Audio By Carbonatix
Pizza joints, like sushi bars, are not in short supply along Washington Avenue. On the eleven blocks between Sixth Street and Lincoln Road, there are eight pizzerias slinging cheesy Italian slices at the passersby. Though the kitchens are hot and loud, and the guys wrestling the dough sweat and grunt like WWF pros, competition is pretty amicable. Some proprietors occasionally send spies to check out others’ styles and prices, and some pizza men are known to rotate positions among the eateries, “stealing” recipes and technique. It’s mostly all harmless, and owners agree there is enough room in SoBe pizzaland for everybody.
Unfortunately this only applies to round New York-style pizza, the usual fare on South Beach. What happened on Washington Avenue is that two pizzerias began selling rectangular Roman-style pies. This meant trouble. You’re not supposed to mess with right angles, thin crusts, and gourmet toppings like the Romans do — unless your name is Pino Piroso.
If you dare flirt with the square stuff, get ready for a litigious letter from Calabria native Pino, owner and creator of Pizza Rustica at Ninth and Washington. He claims to be the first paesano to bring thin rectangles — the kind he first encountered on the streets of Rome — to Miami Beach. Since 1996 the normally affable Pino has taken his place as the SPQR-style’s first and sole purveyor, and he’s bearish about keeping his position.
So when Carmine Puleo, an American with Sicilian bloodlines, dared to open Sopranos Pizza in early May, just two blocks south of Rustica, the local Roman godfather, whose cheery voice and casual style belie a strong-armed pizza lord, got miffed. There was something incestuous about Carmine’s methods, Pino implied, from the borrowing of the name Sopranos from HBO, to the wholesale “theft” of his culinary secrets. (Piroso taught Puleo everything about the square-pizza business when Puleo worked for him at Rustica two years ago.) He showed the Siggie how to lovingly knead the seasoned semolina dough on to a 36-inch baking sheet in small batches, unlike the mass-produced floury paste commonly used in pizzerias. He showed him how to lure hungry pedestrians by interweaving gourmet ingredients such as roasted yellow and red peppers, porcini mushrooms, and prosciutto over a crisp crust, and decorating it with eye-catching arugula and kalamata olives.
When Carmine opened his doors, selling what looked to Pino like an unlicensed version of his own pies, Pino sent him a letter — sealed with a kiss from his attorney Brett Feinstein — warning the Sicilian to “cease and desist.” “It’s not about greed or the money,” Pino says. “The point is that someone’s copying my style of pizza!”
Pino is passionate about his pizzeria and his menu. He switched to pizza from nightclubs after his first Beach partnership venture, Ajaxx International, fizzled in 1994. “I lost everything,” he remembers sadly. “It took a lot of good hard work to build this business and to get known. I worked seven eighteen-hour days to open. It put gray hair on my head. And [then] it was so easy for these people to [capitalize] on my recipes!”
Happily Roman-style caught on soon after opening. His menu bridged upward from mundane fast food to upscale bistro-level fare. To protect his recipes, Pino requires his employees to sign confidentiality contracts to ensure they won’t reveal his recipes to competitors. Carmine Puleo, who worked just two months at Rustica, agreed to sign, Pino insists.
Chrome-domed Carmine, who likes to dress in gauzy outfits and sandals, obviously knows a good thing when he sees one. His other business, RetireQuickly.com, is a multilevel-marketing get-rich-quick venture that recruits prospective buyers to sell information over the Internet. He describes it as the type of business he can manage “while sitting by the pool.” During his short stint at Rustica, he gained intimate knowledge of Pino’s product and witnessed its popularity. When he saw that former pizza kingpin-turned-club impresario Tommy Pooch was selling his Pucci’s Pizza location on Washington and Seventh, Carmine got his mother, New Jersey pizza queen Antonia Calabro, to grab it and open Sopranos; then he convinced Leo De Vita to invest and, frankly, copped Pino’s idea.
“Yes, we did copy [Piroso],” Puleo admits. “Our pizzas are square like his, but we use different ingredients. And we expanded his recipes.” He says he researched gourmet cookbooks and trolled Internet sites for new and innovative combinations, such as chicken teriyaki and Philly cheese-steak pizzas.
Mama Calabro, Carmine’s short, big-voiced partner, is in charge of his kitchen. Like many Italian mothers, she is gregarious and engaging. But beneath her hearty laugh and heavy accent (she sounds like Tony Soprano) beats a toughness you’d hate to see unleashed. Mama owned pizzerias in New Jersey for 26 years. Between perpetual puffs on Marlboros, she explains that borrowing from other styles is just part of the business and that everybody does it. “It’s nothing to copy other people,” she insists. “It’s normal. Before I open a business, I taste all the different pizzas because I want to know my competition. I study other recipes before I start.” She wears a “so what?” expression that you don’t want to challenge. She thinks Pino is too uptight: “He could copy me if he wanted — what do I care?” Yet when pushed on it, she won’t give up her sauce recipe, which she claims goes back generations in her famiglia.
Carmine and his mother clearly have no problem appropriating an established, popular idea. They protect themselves by checking with their lawyer and boning up on copyright-infringement laws. To divert HBO’s coming down on him for using the name of perhaps the most popular drama on American television, Carmine points out that “soprano” can refer to a high-pitched singer. “We’re not copying the show; it comes from the function, the singer’s function — that’s not copyrighted, right?” Still, on the back wall of his joint, deep among the graffiti colors, there is a stencil of The Sopranos cast, including Tony, Uncle Junior, and Meadow.
Attorney Feinstein says he is waiting for instructions from Piroso before deciding what to do next about the Roman Pizza War. He says he’s confident his client has a good case, what with the confidentiality agreement Carmine allegedly violated. “Pizza is pizza. You can’t stop people from selling it,” he says. “But for Carmine to sign the contract and then turn around and duplicate [Pino’s recipe] gives you pause. We’re not trying to kick [Carmine] out of business; we just want him to stop selling the same product. He doesn’t have to sell Pino’s pizza.”
You get the feeling, though, that to the South Florida pizza-eating public, shape doesn’t matter as much as quality. Creators of the round variety, up to their occhios in competition, say having so many pizzerias in the same area just makes for a better product. Those who survive, says Tony Shabani, the Palermitano manager of neighboring Gino’s Pizza, must know what they’re doing. “Pizza is not pizza,” he posits. “Pizza is talent. Pino survived because of his style and because he made something different. [But] there’s enough room for Sopranos, too — if [Carmine] knows what he’s doing.”
But for now at least, the truth is that Rustica is well-known among locals and tourists as a place for quality Italian food, and Sopranos isn’t. Take, for example, Juan Mantilla, a Rustica regular, who lip-synchs in nightclubs as Pussila, a cartoonlike drag queen whose getups make her look like a futuristic ladybug. Juan is very particular and will only eat Pino’s precise square slices. “[His] square pizza just looks better,” Mantilla explains. “And I look better eating it.”
