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Bigger slice
Storied pizzeria heads to Yonkers
By JOHN GOLDEN
August 4, 2008
Pizza connoisseurs of New
York, take note: a popularly acclaimed family enterprise in Connecticut
will venture across the border into Yonkers next spring to open the
first of several pizzerias in Westchester County.
The third-generation owners will bring their grandfather’s original
recipe for his signature dish, white clam pizza, with them.
A New Haven institution since 1925, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana is
scheduled to open May 1 at 1955 Central Park Ave. in Yonkers on the site
of the recently demolished Ricky’s Clam House. The approximately $2.7
million project is a joint venture of Frank Pepe’s Development Co.
L.L.C. in New Haven and Trifont Realty Inc. in Yonkers. A principal in
that family-owned commercial and residential real estate company,
75-year-old Vilmo Fonte, owned and operated Ricky’s Clam House for 40
years. Trifont will have a 3,500-square-foot office on the second floor
of the new building.
The 4,000-square-foot, brick-facade restaurant will employ about 50
full-time and part-time workers and seat about 120 customers.
“This will be our first venture outside our home base of Connecticut,”
said Kenneth Berry, chief operating officer of Frank Pepe’s Development
Company. He said the company hopes to build three or four more
restaurants in Westchester over the next four to five years. William
Fonte, of Trifont Realty, said the business partners are looking at
sites in New Rochelle, Rye, North White Plains and Port Chester.
“They will be a clone of our New Haven operation,” Berry said, with the
same menu, ingredients and recipes passed down by founder Frank Pepe to
his daughters and subsequently to his seven grandchildren actively
involved in the business today.
“The only two differences between what we do now and what Frank Pepe did
in 1925 is that we have air conditioning and refrigeration,” Berry said.
The pizzeria’s sausage still is supplied by the original sausage-maker,
another family business in its third generation in New Haven.
“Our menu is very simple,” Berry said. “It’s pizza, beer, soda and
wine.” In Yonkers, the testimonial-garnering Pepe thin-crust pizzas will
be baked in a 14- by 14-foot, 30,000-pound oven custom-built on the
premises that replicates the oven installed by Pepe in New Haven in
1938.
The Pepe family in 2006 took that same tradition-adhering recipe for
profitable business to Fairfield in Connecticut. Last year, a third
Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana opened in Manchester, Conn. Both have
done “exceptionally well,” Berry said, and the company’s development arm
is considering one or two other locations in its home state.
Berry said New Yorkers, many from White Plains and Port Chester, make up
about 10 percent of business at the Fairfield pizzeria. “Over the years,
the New Haven location has gotten a lot of exposure with New Yorkers
tracking up to Cape Cod,” he said.
As for the new venture into New York, “I think anyone in the sit-down
restaurant business knows the value of a site on Central Avenue in
Yonkers,” Berry said. “It meets our demographic requirements, our
traffic requirements. It’s just a lot of people, and I think they’ll
love our pizza.”
“There is no pizza like Pepe’s around here,” said Fonte, who has often
made the culinary pilgrimage to New Haven’s Wooster Street. “That thin
crust, all natural ingredients, it’s out of this world.”
Frank Pepe came out of the Old World baking trade of his native Italy
and settled in Connecticut, applying his skills at a bread oven of
ancient technology to the New World art of pizza making. Pepe also
proved himself an astute businessman who designed his restaurant
operation with great efficiency. That same layout will be duplicated in
Yonkers.
“They’ve been doing it over 80 years,” Fonte said. “It’s very successful
and from a logistical standpoint it’s very efficient. Frank Pepe was
ahead of his time. Logistically he was a genius.”
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