megapanalo Patsy Grimaldi, Whose Name Became Synonymous With Pizza, Dies at 93

Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurateur whose coal-oven pizzeria in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge won new fans for New York City’s oldest pizza style with carefully made pies that helped start a national movement toward artisan pizza, died on Feb. 13 in Queens. He was 93.

His nephew Frederick Grimaldi confirmed the death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital.

Mr. Grimaldi began selling pies in 1990 under the name Patsy’s. In those days, legal skirmishes periodically disturbed the city’s pizza landscape, and it wasn’t long before threatening letters from the lawyers of another Patsy’s led him to rename the place Patsy Grimaldi’s, then simply Grimaldi’s. Many years later, he reopened his restaurant with a name that pays tribute to his mother. Today that sign reads Juliana’s Pizza.

Under any name, Mr. Grimaldi’s pizzerias attracted long lines of diners outside, on Old Fulton Street, who were hungry for house-roasted peppers, white pools of fresh mozzarella and tender, delicate crusts baked in a matter of minutes by a scorching pile of anthracite coal.

ImageGrimaldi’s underwent several name changes over the course of its existence. It was originally called Patsy’s.Credit...James Estrin/The New York TimesImageDiner lined up outside Grimaldi’s for house-roasted peppers, white pools of fresh mozzarella and tender, delicate crusts.Credit...Terese Loeb Kruezer/Alamy

Like the cooks he trained,phpgames online Mr. Grimaldi hewed to the techniques he had learned in his early teens working at Patsy’s Pizzeria in East Harlem, owned by his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr. Lancieri was one of a small fraternity of immigrants from Naples, including the founders of Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitana in Brooklyn and John’s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, who introduced New Yorkers to pizza in the early 20th century.

Mr. Grimaldi reached back to those origins when, after a long career as a waiter, he opened a place of his own with a newly built coal oven. At the same time, the minute attention he brought to his craft — picking up fennel sausage at a pork store in Queens every morning, for instance, while other pizzerias were buying theirs from big distributors — anticipated the legions of ingredient-focused pizzaioli who would follow him.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

But the move backfired in a way that few supporters expected. Californians in 2021 actually tossed nearly 50 percent more plastic bags, by weight, than when the law first passed in 2014, according to data from CalRecycle, California’s recycling agency.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

free slot machines to play

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.megapanalo