Jeff Varasano of Varasano’s Pizzeria
By Tom Maicon at October 7, 2009 | 4:54 pm | Print
Varasano’s Pizzeria
2171 Peachtree Rd. NE
Atlanta, GA 30309
404-352-8216
http://www.varasanos.com
Now that the flour dust has finally settled after his highly-charged opening of Varasano’s Pizzeria, I thought it would be a good time to catch up with Jeff Varasano to get his perspective into what it’s like to suddenly find himself in the restaurant business, and instantly under a microscope by the most scrutinizing critics.
I finally caught up with Jeff, and here’s what he had to say.
Q: Never being in the restaurant business how difficult has it been to get your restaurant up and running? …and what has been your biggest challenge?
A: The biggest challenge? Can I just list the top 100, LOL…
At first a lot of landlords didn’t even want to deal with me because I had no industry experience. So it took a long time to find a spot. But overall, as with baking at home, the biggest challenge is the dough. A customer asked my pizza chef Willie if he was the boss. Willie pointed past me towards a rack of dough and said, “No, that’s the boss.”
Without ever switching ingredients or proportions you can make a zillion variations on dough. We use a natural sourdough culture instead of factory produced yeast. A hundred years ago everyone did it that way but now only a handful of pizzerias, even in Italy, still do. Now I know why. It’s a living thing and it can be quite temperamental in a commercial setting. The flavor is much deeper so we keep at it, but it has made consistency our biggest challenge.
The biggest unexpected challenge was the fact that guests eat their pizza with a knife and fork. Coming from NY it’s just a reflex to pick up a slice and fold it. I really want everyone to try pizza at it’s best and a huge part of any food experience is the way it feels in your mouth. A great piece of fresh fried chicken has a nice crunch on the outside that gives way to a juicy interior. Similarly, folding a fresh slice allows you to bite the crust which gives way to the juicy sauce.
This style of pizza has a light crust that is too delicate to retain any crunch after it’s been cut with a knife or if it’s sat too long. We got a lot of early criticism about the texture of the crust and we spent the first two months altering the dough formula to compensate. This was probably our biggest mistake. I know of no pizza with this kind of thin, charred, light airy style that holds up to a knife and fork.
Most pizzerias use flour additives such as potassium bromate, but using all natural ingredients and a sourdough culture for natural flavor, the dough is just too delicate. I think we made our worst pizzas by trying to be all things to all people. After two months we switched back to our original formula, and simply bake it slightly cooler to crisp it up just a bit.
Our main focus is explaining that this style of pizza is different than most you find in the southeast, and is best folded and fresh out of the oven.
Q: Before you even opened your restaurant you received a great article by AJC’s John Kessler, and by the New York Times. How on earth did you ever pull that off?
A: It all came from the parties and the website. The parties started way back in 1998. I moved here from NYC and while I loved it, I was homesick for a few things such as pizza. It seemed such a shame to go through all the work of making dough just to make pizza for a couple of people so I’d call up friends and say I was looking for “pizza victims” to try my latest experiment, many of which were quite bad. Thank god for wine.
In December 2004 someone in an online bread forum asked me for my pizza recipe and I put up a single web page sharing my 6 years of trials. From there it took on a life of it’s own. At first, it gradually spread through a circle of fellow pizza fanatics, but in September 2006 it went viral. It got picked up as a news story on cnet.com, then got passed to fark.com, boingboing.net and within hours crashed my server. Within days I was getting hundreds of letters among them several reporters. Some interviews, such as those in Wired, the New Yorker and Esquire didn’t work out and others like the NY Times and NPR did.
After the site went viral I started getting emails from strangers asking if they could attend a pizza party. These then took on a viral quality of their own, with guests passing the word to their friends. One guest knew Kessler and he happened to call me the day before the NY Times columnist was coming to town for a pizza party. And viola, it all came together at the same time.
Q: You haven’t exactly racked up great reviews from the local critics. Do you believe these reviews were unfair?
A: Every day some customers tell us that this is the best pizza they’ve ever had. Many of those comments come from people that have tried the best rated pizzerias in the world.
We’ve also been voted best pizza in Atlanta by Jezebel Magazine and several online polls. But consistency has been a problem, especially early on. I think that the pre-opening hype eliminated the normal grace period for reviews. A buddy of mine who runs one of the best pizzerias in the country, Apizza Scholls in Portland, OR, wrote me “Chris [Bianco in Phoenix] had himself under a microscope after almost 6 years of doing his craft. I was under a microscope after 1 year of doing mine…. you my friend, are under a microscope before you have ever even opened.” That kind of sums it up.
I think that for some reason there was a lot of emotion surrounding my opening so let me give you my perspective on the pre-opening hype.
First off, it was almost all organic. The website went viral and mostly all I did was respond. Of the nearly 2,500 letters I’ve gotten from my website, only 3 could be described as negative. The rest were thanking me for sharing tons of free information that was largely unavailable anywhere else, and also for promoting the best pizzerias around the world.
The site was about a passion, not about promoting me or any business. Back in 2004 when I posted a list of the world’s best pizzerias and ranked Varasano’s Pizzeria in the top 10, it was just a joke because there was no such place, nor any plans to open one. It was simply a twist on the idea that I had more or less morphed my kitchen into a pizzeria since I had started pizza parties as far back as 1998. Many people asked for invitations and I fed over 700 people for free in 2007 and 2008. Without the website and the parties the business would never have happened.
But when I finally opened, the buzz set expectations very high. Some were really turned off by all the hype and I even got hate mail. Many were reacting to claims I never made or that were written by others. I never said I made the perfect pizza or the world’s best pizza, but rather I celebrated the best pizzerias around the world. Nor did I ever say that running this business was going to be easy or just like making pizza at home.
I’ve spent my career working on process improvements. I talk all the time about how it takes thousands of hours of practice to get good at something, whether it’s a sport, an instrument, or any craft.
I talk all the time about how the goal is to get 1% better every week. Launching into a new industry, there was never a thought in my mind that I would open up and be perfect from day one. Clearly though, some critics were reacting as if I had claimed that. My primary claim is that we learn every day. We don’t go through the motions. We are continually trying new things, as I have for years.
Just as an example, I’ve tasted 33 oreganos since we opened and tried at least 6 different methods of drying them so they retain flavor. Over time I hope those that have been critical will try it again.
Q: Many complain that your menu is too limited. Do you plan to expand the menu any time soon?
A: During our “Slice of Heaven” events that we ran each Monday this summer, we made over a dozen specials including Olive/Caper, Fried Eggplant, Potato/Rosemary, Wild Mushroom/Truffle Oil and Sicilian style. A few of these may make it onto the main menu pretty soon or make it as semi-regular specials.
Also we are adding a couple of big salads and probably 3-4 sandwiches. One of these is the real old-school Italian sausage and peppers, like you get at the street fairs in NY. Talking to my NY customers, this one is really missed. But no matter what we add, I want the focus to remain on pizza.
Q: Some were concerned that you don’t use a coal nor wood burning oven. What if anything do you have to say to these people? …and tell us a little bit about your custom made oven.
A: On my website I list many of the world’s best pizzerias. Interestingly, my top 5 have totally different ovens: gas deck, coal, electric, wood and the biggest surprise, an oil burning brick oven. These 5 vary wildly in fuel source, design and bake time. This is one of the things that makes pizza so interesting. Everyone is looking for the secret, especially one they can buy, like the ‘right’ oven or the ‘right’ flour. But as with any art, the secret is in the balance of all things together at one moment. That’s why it’s so hard to do it right consistently.
Many types of ovens are capable of producing great pizza, but if one little thing goes wrong they are also capable of producing tasteless crackers. The smokiness that is often attributed to coal or wood ovens is more often than not the result of the temperature and not the fuel.
I traveled quite a bit testing different ovens and I had a very clear list of capabilities that I wanted. I found an oven maker in Sweden named Christer Andersson. As soon as we exchanged our first email, I knew that he understood some of the unique challenges that make pizza baking so different than bread making. It’s precisely because many people think it’s all about the coal or wood fuel that makes many ovens perform quite poorly.
Some oven builders sell their equipment based on the fuel and disregard the design, as if any chamber is automatically good if you stuff it with wood or coal.
When I baked at home, I used the cleaning cycle which allows the oven to operate at 800F. But I’d use aluminum foil to alter the distribution of heat within the oven. So while I used the same electric coil, a dozen different foil configurations would produce a dozen different pizzas. Right there I knew that fuel source was not my biggest problem.
After a few disappointing tests out on the West Coast, I headed to a little town called Boras, Sweden. The oven was the clear winner and Christer proved to be as good as I’d hoped. The best thing was that during our conversations it was clear that we both had in mind nearly the same design for a next generation oven that is wildly different than anything on the market now. Yet independently, we had come to very nearly the same design. That oven is off in the future though.
For this round we took his basic design and made a few modifications. There are extra heating elements, and also we had to make many component and design changes to get the oven certified by Underwriter’s Labs. Christer even flew in from Sweden for the final round of inspections.
Q: Any future plans for a second location?
A: We keep telling ourselves how much easier this will be the second time around. We are learning so much every day. It may take a while, but there will be other locations.
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