“Visionary.” “Icon.” “Legend.” Those are just a few of the words that have been used to describe Patsy Grimaldi, who died two weeks ago in Queens at the age of 93.
Grimaldi entered the world of pizza-making at a tender age. As a teen, he worked as a busboy in his uncle’s pizzeria in East Harlem. He was soon promoted to pizza maker and eventually assumed the role of manager.
In 1990, Grimaldi opened a pizza restaurant of his own on the site of a former hardware store in Dumbo. He appended his nickname to the business, calling it simply “Patsy’s Pizzeria.” When the owners of an extant Brooklyn pizzeria with the same name threatened a lawsuit, Grimaldi renamed his restaurant Patsy Grimaldi’s, then simply Grimaldi’s.
In a way the change was fortuitous in that Grimaldi’s became synonymous with a feature that imbued a delicious blistered crust to its pizza. That distinctive feature was a coal-fired brick oven pizza, and its presence here touched off a revolution in artisan pizza-making.
