's lemons on there. The reason there's lemons is because of all the pizza tastings. We serve this limoncella, you get people a little buzzed. You know, the pizza tastes better. A lot of times I was at a point where we were bringing bloggers in and, you know, and they were gonna write about us. And, you know, you give them a little homemade limoncello, you feed them for free, they're not gonna say anything bad.
- [23:40]
Alison Stewart
It's so great to sit across from you because you love each other. You can sort of like, most of the time. Most of the time. That's nasty.
- [23:47]
Paulie Giannoni
You heard us.
- [23:50]
Alison Stewart
Well, you're two Brooklyn natives, you know. How did you meet Marianne?
- [23:53]
Marianne Giannoni
We met at a disco in Bay Ridge in November of 1976. It was called Jasmine's at the time. Obviously, it's since gone, but that was when everybody in sort of our generation. He's a little older than me. Went out dancing on Friday and Saturday nights. It was just like, a great time to be in Brooklyn and in New York. It was sort of, I guess, the precursor to Saturday Night Live. We had been to that club also, but he came Saturday Night Fever. Saturday Night Fever. Sorry. He came up to me at the bar, and he said, oh, I see you on the train. And I said, likely story. You know, I figured he was just giving me a line, but he had seen me on the train because I was working across the street. He was in the World Trade center already, and I was across the street in the US Steel building working for Whitewell. That was like, my first job. And he did see me on the train, so he wasn't lying.
- [24:51]
Alison Stewart
Pauli, what advice would you give to someone who wants to make a career switch like you did?
- [24:57]
Paulie Giannoni
If you love what you want to do more than your career, do it. If you do what you love, you're gonna do it well and you know, you're gonna be successful and you're gonna be happy. Okay? And you know, try to do something where you're the boss. The greatest discovery I made was I was meant to be the boss and not have a boss. My heart, my mind is just so, so much healthier and wonderful. You have to do that no matter what it is. Now a great example. That's why I wasn't good in it. I did it for 30 years, but I wasn't wired for it. I wasn't happy. And there were people were so happy to get up at 5 in the morning to go do that.
- [25:39]
Alison Stewart
But now you're the boss.
- [25:40]
Paulie Giannoni
I am the boss.
- [25:41]
Alison Stewart
The name of this book is Pizza for the Heart. Polly G and Marianne, thank you for coming in.
- [25:46]
Marianne Giannoni
Thank you for having us.
- [25:47]
Paulie Giannoni
Yes, thank you for having us. A great honor.
- [25:49]
Alison Stewart
There's more. All of it on the way.
- [25:53]
Joe Widen
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