News broke this week that local pizza chain Sizzle Pie is bringing their pizza to New York City, a city with no recognizable gustatory tradition and a place that totally certainly doesn’t have any kind of pizza to speak of. Chicago? Sure. New Haven? Yeah, pies out the wazoo. But NYC has no known pizza makers or places to buy and eat pizza, which makes this a no-brainer for Sizzle Pie. After all, it’s called the Big Apple, not the Big Pizza.
Obviously, I’m kidding. New York is lousy with pizza. Just ask Pizza Rat. But Sizzle impresarios Matt Jacobson and Mikey McKennedy see a room in the market for what they’re doing, and they’ve signed a lease for an East Coast outpost of Sizzle Pie in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Details were first announced by a publication called Pizza Today. Wait. Hang on. Can we just take a moment and appreciate that we live in an age when there is a publication called Pizza Today? Okay. Here’s what it said:
“We’re ambitious, we love the East Coast and we have friends out there,” says Jacobson. “There’s a Brooklyn-Portland connection. A lot of people in the creative, design and coffee worlds kind of tend to go back and forth between here and there… We went out there and surveyed the landscape and there’s really no one out there doing what we’re doing. It’s exciting. It will have its challenges for sure, but we’re going into it with our eyes wide open.”
Today, Eater confirmed the story:
We caught up with Jacobson yesterday to try and glean the details.
“We signed a lease [in New York City] a couple of months ago,” he confirmed. “We’ve both spent time there, and nothing [back east] was really doing anything like were doing, so we thought we could resonate really well out there.”
The Bushwick location is still six to nine months out, as the landlord is in the process of rezoning the location from industrial to commercial. It will be the eighth place in the world where one can buy Sizzle Pie, following three storefront locations in Portland, two inside Moda Center, one in Eugene, and one in Seattle.
So more pizza for New York. Good for them. At least it’s not another Ray’s. More importantly, where can I get a subscription to Pizza Today?
“There’s a Brooklyn-Portland connection. A lot of people in the creative, design and coffee worlds kind of tend to go back and forth between here and there.”
I was just there in January. Brooklyn has been there done that with the whole gentrification thing. That is probably the connection he is talking about; the creative design people took over Brooklyn and Portland, and neither one have left much of what made them cultural hot spots in the begging, but hey, they – meaning the new and improved poshy yoga crowd of brooklyn – now have sizzle pie.