Pizza Fest: A Celebration of Pittsburgh Pizza
I was invited to a mozzarella making event to promote the upcoming Pizza Fest. There were some interesting discussions around how pizza shops are surviving in a post-covid world.
I was invited to an event to promote Pizza Fest this week.
I don’t consider myself an influencer, so I’m intrigued when I find myself in the midst of an influencer event. A group of Instagram and TikTok superstars creating exciting, innovative content highlighting restaurants. Like the ancient Faiths, they weave the future of restaurants with their content. Influencers changed the dining ecosystem.
Courting influencers is a necessary aspect to promoting a business these days. Pizza shops celebrate, and are at the mercy of, these influencers. They show up to events equipped with iPhones and portable lights to capture footage that will get distributed to thousands of food enthusiasts. One pizza shop owner said he dreaded seeing the red Yelp screen load up on someone’s phone.
It’s a give and take. A pizza shop or restaurant provides acces and the influencers go back to their community to spread the word. Influencers buzz from shop-to-shop like bees pollinating flowers, enriching the ecosystem. An article or viral post can create a gold rush for a pizza shop.
This event was hosted by Caliente in the Aspinwall location. Steve Selznick of Grande Cheese Company walked us through the process of making mozzarella cheese from curds. He was incredibly charming and had a self-deprecating sense of humor that would be at home in a Conan O’Brien monologue.
Steve is critical to the independent pizzeria pipeline. Well, moreso they are incredibly reliant on independent pizzerias. “Independent pizzerias are everything to us,” Steve remarked as he squished cheese curds through rows of piano wire. I’ve only heard of piano wire being used by assassins so I was mesmerized by the domestic implementation of such a deadly piece of equipment.
Grande is not the cheapest, but if you’re not making the cheese yourself or sourcing it from a local producer it’s a solid cheese option. If you see Grande at a pizzeria you know they care and are thinking about the way cheese behaves on the pizza and mixes with the sauce. If nothing else it was better than what the chains are serving, which Steve mentioned a few times.
Sensing he had the audience’s attention, Steve’s rhetoric veered into the realities pizza shops face in the modern era. He said, “Labor is a problem. Consistency is how we rate restaurants, independent restaurants and pizzerias are so vulnerable, we don’t give the same grace as the chains. I’ve seen really strong people down to tears because they put their whole life into something and they get bad reviews.”
I’m not sure if his intent was to chide the room of influencers, the very same people that might vent about a bad experience to their thousands of followers or write a Yelp review. Or, rather, he was hoping to inspire them to take his gospel and spread it to their followers. But it was clear that the factors that dictate survival of an independent pizzeria changed since 2019.
In this modern world your fifteen minutes of fame is reduced to ten second clips. These clips are recycled and run through various algorithms, getting served to myriad of audiences. Users consume hours of content a day in tiny snippets. How can a pizza shop break through the noise and stand out? They have to find ways to reach an audience outside of buying out the Penny Saver. Or giving a high school kid $50 to walk through a neighborhood on a hot summer day stuffing flyers into doorframes.
To help highlight the evolving world of Pittsburgh pizza, Dee Weinberg created Pizza Fest.
Pizza Fest exists to showcase a handful of independent pizzerias within the city. Dee Weinberg, the founder of Good Taste! who puts on Pizza Fest, provided opening remarks. She noticed that Pittsburgh kept getting high rankings for pizza across the country, but no one was doing anything about it. There was a Pizza Fest back in 2015, not to mention a website dedicated to the Pittsburgh Pizza Scene that’s been in operation since 2012, but a huge event celebrating the tapestry of Pittsburgh Pizza? Sporadic at best.
Pizza Fest aims to solve that problem. Coming off of last year’s successful event, Dee hopes to replicate the success in a new venue, Trace Brewing, with a few different pizza shops. You can read my interview with Dee we conducted prior to last year’s Pizza Fest here.
Pizza Fest highlights six different pizza shops, all with very different status in the Pittsburgh region.
Mercurio’s and Caliente are community favorites, and compete at the International Pizza Challenge.
There’s also slightly newer shops with Large Plain and the Alta-Via Pizzeria.
Then you have Mediterra, which has some of the best slices I’ve had anywhere. A supremely delicious bakery that builds a tremendously flavorful pizza atop their perfected dough.
Rounding out the six shops is Asti’s Italian Steak House, a restaurant located at Grand View Golf Club. Exotic and unusual, curious what their pizza taste like.
For $30 you can try a slice from each of these shops and hang out at Trace Brewing. A decent deal if you’re looking for a safe environment test out different pizzas. We tend to fall into familiar patterns when it comes to food. I know I venture to the same pizza shops week after week. Pizza Fest might expose you to your new favorite slice, or help you understand the city’s pizza environment a little better.
More importantly, you can spend time marinating in the world of pizza. Instead of devouring slices through social media, you can meet the owners, digest the yeast and understand what makes each of these shops unique.
Find more info on Pizza Fest here.
What fun it was to go to an influencer event. Will I be invited back? Who can say! I hope you found my perspective intriguing. I struggle with how useful social media content is, but understand its power. There is an incredible tsunami of content I don’t know how anyone finds quality. But hey, I’m a guy that writes a weekly newsletter about pizza. What do I know!
If you want to see this event from another angle check out:
Pizza ya later!
-Dan Tallarico, Pizza Journalist
Great article. Pizza makers need influencers to humanize their craft and influencers need access to them to create unique content. Symbiotic relationship.