Pizza Today - September 2020 - 10

CONVERSATION

JOEY
VANONI
Pizza di Joey
Baltimore, Maryland
Concept:
Pizza di Joey is a Veteran
owned and operated small
business serving authentic,
NY-style brick oven pizza by
the slice! We use traditional
baking techniques and the
best ingredients to show
Marylanders what real pizza is.

Pizza Style:
We say we serve authentic
NY-style pizza, because we
do! Our pizza has a thin crust,
not too much sauce, not too
much cheese, and our pizza
crust is baked ALL THE WAY.
You can grab a slice, fold it,
and continue walking down the
street, just like we do in NYC
and the Jersey Shore. Oh!
And that char on the bottom
means we did it right! Our
dough is made in-house and
cold fermented. We don't play
around. We do this for real!
We were also just voted Best
of Baltimore 2020 Pizza in
The Baltimore Sun's Readers'
Choice Poll. Without my
amazing team and wonderful
customers, this award would
not have been possible.

As a veteran, how has your service helped
you in business and how have you been able to
pay it forward?

How were you able to pivot during the
COVID19 crisis and as we begin to transition
again?

It was an honor to serve our nation. I can
talk for days about how my time in the military
prepared me for business. In short, the military
trains "improvise, adapt and overcome." Being
prepared for any situation out to sea, on the
ground, in a pizza food truck or a pizzeria
located in the heart of Baltimore City is
critical. Never stopping until the mission is
complete is the true key to success though!
In the Navy, our missions needed to be
completed no matter the obstacle. I have that
same attitude every day with Pizza di Joey.
As a Veteran and resident here in South
Baltimore, I volunteer and serve on the
Board of Directors for The Baltimore Station,
a local non-profit organization helping
homeless Veterans transition from poverty
and addiction to self-sufficiency. I believe
not only in helping my fellow Veterans, but
uplifting my community as well. Working with
The Baltimore Station allows me to focus my
efforts on mitigating drug abuse and poverty in
South Baltimore.

Leveraging those skills I honed in the military
and from my time operating my pizza food truck,
I was able to redesign about 50 percent of my
business to adapt and confront those challenges.
We continued to practice our stringent food
safety protocols and focused our kitchen and
food service on pick-up through a curbside
carry-out window (The Pizza Window) and an
in-house delivery service. This compelled us
to redesign our space. Our FOH became our
BOH, and vice versa. My beautiful bar top
became a very large and expensive shelving
unit to store our columns of pizza boxes and
carry-out containers. We began adding to and
changing our menu items to keep our customers
interested, as we were one of the only food
service establishments still operating on our
side of town. New items such as Personal Pie
Pizza Kits were perfect DIYs for quarantine.
I also ensured my presence on social media
was constant, so that my customer base would
remain confident in our continued operation. I
also never drew direct attention to COVID19 in
any of my posts or videos. Everyone was hearing
enough about it on the news. I wanted to provide
a sense of normalcy.

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Pizza Today - September 2020

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