Jimmy Fantin: New Haven Pizza, Dave Portnoy’s 8.1 and Never Saying “Burnt”

Forking Around with Flavor South Florida · Oct 29, 2026 · 49m · transcript

Jimmy Fantin started washing dishes at Frank Pepe's in New Haven when he was 15. More than 30 years later, he made his first pizza in his own place in Stuart, threw out the first batch of dough, and has not thrown one away since.

Kerri sits down with the owner of Fantini's New Haven Style Apizza in Stuart and the newly opened Fantini's Fusion Kitchen in Palm City to hear how a mortgage broker who planned to run a four-table pizzeria for a year or two ended up with two restaurants and 69 employees. He opened in February 2020, three weeks before COVID hit. When capacity limits arrived, his four…