Frank and Angela Bernardo decided that as the city’s ambulance workers and ER nurses put their lives on the line to treat Covid-19 pandemic patients, they would help keep them fueled in the classic New Haven style.
At around noon Thursday, the emergency room parking lot at Yale-New Haven Hospital (YNHH)’s St. Raphael campus was filled with partially-red trucks. Most had stretchers being loaded in and out, occasionally with a patient but most of the time empty. Paramedics gathered by the rear of their ambulances and waited, or sprayed down their equipment.
One of the red trucks featured even more of a flurry of activity. But pizzas, not stretchers, were flowing in and out. The whole parking lot smelled like ever-so slightly charred crust and sizzling tomato sauce and mozzarella.
Bernardo, the chef and businessman behind the New Haven Pizza Truck, ended up making and donating 186 cheese pizzas on Thursday to serve around 600 medical staff at the St. Raphael campus as well as the emergency room at YNHH’s York Street campus.
“I was sitting at home watching TV and I decided I wanted to help out these folks,” Bernardo (pictured above) said as he turned a pizza in the oven to make sure it cooked evenly.
Normally, the end of March would mark the beginning of Bernardo and his trucks’ busy season. Come late spring and summer, he would have his days packed with back-to-back events, sometimes doing eight parties in one day between his four trucks.
This year, most of the events he had planned for the spring have now canceled, and he expects the rest to follow.
But event cancelations were not enough to keep Bernardo’s ovens cold.
Bernardo Thursday manned the wood-fired oven, which sits on the bed of his truck. He slid the pies off of a wooden peel covered in semolina flour onto the white-hot oven floor.
Once the pizza had bubbled and partially cooked, he would spin it around so the less well-done side near the oven door could sizzle to a deep, even brown.
Bernardo’s daughter Angela Bernardo (pictured above) stood next to her father, prepping the pizzas.
She sprinkled semolina flour on the wooden peel before her so the pizza would slide off when it was time to cook it. She then pulled a partially stretched lump of dough from a stack of baking sheets and stretched it to about a foot and a half diameter and set it on the peel.
Using a steel ladle, she spread a bright red tomato sauce out to the edges of the pie, and then sprinkled a field of shredded mozzarella evenly on top.
Bernardo was forthcoming about the cheese: He uses Grande Mozzarella. “It’s the best. It’s the best cheese you can buy.”
The tomato sauce? “They’re Italian tomatoes,” said Angela, hiding the rest of the recipe behind an I‑will-take-that-information-to-the-grave smile.
“Period,” her father cut in. “If we tell you, we’re going to have to … You know what I mean.”
While the father-daughter duo churned out pies with an efficiency that could be a model for America’s Covid-19-test producers, their friend Lisa Iannone prepared boxes and coordinated their delivery to the right departments.
She had called ahead to each department to ask for head counts. One by one, nurses dropped by to pick up a stack of pizzas and bring them inside where the rest of their departments would devour them.
The country may be in a pandemic, but you wouldn’t have known it standing outside the emergency room of St. Raphael’s on Thursday. No one appeared rushed. As nurses wandered over to the tables stacked with warm pizzas, their faces lit up.
Nurse Andrea D’Amato came to pick up the pizzas for the emergency department. She waited for a few minutes in the bright sun as the last few boxes topped off her stack.
“We’re doing OK,” she said of her colleagues. “We know it’s the calm before the storm, but we’re OK.” She said the department has what it needs in terms of PPE for now.
D’Amato stacked her department’s pizzas onto a blue cart. She passed between two parked ambulances before she wheeled it through a door with a bright-red “ambulance” sign above it.
For the top of each stack of pies, Angela shaped one pizza into a heart.
As nurses arrived to pick up their stacks, Iannone lifted the lid to show them the love her friends had baked into the nurses’ lunch.
Some orders were larger than others. Jennifer Menillo and Marissa Morehouse had to stack boxes onto all three levels of their beige cart before wheeling it through the emergency room’s main doors. They took 20 pizzas to feed 80 staff across the medicine services departments.
As time went on, the Bernardos had to move faster and faster. At one point, they had to stop to wait until the fire heated up enough to continue cooking, forcing greater speed once the oven was ready again.
Bernardo lives in North Haven and operates his trucks from there; he also owns New Haven Pizza Place in Milford. Bernardo said he usually spends two days a week at his restaurant, while Angela spends most of her time there.
At one point Thursday, they were running low on supplies. Iannone’s fiancé, Eddy Rivera, swooped in in a pickup truck from Milford for a reconnaissance mission. He dropped off two more large baking sheets with evenly spaced mounds of dough beneath blankets of plastic wrap.
Rivera was not the only visitor. Tony Terzi of Fox61 (pictured above with Iannone) also dropped in for about 20 minutes. He used a folded-up tripod to reach his microphone across the six feet he kept from his interviewees.
As the Bernardos finished their last pizzas and began to pack up the truck, ambulances filled the lot. Most did not unload patients, but rather wheeled in or out empty stretchers. Some drivers, in yellow protective layers and blue N95 respirator masks, sprayed down their equipment.
A Bethany Fire Department ambulance parked on the street, and two firefighters wheeled a mask-clad patient on a stretcher through the gate to the ambulance dock, and into the building.
Once the patient had been brought into the hospital, Frank and Angela Bernardo disassembled their wooden tables and lifted them onto the sides of the truck where they form walls during transport. They fired up the engine and pulled out of the lot, as a few ambulances had just done before them, to drive south on Orchard Street to the YNHH York Street emergency room, where they would bake more tomato, cheese, and wheat hearts for New Haven’s nurses.
This, my friends, is the Real New Haven.