BK remembers Patsy Grimaldi, 93, of pizzeria fame

From Brooklyneagle.com

Patsy Grimaldi, whose name came to define pizza, and whose reinvented storefront underneath the Brooklyn Bridge in itself became iconic, died on Feb. 13, at age 93, according to obituaries published first in Eater New York and then The New York Times.

The son of Italian immigrants, Patsy Grimaldi was born in The Bronx in 1931. As a teen, to help support his family after the death of his father, young Patsy worked at his uncle Pasquale Lancieri’s East Harlem pizzeria, known as Patsy’s starting as a busboy then learning the trade – and the secret of making artisanal, coal oven pizza. And in the process, he met entertainment icons, among them Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, baseball great Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra, with whom he established a decades long friendship even to the point of the singer’s retaining the exclusive right to get his pizzas delivered to him.

Some years after Mr. Grimaldi moved on from his uncle’s pizzeria, he found a building on Old Fulton Street that had been an abandoned hardware store. Availing himself of the “for rent” sign and a pay phone strategically placed nearby, he claimed the spot and was soon making coal oven pizza that began attracting crowd lines so long that they stretched down Old Fulton Street to the waterfront. And his pizzas – always sold whole, never by the slice – met critical acclaim as well. According to a legend from Carol Grimaldi, Patsy’s wife, the lawyers for mobster John Gotti were regular customers during his 1992 trial in federal court in Brooklyn.

However popular his coal oven pizzas were, Grimaldi ran into trouble in 1990 when he named his own restaurant Patsy’s. A real estate company named I.O.B that had bought the East Harlem pizzeria from Lancieri (but retaining the name Patsy’s and even opening four Manhattan restaurants with the same brand), sued him over the name, notwithstanding Grimaldi’s own strong family connection to the original store. Carol Grimaldi told The New York Times in a 1996 article that the company I.O.B. Realty had “no ethics” and was capitalizing on the name Patsy’s. “If we weren’t doing this well, they wouldn’t have bought the name,” she said.

Patsy and Carol Grimaldi, not wanting to be connected with I.O.B’s enterprise, renamed their pizzeria to Pasty Grimaldi’s, and then further shortened it to Grimaldi’s. Eventually, Patsy Grimaldi sold Grimaldi’s to Frank Ciolli when he thought he wanted to retire.

However, Patsy and Carol (who predeceased him in 2014) then partnered with an early fan, investment banker Matthew Grogan, to open Juliana’s. Their new pizzeria, named for Patsy Grimaldi’s mother, now sits at 19 Front St., next door to the one Ciolli had purchased. Both restaurants still draw long lines.