{"id":2502,"date":"2025-02-22T07:09:31","date_gmt":"2025-02-22T12:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2025\/02\/22\/patsy-grimaldi-whose-name-became-synonymous-with-pizza-dies-at-93\/"},"modified":"2025-02-22T07:09:31","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T12:09:31","slug":"patsy-grimaldi-whose-name-became-synonymous-with-pizza-dies-at-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharewatch.com\/wp\/2025\/02\/22\/patsy-grimaldi-whose-name-became-synonymous-with-pizza-dies-at-93\/","title":{"rendered":"Patsy Grimaldi, Whose Name Became Synonymous With Pizza, Dies at 93"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Patsy Grimaldi, a restaurateur whose coal-oven pizzeria in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge won new fans for New York City\u2019s oldest pizza style with carefully made pies that helped start a national movement toward artisan pizza, died on Feb. 13 in Queens. He was 93.<\/p>\n

His nephew Frederick Grimaldi confirmed the death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Queens hospital.<\/p>\n

Mr. Grimaldi began selling pies in 1990 under the name Patsy\u2019s. In those days, legal skirmishes periodically disturbed the city\u2019s pizza landscape, and it wasn\u2019t long before threatening letters from the lawyers of another Patsy\u2019s led him to rename the place Patsy Grimaldi\u2019s, then simply Grimaldi\u2019s. Many years later, he reopened his restaurant with a name that pays tribute to his mother. Today that sign reads Juliana\u2019s Pizza.<\/p>\n

Under any name, Mr. Grimaldi\u2019s pizzerias attracted long lines of diners outside, on Old Fulton Street, who were hungry for house-roasted peppers, white pools of fresh mozzarella and tender, delicate crusts baked in a matter of minutes by a scorching pile of anthracite coal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n

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Like the cooks he trained, Mr. Grimaldi hewed to the techniques he had learned in his early teens working at Patsy\u2019s Pizzeria in East Harlem, owned by his uncle Pasquale Lancieri. Mr. Lancieri was one of a small fraternity of immigrants from Naples, including the founders of Totonno\u2019s Pizzeria Napolitana in Brooklyn and John\u2019s of Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, who introduced New Yorkers to pizza in the early 20th century.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/aside>\n<\/div>\n

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Mr. Grimaldi reached back to those origins when, after a long career as a waiter, he opened a place of his own with a newly built coal oven. At the same time, the minute attention he brought to his craft \u2014 picking up fennel sausage at a pork store in Queens every morning, for instance, while other pizzerias were buying theirs from big distributors \u2014 anticipated the legions of ingredient-focused pizzaioli who would follow him.<\/p>\n

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