Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurant whose pizzeria drowned in the shadow of the Brooklyn bridge has won new fans for the older Pizza style of New York with carefully made pies who helped to launch a national movement towards the artist. February 13 at Queens. He was 93 years old.
Frederick Grimaldi’s nephew has confirmed death at Niurn-Festival Hospital.
Mr. Grimaldi began selling pies in 1990 under the name of Patsy’s. At that time, legal skirmishes periodically disturb the city’s landscape and was not long before threatening letters from another Patsy’s lawyers led him to rename the Patsy Grimaldi’s place, then simply Grimaldi’s. Many years later, he reopened his restaurant with a tribute name to his mother. Today this sign reads Juliana’s pizza.
Under any name, Mr. Grimaldi’s pizzeria attracted large Diners lines out, on Old Fulton Street, who were hungry for house peppers, white pools fresh mozzarella and tender, sensitive crusts baked in a few minutes of a hot carbon Anthracite.
Like the trained cooks, Mr. Grimaldi fell into the techniques he had learned in his first teenage teenage working on Pizzeria, Patsy in East Harlem, who belonged to his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr Lancieri was one of Naples’s young migrant brothers, including the founders of Totonno Napolitana’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn and John’s Bleecker Street to Greenwich Village, which introduced the New Yorkers to Pizza in the early 20th century.
Mr. Grimaldi returned to these roots when, after a long career as a waiter, he opened his own place with a newly formed carbon oven. At the same time, the delicate attention he brought to his boat-taking the fennel sausage to a pork shop in Queens every morning, for example, while others bought their own from large distributors-pusted Pizzaioli legions who would focus on Follow him.
“It was the first pizza craftsman” in the city, Anthony Mangieri, owner of Una Pizza Napoletana in Lower Manhattan, in an interview.
“It was really the first part that opened that he had this old school connection, but he thought a little further, a little more food-centered,” he said.
Patsy Frederick Grimaldi was born on August 3, 1931, in Bronx to Fentriko and Maria Juliana (Lancieri) Grimaldi, immigrants from southern Italy. His father, a music teacher and barber, died when Patsy was 12. To support his mother and five brothers, Patsy worked on his uncle’s pizzeria, first as busboy, then as an apprentice in the carbon oven and finally as a waiter in The dining room. In addition to a brief license in the early 1950s to serve in the army, it remained until 1974.
Patsy’s pizzeria lasted slowly at that time, and Mr. Grimaldi became experienced in the care of entertainers, mafia, chefs and other creatures of the night, such as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Rodney Dangerfield, Joe Dimaggio and Frank Sinatra.
The bond he formed with Mr Sinatra lasted for decades. Mr. Grimaldi made personal traditions from two large sausage pies – when Mr Sinatra stayed in his suite at the Waldorf Astoria. In 1953, they ran to each other in Hawaii, where Mr Sinatra was filmed “from here to eternity”.
“What are you doing here?” The singer asked the waiter. Mr. Grimaldi had been sent by the army to play bugle in an army band.
Mr. Grimaldi met with his wife, Carol, at a New York nightclub and took her to Pizzeria in Patsy on their first date. They got married in 1971.
Shortly afterwards, Mr Grimaldi let Patsy’s wait for tables in a series of restaurants, including Copacabana and Jazz Club Jimmy Ryan’s. He was 57 years old and worked in a Brooklyn cafe when he noticed an abandoned hardware store on the Old Fulton Street with a sign “for rent” in the window and a paid phone screwed on a wall nearby. He took the phone and called the number. Shortly thereafter, he showed the thin, elementary pleasures of carbon burning pizza to people who had never tried it.
Matthew Grogan, an investment banker, ate in Patsy just a few weeks after opening. Until that time, he thought he knew what good pizza was.
“I said,” I have lived a scam all these years. This is the biggest food I have ever had, “he recalled in an interview. (Later he founded Juliana with Grimaldis.)
Others seemed to agree, including critics, the writers and customers of the restaurant driver. Some of them were known, such as Warren Beatty, who brought Annette Bening, his wife. (“So, are you in the movies?” Mrs. Grimaldi asked her.) Others were unclear until Mr. Grimaldi decided that they looked like a famous one. “Mel Gibson is here tonight!” He would shout. Or: “Look, it’s Marisa Tomei!” It was more discreet when the real Marisa Tomei entered.
According to an unpublished story written by Mrs Grimaldi, when the leader of the fighter John Gotti was in trial in 1992 at the Federal Court in downtown Brooklyn, his lawyers became frequent customers.
“We will wrap each slice on foil and put it in their affairs so that John is able to have our pizza for lunch,” he wrote.
In 1998, Grimaldis decided to sell the pizzeria to Frank Ciolli and try their hand in retirement. It didn’t last. Nor is their relationship with Mr Ciolli, who opened a series of Gimaldi’s country who believed they failed to support the standards they had set in Brooklyn. When they learned that their old restaurant was expelled, they broke the lease.
Mr Ciolli, who moved the Grimaldi to the building by the door, sued to stop them again. Mr and Mrs Grimaldi, claimed in an affidavit, were trying to “steal the business herself that was echoed earlier to me”.
A truce was eventually achieved. These days the lines outside Juliana’s are often not distinguished by the lines outside the Grimaldi’s.
Mr. Grimaldi, who lived in Queens, survives by his sister Esther Massa. A daughter, Victoria Strickland. And a grandson. His wife died in 2014. A son, pat, died in 2018.
A sunbed in Juliana holds a small sacred Sinatra. Jukebox in his precursor, Patsy’s (also known as Patsy Grimaldi’s, also known as Grimaldi’s), was stored with Sinatra Records, scattered with some by Dean Martin. Mr Grimaldi maintained a strict non -surrender policy with one exception: for Mr Sinatra.
