There are no open seats at the bar on a warm afternoon at Nello's in Ahwatukee.
Beyond the sprawling parking lot of the sand-colored strip mall, every one of the black high top chairs seats a customer. Most are hunched over plates of food and keeping one eye on the pair of wall-mounted televisions airing Sunday night football. In the dining room, there are hardly any parties smaller than four as families divvy up large pizzas and piles of salad. Servers in black pants, shirts and sneakers charge back and forth, smiling while tucking checks and pens into the pockets of their aprons.
It's a familiar scene even if you've never been here. The sounds — the babble of conversation, the scraping of wooden chairs on tile, the clatter of forks on plates — could be heard on almost any night in America at pizzerias from Seattle to Miami. There's a vague comfort of sinking into a vinyl-covered booth to look over a plastic-coated menu offering simple options: pepperoni or sausage?
Look a little longer and you might notice a few things that make this place different.
These pizzas aren't quite deep-dish — the crust isn't the right texture but the thick, sturdy walls rise up several inches from the plate. And the beer of choice isn't just any golden domestic but a copper-colored pint of Four Peaks Kiltlifter brewed nearby in Tempe. Even though it's early November, the patio is crowded with dozens of customers enjoying balmy 80-degree weather.
This could be any of thousands of pizzerias in America, but it's not. Owned by the Mei family, it's a restaurant in a quiet Phoenix suburb and part of a local family legacy that spans nearly four decades. Along with the Barro and Spinato families, whose pizza restaurants have served metro Phoenix for more than 30 years, the Meis are an essential piece of the city's food history.
Phoenix pizza beyond Chris Bianco
You can't talk about pizza in Phoenix without mentioning Chris Bianco. In fact, in America, you can hardly talk about pizza at all without mentioning the Bronx-born chef. Open just about any contemporary book on the subject and you'll find at least a passage, if not an entire chapter, about his dedication to the art of making pizza.
With his accolades and posse of famous fans including Oprah and Jimmy Kimmel, Bianco often casts such a long shadow that his well-deserved reputation blots out light that might fall on other talented pizza makers in the Valley of the Sun.
Plenty of them deserve to go down in the annals of Phoenix pizza history.
To name a few, there's Justin Piazza, a talented pizzaiolo whose dedication to tradition of Neapolitan-style pies sets him apart from Phoenix's pizza king, and Matt Pilato, whose Scottsdale pizzeria Lamp serves an unabashedly unorthodox style of pizza driven by a pursuit of exceptional flavor. And it would be wrong not to credit Stefano Fabbri, the larger-than-life creator of Pomo Pizzeria, for raising mainstream awareness of Neopolitan pizza with three locations of his modern restaurant.
Rewind even further, however, and you'll find Phoenix is home to legends not unlike those who made Chicago and New York destinations for excellent pizza. In some cases, their names have appeared as minor footnotes in broad looks at American pizza history. But, largely, their stories remain untold.
Theirs are stories of families who brought traditions of hand-stretched dough and secret recipes to the Southwest and planted roots deep in the desert sand. Stories of families who started their businesses before the Valley earned its reputation as a seemingly unlikely bastion of Neapolitan tradition, who laid a foundation that made it possible, decades later, for one talented chef to become, arguably, the world's best and most famous pizza maker.
These three families, who moved to Phoenix from Chicago around the same time, are not the only ones to found long-standing pizzerias in the Valley. There are others, including the family behind Venezia's — which is perhaps the most famous Phoenix pizza name aside from Bianco thanks to the company's appearances on "Breaking Bad" — and the family behind Oregano's, a Phoenix-based pizza chain with locations in Arizona and Colorado.
But through the stories of the Mei, Spinato and Barro families it's possible to trace the birth of Phoenix's pizza culture.
Ken and Elaine Spinato arrived in Fountain Hills in 1974 and opened their first pizzeria under the name Aurelio's in Scottsdale. A decade later, they'd move the family restaurant to an industrial park in Tempe, just a few blocks from where their children operate the company today. Angelo Barro made his way to the Valley from California a few years later, bringing with him the Barro's Pizza name. The last to arrive were Brian and Gino Mei in 1983. When they opened Nello's, they didn't serve pizza. But it wasn't long before they'd add it to the menu and call on their two older brothers to help run the fast-growing business.
How pizza became food for all
You can trace pizza's history back as far as the Persian empire, when soldiers cooked dough on metal shields before topping it with cheese and dates. But the dish as we know it comes from Naples, where the city's poorest class loved pizza in part because it was the only food they could afford to love.
Of course, from these humble beginnings nearly two centuries ago, pizza has traveled far.
Today pizza is one of the best-loved foods on the planet. In Brazil, diners enjoy theirs topped with green peas, while Russians might opt for red herring as their topping of choice. In Pakistan, you might find a menu offering curry pizza. Australia favors the controversial combo of pineapple and ham.
But it's not just geographical spread. Pizza also has scaled the socioeconomic ladder in a way few foods have.
What started as simple food for the lowest classes now is enjoyed widely no matter wealth or status. On any night in the United States, you might find a team of sweaty teenage athletes swarming around a pepperoni pizza from a Domino’s cardboard box. You're just as likely to see an elegant disk of dough painted with dill cream sauce and crowned with salmon pearls delivered at Spago, a white-tablecloth restaurant with locations in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas.
Pizza has become food for all.
It's in part because of its adaptable nature. For purists, pizza's versatility may be its biggest flaw — the weakness that opened the door to broccoli crusts and toppings ranging from crawfish to jelly beans. But it's also the advantage that's carried pizza to such dizzying heights. If pizza means a connection to a tradition and past for some, for others it's a blank slate.
This boundless potential led to some of America's most loved and sometimes most controversial foods. It's what led a Chicago restaurateur and a former All-American linebacker to invent a heartier pizza, one with cheese on the bottom and sauce on top, and what permitted one California chef to top his with barbecue sauce and smoked gouda. It's what makes pizza more than just food, but also a part of American culture and regional identity.
PIZZA HISTORY: An oral history of 3 family-owned pizzerias in metro Phoenix
Chicago's influence on Phoenix pizza
Phoenix's pizza identity, however, hasn’t been well defined beyond its reputation as the home of America's most famous pizza whisperer.
Like much of the city’s history, things picked up pace after World War II and into the latter half of the 20th century. Prior to WWII, most pizza in America was eaten by Italian immigrants in neighborhoods mostly inhabited by Italian-Americans. But by the 1950s, frozen pizza made its way into American grocery stores, and by the second half of that decade, chains including Pizza Hut and Domino's had spread across the country.
Phoenix's enduring pizza restaurants arrived in the Valley of the Sun not long after national brands began the standardization of pizza in America. And while they weren’t the first to bring quality pizza to the growing southwest city, they have outlasted many who came before and after.
It doesn't take much digging to find evidence of a longstanding connection between Chicago and Phoenix. The Valley is home not only to large numbers of former Midwesterners driven southwest by the frigid cold, but also to scores of restaurants and entertainment options curated with former Windy City residents in mind. Every spring, hordes of baseball fans flock to the Valley to catch Cubs and White Sox preseason games and can dine at many of their Midwest favorites including Portillo's, Lou Malanti's and White Castle — which were met with much fanfare upon their arrival in the Southwest.
Phoenix's pizza history is, maybe not surprisingly, no exception. From Chicago, three families arrived in the city looking to start businesses. They were armed with family secrets — red sauce perfected by grandma in the old country, a sausage recipe passed down for generations — that are now the bedrock of their legacies.
Meet the families behind the pizza
The first to arrive were Ken and Elaine Spinato, who moved to Fountain Hills with their young daughter Nicole in 1974. They opened their first restaurant, Aurelio's, with a partner based in Chicago, but eventually bought out the partner and renamed the restaurant Spinato's.
Angelo Barro, born in Chicago, showed up not long after. He'd jumped into the pizza business with his brother John in southern California in 1968, before deciding he needed a place to call his own. The siblings struck a deal: John could keep the dozens of Barro's restaurants in California if Angelo could have the rights to strike out alone. He went east and opened the first Barro's Pizza in Mesa in 1981.
Two years later Brian and Gino Mei, two of four Italian brothers raised in Chicago, rolled into town and with help from their mother, Cleone, opened Nello's in 1983 as a small Italian sandwich shop in Tempe. After seeing pizza delivered to businesses nearby, they added their own take on Chicago's famous deep-dish to the menu. The addition was such a hit they soon enlisted help from their other two brothers, who uprooted their families to join the rest of the clan in the East Valley.
A 1986 Arizona Republic story recounts Nello's impressive early success and acknowledges that, even three decades ago, making it in the crowded Phoenix pizza market was no small feat. In fact, it wasn't until Nello's won a Phoenix New Times Best of Phoenix award for Best Pizza not long after opening that sales began to take off.
"It doesn't take a market-research expert to figure out that the East Valley has a lot of pizza joints," the story begins. Even in those early days, the Meis knew good pizza wasn't enough to ensure a profitable restaurant. Family was key. So was taking care of the customers.
"We want to make sure each (restaurant) is good, that the customers are taken care of, that there's a friendly atmosphere, more than how many restaurants we can have and how much money we can make," Brian Mei said in the story.
Longtime Phoenix food writer Nikki Buchanan remembers the arrival of both Nello's and Spinato's in metro Phoenix. It was a heydey for other spots too — including Pizzafarro's, which is still in operation on the northern fringe of the Valley in Carefree — but Buchanan said what Spinato's brought to the scene elevated the level of pizza in Phoenix.
"I remember thinking, 'Oh my god this is great — green olives on a pizza,'" Buchanan said with a chuckle. "Nello's was big, too. Respected."
If Nello's and Spinato's brought a level of sophistication commonly seen in Phoenix, then Barro's struck a different chord.
"That is an everyman place," Buchanan said.
Indeed, even in 1983, that restaurant was beginning to earn a reputation as a destination for families and high school sports teams, partly due to owner Mike Barro's experience as a football coach. Both he and his father, Angelo, coached at East Valley high schools including Corona del Sol and Marcos di Niza over the years. By 2005, a story in The Republic declared one Chandler location of Barro's Pizza as the "unofficial headquarters for little leaguers."
There's a vast sea of pizza between Barro's and Bianco, who is known for using premium ingredients often sourced from small local growers, but Buchanan said families like the Barros likely paved the way.
"They probably opened the doors a little bit," she said.
What's next for the families?
All three families settled into success, but the decades haven’t passed without challenges. Like pizza, for which versatility can prove both a boon and a burden, being a family-run business certainly can be a double-edged sword.
Each restaurant has found its own way to divide and conquer territory.
For the Barro family, a little separation has been the key. With four children — Mike, Bruce, Ken and Gina — around to step up, the family has chosen to operate under one name but as four relatively independent companies. There is strength in numbers, yes. But there’s perhaps even more in the space each sibling has to operate his or her own empire.
"You know, obviously having 41 locations gives us that power for buying and such," Mike Barro said. "But it keeps a lot of peace in the family by having separate companies as well. So we all get along quite well."
For the Spinatos, the business has remained a close family affair. Founder and patriarch Ken Spinato has passed the reins to his children, Anthony and Nicole, who now run the business with help from their partners. Anthony's wife Jaime is head of pastry, while Nicole's husband Kris leads the company's retail division. But Ken Spinato "stays busy," as his son Anthony puts it. He visits each restaurant once a week, encouraging staff and dispensing advice to young employees, much like he did with his kids.
The Mei family story lands somewhere in between.
At one point each of the four brothers owned and operated his own Nello's restaurant, but the four siblings struggled to find a cohesive vision for the company. Over the years the locations drifted further apart until ultimately all but two closed. The remaining locations are operated by two of the brothers, Danny and Brian, but serve different menus and offer distinctive dining experiences.
But the drifting and splintering of Nello's doesn't put the family legacy in danger of fading. In 2009, Danny's son Aric, with help from his parents, opened his own pizzeria The Parlor in central Phoenix. Some of the recipes came straight from Nello's, Aric admits, but the fresh brand gave him leeway to make the restaurant his own.
"We're doing a very humble thing and a very simple thing and hopefully, a very approachable thing," Aric said. "If we can't make it with handmade pasta and a good glass of wine and a beautiful pizza and a pitcher of beer, there's bigger problems than us and our family."
Reach the reporter at lauren.saria@azcentral.com. Follow her on Instagram at laurensaria, on Twitter at lhsaria and on Facebook at facebook.com/lsaria.
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Barro's, Nello's and Spinato's are essential to Phoenix's pizza history. Here's why - AZCentral.com
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