Pittsburgh Loses Two Pizza Shops and a Huge Ketchup Update
Light news week and also I am deadly tired
Hi there!
March - the month of pizza. It’s my birthday month which consists of extreme pizza consumption. I don’t ask for gifts, but since I’ve made pizza such a close part of my identity I usually receive a couple pizza items. Like the three wisemen who once traveled across the globe to deliver incense to Jesus, people gather in my manger to give me things like framed photos of pizza, pizza socks, pizza books, pizza candles.
If there exists a product, there exists a pizza version of that product - Pizza Prophecy
Outside of my birthday, another huge pizza party happens in March. That’s right: The International Pizza Expo. I’m working on a piece leading up to the event, but rest assured that editor-at-large, Tom Tallarico, will be on the scene reporting from the show floor. You can read his past reports from Pizza Expo here. Maybe you can figure out why he insists on capitalizing Pizza. Is it reverence? Or something more mysterious?
Enjoy some pizza expo highlights below before we get into some local pizza news.
Vento’s Pizza & Piazza Talarico Call it Quits
A tale of two different pizza shops coming to an end of their saga. First, we have East Liberty anchor, Vento’s, which survived off of Home Depot visitors and Franco’s Italian Army. There was an incredible resurgence in interest around Vento’s when Franco Harris passed last year, but it wasn’t enough to keep them going. I unfortunately never ate at Vento’s as a friend of mine (who I’ll refer to as John C to preserve some anonymity so that the Italian Army does not come after him) John C, ate here and told me how utterly bad it was. I was tainted early.
Yet this shop existed for sixty-seven years in East Liberty, an area of the city that was utterly destroyed, gentrified and rebuilt over that time. Incredible. They officially close on march 4th, so if you’re reading this on the day it’s published you have about 36 hours to grab a final Vento’s slice.
Piazza Talarico Says Goodbye
On the other end of Penn Ave, the folks at Piazza Talarico have announced they are shutting down their shop at the end of March. You can watch their announcement video here.
I got a lot of questions about Piazza Talarico because we share similar surnames. Tallarico vs Talarico. Can you spot the difference? Maybe if we traced our ancestry back to the ancient soil of Italy we could have a small village in common. But the fact that we are both pizza enthusiasts is enough research I have to do to show we are related on some level.
Piazza Talarico opened around October of 2017. I was unemployed and me and the previously mentioned John C ventured down Penn Ave to check out this cozy neighborhood Italian join. How surreal to have a restaurant a block away.
The operation was built on a foundation of wine making, having built up a local following at markets and such with Papa Joe’s Wine. The food was a new addition and the operation was run by two plucky, enthusiastic, sisters, Katie and Beth. Pitt paraphernalia adorned the walls, yet no one I knew ever stepped foot in there. Was it too neighborhood-y? Not for our demographic?
A small Italian restaurant tucked away near the border of Bloomfield sounds like a killer idea on paper, but it never seemed to catch on, drowned out by the volume of culinary activity growing on Butler St.
My pizza at Piazza Talarico was adequate. Very simple, basic. It reminded me of a few spots I grabbed a pizza in Italy. Every shop in that country is equipped with a pizza oven because, quite simply, everyone makes pizza. The same way Americans know how to order items from Amazon, it’s something everyone knows how to do. This pizza was on that level. Pizza made from the threads of common knowledge passed down for generations. Simple and basic because it has to be remembered.
Piazza Tallarico closes at the end of March so you have a few weeks to try it out before it’s gone forever. If I recall, John and I left Piazza Talarico wondering how long they would survive, and I gotta say I’m impressed they made it over five years.
Spak’s Ketchup Comes Under Question
This week there was a post on r/Pittsburgh calling Spak out for using non-Heinz ketchup. The post implored Spak to “stepup your ketchup game.” This is incredulous for a number of reasons, but mostly because Spak does not take shortcuts. They source high quality products and maintain a level of excellence unseen in the average pizza parlor.
In an era where store shelves have trouble stocking fundamental ingredients like tomato sauce or corn starch, you’d have to chalk this up to supply chain issues.
Two days after the Reddit post, Spak Brothers posted a treasure chest of ketchup that arrived in their shop.
Thanks for reading! I hope you have found something to enjoy in this amazing pizza newsletter.
Thanks and pizza ya later!
-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist
Seeing as its lent, I'm curioys about your thoughts on seafood pizza. What works and what doesnt?