The “New Haven Green” pie.
Thomas MacMillan Photos
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In less than three years, Joel Mehr and Tom Marr have built two successful restaurants here and are poised to open a third. Last year, President Obama mentioned their business in a speech. Last month, Vice-President Biden stopped by. The secret to their success? Serving up New Haven’s famous “apizza” with “Staven” and “Cutler’s” specials.
That’s “ah-BEETS,” the special variety of thin-crust Neapolitan pie served in New Haven.
Mehr (at left in photo) discovered apizza several years ago through his wife, Alicia Wilkinson, whose family lives in the New Haven area. He imported it to his hometown of Washington and opened Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza with his partner, Marr (at right).
Like Chicago, the nation’s capital has since embraced New Haven’s famous pies. Business has been so good that Mehr and Marr are quickly expanding their operation. Already the president and vice-president have highlighted the restaurant as a successful small business.
Last Friday afternoon Mehr and Marr took some time out of their 80-hour work week to talk about the success of their apizza business. They met with the Independent at their second location, which they opened three months ago on Wisconsin Avenue in northwest D.C.
Links to New Haven are everywhere in the restaurant. Clocks on the wall tell the current time in New Haven (the same as D.C. time, conveniently) and in Naples. The menu offers pies with familiar names. The “Coliseum” has olives, onions, and eggplant. The “Merritt Parkway” offers prosciutto, olives, and basil. You can also choose from the “State Street,” the “Edge of the Woods,” the “Nighthawk,” the “Cutler’s,” or the “Staven.”
All those references come by way of Mehr’s New Haven in-laws, who introduced him to the area and to the pizza. Although he’d never been a pizza chef, Mehr decided New Haven apizza was a product that he could build a restaurant around.
At the time, Mehr and Marr were working as chefs at the National Gallery in D.C. They got to know each other in the kitchen and began tossing around ideas they had for starting their own businesses. Mehr saw that D.C. was ripe for New Haven pizza. The capital had plenty of “conveyor belt” pizza (Domino’s, Pizza Hut, etc.), but exhibited a lack of family-friendly pizzerias dedicated to making a high-quality pie, he said.
Mehr spent a few days in training with Rick Nuzzo, a pizza chef at Grand Apizza in Cheshire, learning the art of apizza. When Mehr started moving with his pizza plan, Marr jumped on board and they both quit their jobs at the National Gallery. Both men put up their homes as collateral and managed to secure a loan after going to “20 banks.” The original Pete’s opened in April 2008 in the Columbia Heights section of D.C. They named the restaurant after Mehr’s father-in-law and his 11-year-old son.
Mehr and Marr now regularly put in upwards of 80 hours a week building their business. They share a foodie perfectionist streak and a dedication to hard work
From the beginning, the pair has been committed to building a brand around “apizza” and the city of New Haven. That means educating customers on how to pronounce the name of the product. “It’s not just pizza, it’s ‘ah-BEETS’,” reads a sign at the door to the restaurant. The pronunciation guide is also emblazoned on the back of all employee T‑shirts.
“We want people to know we’re doing something different,” Mehr said.
Making New Haven-style apizza is about more than just pronunciation. It means making a crust with only four ingredients: flour, water, salt, and yeast, Mehr said. That simplicity distinguishes New Haven’s crust from that of New York pizza, for example, where gluten and olive oil and even honey create a crust that you can toss in the air. New Haven pies have to be pushed out flat by hand. At Pete’s, the pies are cooked in stone-bottomed, gas-fired ovens.
Pizza chef Hermin Turcios
New Haven apizza also means picking only the choicest ingredients, Mehr said. The restaurant serves local vegetable toppings when possible. The cheese is Grande mozzarella from Wisconsin. “We grind our meat ourselves,” Mehr said. “We shop at farmers markets.”
Mehr won’t serve Coke products, he said. The restaurant offers a line of all-natural soda’s from New Jersey. He can’t get Foxon Park to deliver so far from southern Connecticut. But every time someone from the restaurant passes through Connecticut, he or she picks up cases of Foxon Park birch beer, so it can be sold by the bottle at Pete’s.
Pete’s also makes its own gelato.
To illustrate the restaurant’s pickiness when it comes to ingredients, Marr grabbed up a pepper shaker from a table. It’s not advertised anywhere, but the pepper shakers are filled with fresh ground pepper, he said.
“It’s not a big deal,” Mehr said. It just means the pepper “doesn’t taste like sawdust.”
The salt shakers contain sea salt. The parmesan shakers? Freshly ground parmesan.
That extra attention to details cost a little more for the restaurant, and Pete’s therefore aims for a customer who’s willing to pay a little more for quality ingredients. The business was started with the assumption that D.C. has a “market for people who are conscious about what they eat,” Mehr said.
That assumption has been validated by success of the restaurants, which have drawn in DC VIPs. Not long ago, someone left a wallet behind at the original Pete’s location. It turned out it belonged to an adviser to the president. A speechwriter for the vice-president eats at Pete’s regularly with his family, Mehr said.
City First Bank of D.C., the community-development lender that put up the money to start Pete’s (and a prototype for the new community development bank about to launch in New Haven), led members of the Treasury Department on a tour last year of some of its small businesses, including Pete’s. “That put us on the radar,” Mehr said. Three months later, when President Obama announced a new program of credit initiatives for small businesses, he mentioned that it would help businesses like “Pete’s Apizza.”
Mehr said he was pleased his restaurant was mentioned, even if the president did mispronounce it and use the wrong name. The restaurant is officially called “Pete’s New Haven Style Apizza,” not “Pete’s Apizza.” That was going to be the name until Little Caesar’s objected that it was too close to its trademarked “Pizza Pizza” slogan.
Then in August Vice-President Biden chose Pete’s to hold a “Middle Class Task Force ” roundtable discussion of cutting taxes for small businesses.
Biden left with two pies — a pepperoni and a mozzarella — to take back to the White House.
On Friday, after Mehr and Marr left to attend to their busy schedules, the Independent dug in to a “New Haven Green”: artichoke hearts, sauteed spinach, oven-dried tomatoes, and kalamata olives (pictured at the top of the story). It tasted just like New Haven’s own. The crust was foldable without being floppy. The big chunks of artichoke heart were copious and delicious. And the deep purple olives added a sharp and salty bite.
That pizza looks superb!