#3 The one-dollar Pizza King

On Saturday nights, when the party is over and you are hungry, you want to keep it simple. New York is a city of countless options: where to live? what to have for lunch? where to go out? But, after a night out, there is only one simple, reasonable option, both for your stomach and your wallet: the one-dollar pizza. 

I found myself in that exact situation some nights ago, somewhere in lower Manhattan. After the bar closed, I said goodbye to my friends and prepared to take the subway home, when I realized there was no way I was going to survive the one-hour ride to my fridge without eating something greasy and fulfilling. I had to find the nearest dollar pizza.

Thankfully, if the area is worthy of a night out, they are never too far away. I walked a bit and found not one, but two pizza joints, in opposite sides of the street. I went for the simplest, ugliest, less appealing façade. It is basic math, really: the price of the slice is the same everywhere, so the more money spent on the decoration, the less spent on the ingredients.  

Not that there is a lot variability among these places (I say places or simply dollar-pizzas because I don’t want to offend anyone calling them pizzerias). All of them are no frills, stripped down locals consisting on four white walls and a counter in the middle. The counter separates the working area (oven, servers and Great Wall of pizza boxes) from a line of hungry customers. Pizza joints normally have no tables or chairs —an unnecessary luxury—, but they often have an elevated, narrow bar throughout the wall where clients can lean and eat their pizzas. During daylight, when most New Yorkers get their slices and rush back to the urban race, the bar is almost empty. In the night, it is a haven for people who, for different reasons, just can’t go to bed yet. 

When I entered the place, there was a couple of customers eating on the sides but no one waiting. I ordered two slices. Typically, the crystal counter contains one-dollar margherita pies, and other more expensive slices, with fancier ingredients on top, like pepperoni. Ordering these is a classic rookie mistake. The key is rotation: only the one-dollar pizza moves really fast. In other words, that other thing can be yesterday’s pepperoni pie.

I got my two slices on a paper plate, plus a drink: $3.50 in total, which barely gets you an espresso anywhere else in the city. I used to think the existence of the one-dollar bill was an inexplicable oddity of American culture that loaded your pockets with bills that was not enough to buy anything. But there is certain pleasure in exchanging a slice of greasy, delicious pizza for a wrinkled, equally greasy piece of paper with Washington’s face in it. The euro coin simply doesn’t give you that.

Next step is to go to the bar on the wall and customize your pizza with the omnipresent extras: oregano, red pepper flakes and roasted garlic. I was about to bite my first slice when I first heard his voice.

“Brother, can you lend me a dollar for a slice?”.

I turned around and saw a big, African American man wearing a worn-out overcoat. My first impulse in these situations is to say ‘no’ and look away, and feel awful about it. I don’t know why this time I reached for the wallet and gave him the dollar. I was hoping that was the end of it. However, when he got his slice, he came back. He reached for the garlic powder shaker and started pouring it on his pizza. He kept pouring it, more and more. He buried it in white. There was no sight of tomato sauce left. It looked like a flip flop covered with beach sand. 

“Wow, that’s a lot of garlic”, I said to him. Now, why the hell did I have to do that? I didn’t think, I just said it, and I instantly wished I hadn’t done it. Now he’ll start talking, and I won’t be able to eat this second slice peacefully. I don’t know what happened, normally I manage easily to be an asocial prick. Oh, is that a lot of garlic? You big-mouth genius.

“Yeah”, he said. “You should put a bit more, too. Garlic is good for your health. Antiseptic.”

I thought that dry white dust was to garlic what sexting was to sex: hardly related to the real thing and devoid of any therapeutic properties (yes, it was a 5am metaphor). But why bring that up?

“Do you know that there was a time when almost no pizza joint in the city offered garlic powder?”, he said.

I didn’t want to engage in that conversation at all. I just wanted to eat my pizza, was that too much to ask? But I had thrown the first stone, so now it felt rude not to respond.

“Oh, yeah?”.

“Well, it was all because of the Pizza King.”, was his answer.

Now, maybe some of the readers will shame me for using this cheap marketing trick, riding that tiger show wave for my story, pulling a King out of my sleeve. But the truth is, I was the one falling for it. Suddenly I saw everything in perspective: it was a Saturday night, I had pizza and a can of Fanta, and I was about to hear a story about a Pizza King. I was hooked.

“So, is there a Pizza King, you say?”. He must have sensed the change of inflection in my voice, and he seized his opportunity.

“Oh, you didn’t know?”, he said. “Well, that is a long story. But I wouldn’t want to keep you.”

“Nah, it’s fine, I’m not in a hurry”, I replied.

“In that case, we better stock up. Would you happen to have another spare dollar? Actually, make it two. Do you want another one too?”

He somehow had eaten most of his slice already. I handed him the money, he waved it at the vendors, who handed him the new portions.

“So, the Pizza King”, he started. “I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of him, although he is the reason you are eating that good, cheap piece of pie right now”. 

As he spoke, the man was repeating the garlic powder carpet bombing on his new slice. For the first time, I examined him in more detail.  I would say he was around his fifties, and he fitted with general homeless, or at least street-wandering appearance that is so familiar in New York. He was, as I said, a big guy, and I would have been intimidated if it wasn’t for his calmed voice. It was not a kind voice; it was just relaxed and confident. He spoke in mundane words, but there was of dignity in his language and cadence. An unfortunate summary would be that I remember thinking he didn’t sound like a person living on the street. 

“It all started during this last big crisis, what?, twelve years ago already? New York City is, as you know, the world’s pizza capital, but then, with the economy collapsing, many local people could no longer afford it. In Downtown Brooklyn there was this Italian man who owned a pizzeria. Longtime family business, big stone oven, waiters with notepads and work permits, that sort of stuff. He realized he was losing customers. He came up with this idea: selling pizza at one dollar per slice. Big marketing trick! He changed all his suppliers, started buying cheaper ingredients, lost all the staff he could. And of course, he set a shiny new billboard by his door: ‘pizza 1 dollar!’”. Of course, he started selling like hell, there were lines at his door every day and night. The only problem was, when he went home and crunches the numbers, he was losing money. Losing money the first month, losing money the second month, losing money the third… Heading straight into bankruptcy.”

“But then, how did he become the Pizza King?”, I asked impatiently.

“Him? Don’t make me laugh. Of course, he wasn’t the Pizza King. Those old Italian businessmen where classicists. The pizza was part of them, they cooked it like they had learnt from their nonnas, you know? They cared too much, they respected it too much . They ran their restaurants like a gentlemen’s sport, and this was fucking guerrilla warfare. They needed an outsider.

“That’s when Orlando comes in. The Italian businessman lived in Carroll Gardens, in Brooklyn, not far from his pizzeria. That’s how he knew him. Very little is known about Orlando before he became the Pizza King. He had escaped Cuba after the revolution when he was a teenager, lived in New York his whole life, first in Harlem, then in Brooklyn. He never completed school and he had no identifiable trade or profession. He was a handyman, a jack-of-all-trades, he did all sorts of things for all sorts of people. You need your sink pipe repaired? You call Orlando. The car brakes are not working? Orlando can fix it. A waiter got sick and it’s Friday night? Orlando knows his way around a Margarita. Need an extra hand in the funeral house? Orlando is not easily impressed.

“The funny thing is, he wasn’t particularly good at any of those things. In fact, you could always have found someone better than him for any of those jobs. But he was there. Always. He did the job, never perfect, but good enough. And he was cheap. Always cheaper than any other, anyway. He did everything just good enough to be considered ‘just done’. With the cheapest non-defective materials. The strictly necessary amount of work. And just the minimally acceptable amount of charm. He worked for everybody. Everybody would complain. Everybody would call again next time. He was the perfect man to build a pizza empire.

“The Italian businessman called Orlando in a couple of times to help change a window in his pizza joint. One of those times, Orlando may have gotten curious —something he rarely bothered doing— and asked about how the new business was doing. The owner would tell him how he just couldn’t make the thing profitable. Next thing you know, Orlando was spending five nights a week there, learning all the ins and outs of the pizza business. The boss started taking Orlando’s advices and changed things. New, cheaper, faster oven, that can bake up to five hundred pies a day. New cheese, just as cheese-like as you need, not an atom more. Tomato sauce just as watery as you can stand. No chairs, no tables, no restroom. And the waiters had to work the most hours for the lowest salary they would take without start spitting on the food. Not on all the food at least.

“Thanks to Orlando’s advice, the joint started making a lot of money. Soon they were swimming in wrinkled dollar bills. Orlando wanted to extend the operation, open another joint in a different part of the city. But the Italian boss was old and about to retire. He was a traditional man, a romantic of pizza, he felt that he had betrayed his entire cultural legacy. But by that time, Orlando was a constant presence in the joint, he knew every inch of the business and every minute of the life of his workers. The owner gave up. He practically handed over the business to Orlando in exchange for periodic payments, which Orlando always paid late, but not too late. 

“With the profits Orlando opened a second joint. Then a third. Then, he took over a couple of failing joints at liquidation prices. Soon, he was at the top of twenty-four dollar-pizza joints all across New York, almost half of all the joints in the city. His system was just more profitable than everybody else’s, and nobody could copy it. And they tried. Oh, they tried. They would send people there to spy on his places, measuring output, timings, square foot. They bribed or hired his waiters to explain the method. But they couldn’t. Orlando would never explain it in full to anybody. Everybody just received the essential bit of information they needed to do their job. And they didn’t have his view of the whole picture, how the pieces came together. It took all those years of clogged toilets, broken cars and cleaned dead bodies to make the man who became the Pizza King.  

“But like every king, Orlando had enemies. His success made people jealous. Many people despised what he was doing. I’m not talking about people in the fancy Italian restaurants, or these pretentious trattorias down in Soho. They hadn’t even heard of the King, even if many of them ate his pizzas any clubbing night. No, it is the small pizzeros I am talking about. Especially the ones that had tried to copy the ‘one-dollar pizza’ idea. They hated him, because no matter how good they did it, they could never make the money he made. This is how the Roasted Garlic War began.”

The Roasted Garlic War? I thought this guy was bluffing, but we’ve seen weirder things and dumber wars.

“The other businessmen couldn’t beat him, so they sabotaged him. A few of his enemies got together and formed an informal alliance known as the Hell’s Kitchen —because they met in that area, in an ice cream shop—.  They tried bribing his purveyors, breaking his supplies, stealing his employees, but he’d always manage to figure something out, working a way around every problem they created him. Until they came up with the stupidest, most effective idea: empty the garlic powder shakers. One by one, all of them, from each one of Orlando’s shops. Families, friends and acquaintances of all of New York’s small pizzeros would eat in Orlando’s places several times a week and drain as much of that stuff on their plates as they could fit. If they could, they’d steal them and throw them away.

“That totally disconcerted Orlando. He had to start buying more and more garlic powder, which broke his tightly adjusted balance sheets. Garlic powder made customers thirsty, so beverage revenue went down too. Orlando ordered his waiters to be tough on people who abuse the free spice shakers. In some of the joints he tried to even dispose of them altogether. So, people just stopped going to his joints. Not that they knew who he was, or even that those places where owned by the same guy, but when they faced two different dollar pizza joints in opposite sides of the street, they remembered which one didn’t have garlic powder last time. 

“He was desperate. He had a perfect system, but one tiny piece out of place had taken all to the ground. He started losing some of the joints, sold others off, cancelled leases. Until he lost the last one, the original one in south Brooklyn. He sold it to a nephew of the old Italian boss, who wanted to get in the family business. Other pizza business hired his old staff, and put together many of the pieces of his method. With the King out of the game, they could finally compete.

“But it was never quite the same after that. The work is not nearly as precise. So many things get wasted, and I tell you, they are not making half the profit as back then. That’s why the dollar pizza model is in decline. Its doomed. In a few years, it will be gone. And, before you ask me “what happened to the Pizza King?”, well, Orlando went back to his old life. There was no transition. They say that, after handing out the last pizza joint, the next day he was back changing a window for the cheapest price in all Carroll Gardens. Remorse was a waste of time and energy. That was the Pizza King: a practical man.”

When the man finished his story, the remains of my slice of pizza were dead cold in the plate. The King’s story had made me think about how anonymous characters like that shape our daily New York experiences, without us knowing. It also had made me hungry. I told the man that I was going to get another slice of pizza. 

“Did you like the story?”, he asked me. “Do you think it earnt me another slice?”.

I ordered two more pieces.

“Anyway”, I said, “how do you know all this?”.

“I worked the oven for two years under the Pizza King. Then in the competition too. I am a veteran of the Roasted Garlic War”, he said. “And believe me, if you had seen what I’ve seen, you would never eat in one of these places again.”

“But”, I replied, “you are eating here. Why do you keep eating here then?”

“Oh, you know, it’s good enough. And it’s just one dollar, brother!”

#EastVillage #food #pizza