Patsy Grimaldi, a Man Who Left His Mark on Pizza in New York

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at why a pizzeria owner named Patsy Grimaldi was a bridge to the early days of pizza in New York. We’ll also get details on changes to strengthen state oversight of New York City that Gov. Kathy Hochul asked for after deciding not to remove Mayor Eric Adams for now.

First there was Patsy’s, then Grimaldi’s and Juliana’s, and somewhere along the way there was Patsy Grimaldi’s. A celebrated pizzeria owner who died last week at 93 had definite ideas about how to make pizza.

The owner, Patsy Grimaldi, who died last week at 93, didn’t make pies to be anything like those at Famous Ray’s, Original Ray’s or Famous Original Ray’s.

“He is a crucial bridge, maybe the main bridge from the early, early days of pizza in New York — brick ovens fueled by coal,” Pete Wells, who stepped down several months ago as The New York Times’s restaurant critic, told me. “That’s the kind of oven he learned to use when he was 12 or 13 at his uncle’s place in East Harlem.” His uncle was Pasquale Lancieri. His restaurant was called Patsy’s. A later owner of that Patsy’s took issue with the name Grimaldi had given his pizzeria, so the Patsy’s in Brooklyn became Grimaldi’s.

But back to Grimaldi at the Patsy’s in East Harlem.

“At first he’s busing tables,” Pete said. “Within a few months, they send him back to make the pizzas. He is learning how old-school New York pizza was made when the pizzerias were run by the generation that came over from Naples around the turn of the century. That style becomes the thing that he knows.” It was not what pizza eaters in the 1960s and 1970s knew, after gas ovens came along — and produced a different kind of pizza, with a golden crust.