Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurateur whose coal-oven pizzeria within the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge gained new followers for New York Metropolis’s oldest pizza model with fastidiously made pies that helped begin a nationwide motion towards artisan pizza, died on Feb. 13 in Queens. He was 93.
His nephew Frederick Grimaldi confirmed the loss of life, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital.
Mr. Grimaldi started promoting pies in 1990 below the identify Patsy’s. In these days, authorized skirmishes periodically disturbed town’s pizza panorama, and it wasn’t lengthy earlier than threatening letters from the legal professionals of one other Patsy’s led him to rename the place Patsy Grimaldi’s, then merely Grimaldi’s. A few years later, he reopened his restaurant with a reputation that pays tribute to his mom. Immediately that signal reads Juliana’s Pizza.
Underneath any identify, Mr. Grimaldi’s pizzerias attracted lengthy strains of diners outdoors, on Outdated Fulton Avenue, who have been hungry for house-roasted peppers, white swimming pools of recent mozzarella and tender, delicate crusts baked in a matter of minutes by a scorching pile of anthracite coal.
Just like the cooks he educated, Mr. Grimaldi hewed to the strategies he had realized in his early teenagers working at Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem, owned by his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr. Lancieri was one in all a small fraternity of immigrants from Naples, together with the founders of Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitana in Brooklyn and John’s of Bleecker Avenue in Greenwich Village, who launched New Yorkers to pizza within the early twentieth century.
Mr. Grimaldi reached again to these origins when, after a protracted profession as a waiter, he opened a spot of his personal with a newly constructed coal oven. On the similar time, the minute consideration he delivered to his craft — selecting up fennel sausage at a pork retailer in Queens each morning, for example, whereas different pizzerias have been shopping for theirs from large distributors — anticipated the legions of ingredient-focused pizzaioli who would observe him.
“It was the primary artisan-style pizza” within the metropolis, Anthony Mangieri, the proprietor of Una Pizza Napoletana in Decrease Manhattan, stated in an interview.
“He was actually the primary place that opened up that had that old-school connection however was pondering a little bit additional forward, a little bit extra food-centric,” he added.
Patsy Frederick Grimaldi was born on Aug. 3, 1931, within the Bronx to Federico and Maria Juliana (Lancieri) Grimaldi, immigrants from southern Italy. His father, a music trainer and barber, died when Patsy was 12. To assist help his mom and 5 siblings, Patsy labored at his uncle’s pizzeria, first as a busboy, then as an apprentice on the coal oven and ultimately as a waiter within the eating room. Aside from a short depart within the early Nineteen Fifties to serve within the Military, he stayed till 1974.
Patsy’s Pizzeria saved late hours in these days, and Mr. Grimaldi grew adept at caring for entertainers, mobsters, off-duty cooks and different creatures of the night time, together with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Rodney Dangerfield, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.
The bond he fashioned with Mr. Sinatra lasted for many years. Mr. Grimaldi personally made deliveries from Patsy’s — two massive sausage pies — when Mr. Sinatra stayed in his suite on the Waldorf Astoria. In 1953, they bumped into one another in Hawaii, the place Mr. Sinatra was filming “From Right here to Eternity.”
“What are you doing right here?” the singer requested the waiter. Mr. Grimaldi had been despatched by the army to play bugle in an Military band.
Mr. Grimaldi met his wife-to-be, Carol, at a New York nightclub and took her to Patsy’s Pizzeria on their first date. They married in 1971.
A short while later, Mr. Grimaldi left Patsy’s to attend tables at a collection of eating places, together with the Copacabana and the jazz membership Jimmy Ryan’s. He was 57 and dealing at a Brooklyn waterfront cafe when he observed an deserted ironmongery store on Outdated Fulton Avenue with a “for lease” signal within the window and a pay cellphone bolted to a wall close by. He picked up the cellphone and dialed the quantity. Not lengthy after, he was exhibiting off the nuanced, elemental pleasures of coal-fired pizza to individuals who had by no means tried it.
Matthew Grogan, an funding banker, ate at Patsy’s only a few weeks after it had opened. Till that second, he thought he knew what good pizza was.
“I stated, ‘I’ve been residing a fraud all these years. That is the best meals I’ve ever had,’” he recalled in an interview. (He later based Juliana’s with the Grimaldis.)
Others appeared to agree, together with critics, restaurant information writers and clients. A few of them have been well-known, like Warren Beatty, who introduced Annette Bening, his spouse. (“So, are you within the films, too?” Mrs. Grimaldi requested her.) Others have been obscure till Mr. Grimaldi determined that they resembled somebody well-known. “Mel Gibson’s right here tonight!” he would name out. Or: “Look, it’s Marisa Tomei!” He was extra discreet when the precise Marisa Tomei walked in.
In keeping with an unpublished historical past that Mrs. Grimaldi wrote, when the mob boss John Gotti was on trial in 1992 on the federal courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, his legal professionals grew to become frequent takeout clients.
“We might wrap every slice in foil and they’d put it of their attaché instances in order that John would be capable of have our pizza for lunch,” she wrote.
In 1998, the Grimaldis determined to promote the pizzeria to Frank Ciolli and check out their hand at retirement. It didn’t final. Neither did their relationship with Mr. Ciolli, who opened a string of Grimaldi’s across the nation that they believed did not uphold the requirements they’d set in Brooklyn. After they realized that their previous restaurant was being evicted, they snapped up the lease.
Mr. Ciolli, who moved Grimaldi’s to the constructing subsequent door, sued to cease them from reopening. Mr. and Mrs. Grimaldi, he claimed in an affidavit, have been making an attempt to “steal again the very enterprise they earlier offered to me.”
A truce was ultimately reached. Nowadays the strains outdoors Juliana’s are sometimes indistinguishable from the strains outdoors Grimaldi’s.
Mr. Grimaldi, who lived in Queens, is survived by his sister, Esther Massa; a daughter, Victoria Strickland; and a grandson. His spouse died in 2014. A son, Pat, died in 2018.
An alcove at Juliana’s holds a small Sinatra shrine. The jukebox at its forerunner, Patsy’s (a.ok.a. Patsy Grimaldi’s a.ok.a. Grimaldi’s), was stocked with Sinatra information, interspersed with a number of by Dean Martin. Mr. Grimaldi maintained a strict no-delivery coverage with one exception: for Mr. Sinatra.