Photo provided courtesy of Andrew Young and NYC Pizza Week

Pizza has been essential New York City for more than a century. The oldest pizzerias date back to the turn of the 19th century, but the slice shop is something of a newer creation. Patsy’s in Harlem is largely credited as the first New York pizzeria offering a slice, but the slice joints really took off in post-war America.

Slices are convenient, portable meals, and they are the focus of New York City Pizza week, launching on Sunday, September 20th at 21 local shops across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Each participating shop features a signature slice, something that’s not normally on their menu, and might only ever be available during pizza week. Participants can buy a slice and tap in on a QR code to rate them as they eat. Ten cents of each purchase goes to Slice Out Hunger, a non-profit committed to fighting food insecurity

The whole event is the brainchild of Andrew Young, a pizza enthusiast from Brooklyn. About two years ago he accidentally started leading pizza crawls around the city, connecting his favorite pizzerias with total strangers. But looking for the next big idea, he decided to launch NYC Pizza Week.

I found Andrew when he posted the link to the NYC Pizza Week website on Reddit. We sat down on Zoom to talk about pizza, planning a complex, two week-long event, and what some of the benefits of pizzerias in our communities.

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RED SAUCE AMERICA: How much pizza do you eat?

ANDREW YOUNG: Before I started pizza crawls and all this, I would get maybe one slice every other week. I think I was a lot healthier before. But now ever since I started the pizza crawls, I’m probably eating like, two to three at most five per week. I have to limit myself to just those slices that are going to be amazing and not eat the ones that I know are not going to taste good, or just don’t look good. I’ll spare myself the calories and skip it.

RED SAUCE AMERICA: Pizza Week came about because you were doing Pizza Crawls, but what was the genesis of those?

ANDREW YOUNG: Everything boils down to Reddit. I’d been making pizza at home for a couple years during the pandemic. I had been involved in a lot of the pizza community, pizzamaking.com, the pizza subreddit on Reddit, just kind of see what people make to share ideas.

Even though I stopped making pizza for a little bit, I still browse through the subreddit to see what people make, get feedback, things like that. One day, this guy made a post saying: Hey, I’m visiting New York City from Japan with my family. Where should I go eat pizza?

He was a local brew master and pizza maker in Japan and wanted some recommendations on what New York City pizza he should eat.

I commented: I’m glad you’re coming to town. I would love to show you around.

Whenever friends come into town, I always show them around if they ask. For who are in New York City for the first time, it’s kind of hard to get around. You don’t know your bearings. I will walk you to a couple of places. And, you know, it’s an opportunity to make a new friend. Next thing I know, a couple hours later, there’s a couple hundred posts replies: Can I come too; can I come too; where, where is it? I would love to be there.

Then this light bulb came into my head: Why don’t I just invite everyone? And Pizza Crawls, New York City was born.

I created my own subreddit. I posted on Partiful. I just picked a couple of spots that I’m familiar with in the East Village, a really accessible area, high density of great spots to eat. I said: This is the route if you want to come, it’s going to be this Saturday, 12 o’clock we’ll meet.

And about 45 people showed up. Just very typical slice shops that I knew that we can get in easy and get slices.

RED SAUCE AMERICA: How did that transition from a pizza crawl into like a whole week of pizza or two weeks of pizza, really?

ANDREW YOUNG: The pizza crawls, I would do it month to month, pretty much every single month, except when it’s cold or my schedule doesn’t allow for it. It was always the first Saturday of every month, and I did that for two years. It’s great to meet people. It’s great to make new friends. The whole Genesis was about eating pizza and making new friends along the way.

It’s about getting off your phone, getting off the computer and spending three hours of complete strangers and eating pizza. We would form lines at each of these spots and through the waiting, people are making new friends. They’re learning about each other: where you’re from, all this stuff. And when they finally get to the counter, they’re sharing slices, they’re cutting it in half so they can have the space to fit more slices later in the day.

Through meeting the shop owners, getting to know them, bringing them business, learning their history, their stories behind the shops. I always asked the shop owners to be there, so when the guests do come, if they want to talk to you, great. But also, these are the people that can eat your pizza. This is a chance to talk with your actual customer and get feedback. And as a guest, it’s cool to see the pizza owner, pizza maker, greeting you.

Through it all, I’m like: what’s the next stage of growth? Where am I going to, where am I taking this? Do I want to do curated dinners?

All these different ideas came to. A lot of these ideas, they required too much work month-to-month. I just didn’t have the bandwidth to support it. Then one day in December or January of this year, I was sitting on a subway: Hey, pizza week!

Other cities have done pizza week. I started Googling New York city pizza week. Zero results. Nothing. I get home, look at the computer for a couple more hours, Googling as far as back as I can look, and nothing. There are pizza festivals, but they’re all about bringing people to one venue, eating lots of pizza, drinking beer, alcohol, music, and they all go home.

I called Scott Wiener, who runs Scott’s Pizza Tours. I say: Scott, have you ever heard of anyone doing New York City pizza week?

He tells me: I’ve heard people talking about doing it, but no one’s actually ever launched one.

I looked at all the “pizza weeks” across the country. There’s a lot of them: San Francisco, Cincinnati and in smaller markets. But not New York City. I think it is quite possibly the pizza capital of the world. We have so much pizza here, all types of styles. There’s people come here to vacation just to eat pizza. And that says a lot about the city and the pizza culture and the availability of all this stuff that we have here.

But I wanted to do it in a way where it fits the New York City community, and it would be agreeable for the shops to do. I talked with some of the shops that I’ve done pizza crawls with.

I talked with the owners: I want to do this week, an event where it’s to celebrate you, the shop, the pizza shops that support the community that people come here to eat every day. I want to highlight not just your pizza, but your story behind it, you as a person, you as the owner, how did the shop come to be, whether you’re a generational business shop owner, or you’ve been doing a pop-ups and then you finally got your own brick and mortar.

I wanted to showcase the story because I feel like that’s so important beyond the pizza that they’re making.

RED SAUCE AMERICA: How did they come up with the signature slices for each shop?

ANDREW YOUNG: I didn’t want to just create a list, to just have 21 shops. There’s so many of these lists. I want to do something different. Then the idea came from a tapas festival that I found in Barcelona where they invite a hundred tapas shops to create something unique, one tapas dish that’s unique to the event.

I asked each shop to make a, a signature slice. They had total creative freedom to do whatever you want, whether it’s using ingredients that is seasonal, seasonal produce, maybe there’s some new protein or sausage you want to use a new sauce or, you know, stick to traditional, toppings that you would normally do, but the rule being that it cannot be something that’s already available in the shop. So it’s not a pepperoni burrata slice. It has to be something unique so that when your regular customers come and visit you, it’s something that they haven’t had before.

RED SAUCE AMERICA: So what is your the ideal of a slice?

ANDREW YOUNG: For most of the slices you’re going to get a much better experience on the reheat, versus a fresh pie. I think for people that get a fresh pie delivered, I think they’re getting a lesser quality slice in terms of the best possible way to eat it. The pies that are made, and sit on the counter, and then put into the oven for the reheat, I think those are always the best in terms of the texture.

A crust that has flavor to it. I think a lot of shops these days are putting so much effort and thought into creating dough, and flavors are coming across, with a lot of earthy tones to it and different flavor profiles.

You do have places that just use one type of flour and that’s it. And they don’t do any sort of long fermentation. They don’t do any sourdough.

I’m not too picky about the toppings. I think not having too much cheese on slices is a good thing. Too much cheese just weighs it down, makes it too oily.

RED SAUCE AMERICA: There’s a lot of newer gentrified slice shops. Do you see them as a threat to traditional slice joints?

ANDREW YOUNG: It’s interesting where some of these folks are struggling to open up one shop, right? Others, they started with one and next thing you know, within a couple of years, they have a dozen locations and they’re spread across different states.

They all come with different strategies when it comes to expansion and they all have different investors. Some of them are self-funded and some folks come in with great amount of connections or have deep pockets and they’re able to fund them.
I want to support the shops that I know the owners, the owners are there working every day and they’re making payroll. They’re trying to figure out what to do when the prices go up. And those are the ones that I want to support. The ones that have funding, whether it’s through VCs, big money, their cousins, whatever, they’re great, but they’re not dealing with the same struggles that a slice joint has.

The interior of Diamond Slice in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

For instance, Diamond Slice has one shop. They’re trying to feed the community. Ever since I visited shop when Peter first, for him, it’s all about community. He lived down the street, his family, his grandma, his dad is down the street. The shop that he opened used to be a bar that his parents would visit when they were younger.

For him, it’s all about serving the community, ensuring that the families, the kids that come by after school, that they’ll have a place to visit and eat pizza. They’ll have a place to congregate.

Those are the shops I want to put forward and support, because I think those are the shops that make the neighborhood great. When the owners are there almost every day, whether they’re on the laptop or mixing the dough, you know, they’re paying attention to what goes on in the store and they want to make sure that when their customers come in, and that they’re happy. They’re not thinking: How many more locations can I open?

I want to support the Diamond Slices of the world where, you know, they live down the street, they live in the zip code nearby. Hopefully for future pizza weeks, I can expand to different neighborhoods.

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New York City Pizza Week runs from Sunday, September 20th through Sunday, October 4th. Visit NYCPizzaWeek.com for more information

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