Latest / Day Drinking With Dog / Frank Zabski joins the show!

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Frank Zabski joins the show! · Day Drinking With Dog

• 0:02
  D D Drinking Day, Drinking Day, Drinking, Welcome Back Day, Drinking
• 0:15
  with Dog. I am off my little vacation week. It's been two weeks.
• 0:18
  As if I've done a podcast. It is August nine, twenty twenty
• 0:21
  three. I have a great guest coming up in a couple of minutes.
• 0:24
  I'm going to review my little vacation out in Cape Cod. So it was
• 0:28
  me and seven guys, a bunch of guys from Stonebridge, a couple of
• 0:32
  old timers. We rented this airbnb uh in Founmouth, Mass Cape is beautiful.
• 0:37
  I've been in them. I went once with the fam about four years
• 0:40
  ago and it's been thirty years since then. So we went out a little
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  golf journey and uh, you know, it's one of those things where you
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  kind of black out a couple of times each day. You know, you
• 0:54
  get up, your drink, your golf, you go home, you just
• 0:58
  keep drinking. Then the side, I'll take a nap before dinner and then
• 1:00
  you wake up your share and go back. Okay, well I'm almost fifty,
• 1:04
  I can't do this ship anymore. And we were with like four twenty
• 1:07
  five year olds. These guys are savages. They're jumping off the roofs.
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  They're breaking shit. I've never had a supplemental bill from an Airbnb before,
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  but uh I got my first one for two hundred and twenty five dollars broken
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  wooden planks, extra hour of cleaning. We brought ten eleven cases of a
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  mixture of Vivas, surf sides, white Claws eleven eleven cases. And that's
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  not including the booze. We brought Tully Jmo Bourbon tequila. We I think
• 1:51
  we had left twelve surf sides twelve. Now mind we brought something the golf
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  course and drank on the course and all that stuff. But that's doing some
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  damage and I felt it. I hadn't had a drink. I I Wednesday,
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  So we golfed Wednesday right and I had a couple. I wasn't feeling
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  good. And we get home. I said, don't let me take a
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  nap, get up at eight shower, We go to dinner. Waiter comes
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  over. It's like, what can I get you? I just look at
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  my phone. Nothing. I'm getting over and I just took it over back
• 2:30
  home. I took it over back home and slept through the night, not
• 2:35
  really so I didn't sleep. I was like had the shakes, got up,
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  drove home, miserable ride home. I started feeling better, you know,
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  five six o'clock on Thursday. Had to work all weekend, didn't drink
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  all weekend, and I went and played golf on Monday in the tournament and
• 2:51
  the fucking pouring rain at Oxford and had a couple. But I've been I've
• 2:54
  been good lately, so until I get to my Jelly Roll concert tonight,
• 2:58
  which we'll get to a little bit. All So, that was my Cape
• 3:00
  cod journey. Uh. If you guys want to see a really really really
• 3:06
  hilarious video, it's only like a five second video of I'll show it to
• 3:10
  you after of pretty much what sums up our three days in the Cape?
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  Just shoot me a text. I thought it was like a week. It
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  was only three days. It was just three days. Yeah, eleven cases
• 3:22
  in three days. Uh, that's heavy duty. But I got a five
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  star review because I paid the two twenty five. All right, let's get
• 3:31
  to the guest. Frank Zapsky's here the Pizza Cavones. Uh. I met
• 3:37
  you. I first met you down in Nautilus. Yes, our friends Eric,
• 3:42
  Crystal and Nick the opening there. I brought you on for a quick
• 3:46
  five minutes. So thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for the pizza.
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  By the way, I was starving and he made your own New Haven
• 3:54
  style pizza right my home ove and baby oh man. And I like how
• 3:58
  you kind of did the cheese on one half, no cheese on the other.
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  Well there's like sprinkled cheese, right yeah, but no moots right,
• 4:04
  grated cheese, grated cheerina romano. So that's that's a classic New Haven style.
• 4:09
  It's called the New Haven Plane or the original tomato pie, the original
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  tomato. Yeah, just those sauce, peccorino olive oil. Done. And
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  I add a little garlic because I love garlic. So before we get into
• 4:19
  all your pizza ventures and everything you do, what's your backstory? Obviously you're
• 4:25
  you call yourself the Italian Polock. I just make that up. Now,
• 4:29
  you just made that up? Okay, Yeah, I call myself two things,
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  the Pizza Gavone and the Polish Pizziola, which basically is a Polish guy
• 4:36
  who makes pizza. Okay, So but I'm phasing out the Polish pizziol and
• 4:42
  just going with the Pizza Gavon. Yeah. But so my backstory is I'll
• 4:46
  try to be pretty quick. So I started making pizza when I was about
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  twelve years old at my church carnival. I grew up in West Haven,
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  So from twelve to sixteen, every summer, that week in July where with
• 4:59
  that falls on the fourth July, we always had our carnival. So me
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  and a couple of buddies to come in, make the dough, sauce,
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  grape the cheese, put it in the freezer, letter ferment, so and
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  so forth. And that career lasted till I was sixteen and I discovered girls,
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  and I'm much rather at that point would want to chase the girls around
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  the carnival and make pizza. So that kind of really was the start of
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  my pizza career so to speak. Obviously growing up in West Haven, Zoo
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  parties, Mike's Vesuvios which is no longer there, Danny's Supos that was up
• 5:32
  by Unah. Right, Yes, I went to un and I went to
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  Haven. That was Monday night pizza specials at Vesuvio for ten dollars or something
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  crazy like that thirty years ago. Yeah, And so I went to Notre
• 5:45
  Dame High School and so we used to go there, you know, probably
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  like you did, you know, after school or we cut out or whatever
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  and go down there for a couple of slices. But that was really good
• 5:54
  place. Yeah. So anyways, you know, I was surrounded by pizza
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  and I don't know you on my who like pizza story? You want them
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  to stop now? No? No, no, Well, I want to
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  kind of get into the whole New Haven style. Obviously we're from the area.
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  I didn't really know knew I like, so, I grew up in
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  Madison High School, went to University new Haven, New Vesuvios. I haven't
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  heard of that name in a long time, but there's back some memories for
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  sure. Monday night football, baby, and the freshman dorms we literally want
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  so the freshman dorms are right across the street. We just walked over.
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  Again. We knew all the guys down there, they knew us our drunk
• 6:30
  asses. But I didn't really find New Haven, you know, till I
• 6:34
  was out of school. You know, I heard of Peppi's everyone. You
• 6:39
  know, they don't really pay attention as a as a kid or a young
• 6:42
  young adult really what it's all about. So how did you find like Peppi's
• 6:46
  and what gravitated you to that style. So that's a good question. You
• 6:51
  know, I learned so much over the last twenty years about pizza, Like
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  I just went through Zoo parties and he pizza, and I didn't know it
• 7:00
  was a style. It was just, hey, let's go to zoops.
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  And probably you know, my mid twenties when I kind of discovered Worcester Street.
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  I didn't hit Worcester Street. And for those that don't know, it's
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  obviously one of the most famous streets in the Haven, kind of like Arthur
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  av the country. Yeah. Really, and it's got for food, for
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  pizza. Yeah, it's got Sallies, it's got Peppi's, Libby's, Triscollini
• 7:27
  Consiglios. But the bottom line is I knew about it, but I never
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  went there. So probably my mid twenties, I was dating this girl and
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  we had met this other couple and make long story short, we had standing
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  reservations at Sally's for about ten years, so we had the secret number.
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  We had Flow, who obviously was still there and part of the business.
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  Every time we would make a reservation with her before before we left. You
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  know, we got a connection down there. You know, that's old school
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  Sallies. We had the same waiter for the same time. This guy,
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  Johnny Mane, who actually owns Manja Beats in North Haven, but anyways,
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  was there for ten years, got married, had kids, and for those
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  that know Sally's well, Sally's is not a place that you want to bring
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  kids because the pizza could come out in ten minutes, one hour or two
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  hours and ten minutes. So we ended up switching over and going to Peppi's
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  and we've pretty much been going there ever since. And we got pictures of
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  my kids and the you know, strollers and all these other stuff. But
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  that really kind of was kind of the basis of my kind of New Haven
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  foundation. And I've always had I felt that I've always had like pizza in
• 8:43
  my blood. What a lot of people don't know is that, you know,
• 8:46
  I was in it for thirty years, which is completely different than pizza.
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  And so I tell people all the time, I traded making a lot
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  of dough for a little dough. But I'm a lot happier. Yeah,
• 8:56
  twenty twelve, I started Fired Up Pizza Truck. It was a it was
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  a mobile pizza business, me and a partner and we did that for three
• 9:07
  or four years it went gangbusters. But here's the story. At that time
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  I had three businesses, computer business, cabling business, and the pizza business.
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  And my wife, who's put up with my craziness for over thirty years
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  now, said to me, Frank, one or two things has to happen.
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  Either one of the businesses have to go or I'm going. And so,
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  as I say half jokingly, it was cheaper to keeper. So I
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  stopped doing the pizza business because it was just crazy. I mean, I
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  was five days a week with two businesses. Crazy. I can't imagine juggling
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  like an IT business with anything involved in the restaurant world at the same time.
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  It was nuts, but it opened my eyes to a lot of things.
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  It opened my eyes to anyone in the food service business. No one
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  has any idea the amount of time, effort, frustration, stress that you
• 10:05
  have in the food service business. So anyone that has lasted a long time,
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  any restaurant, any pizzeria, any mobile pizza business or whatever mobile truck
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  you want to talk about, it's a crazy, crazy amount of work.
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  So where I'm going with that is huge accolades and respect for anyone in the
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  food business. It's crazy because it's it's one of those businesses where like if
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  there's so many factors go into like you know, just working in Stonebridge,
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  right, weather weather, It's like like we like our summers really rely on
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  good weather, and we haven't had it this summer. Like we've had great
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  days, we had a good last week, but like we've had crappy weather
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  on Fridays. I mean, this is where we make money, and it
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  just trickles down from the top, like if the top's not making money,
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  the mills not making money, in the bottom on the bottom, the bottom
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  is not making money. And that's just one aspect, you know, is
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  whether you know then you get you know, obviously the COVID was a whole
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  nother you know that that destroyed businesses. But I mean it's I know what
• 11:11
  you're saying. It's it's you get to a point where like you have to
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  trim down payroll. You have to you know, it's not just a store.
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  And I'm gonna get to this in a second towards the end. But
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  I was at Target yesterday and it's it's I almost it dawned on me when
• 11:31
  I was there of really, what's going on in this world? And it's
• 11:37
  a ship show. It's dude, I'll just get to it now because I
• 11:39
  don't want to forget it. So I'm there, I'm buying a couple of
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  things and the line is just the self checkout, and I've seen people bitch
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  about it online and whatever. It is thirty people deep, and I'm like,
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  what am I even doing here? And I had a lady in front
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  of me on the phone with her friend bitching about what we're going through.
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  So I'm my, god, don't I'm never in a hurry something whatever.
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  I'll fucking wait it out. I'm on my phone. Thank god you got
• 12:09
  phones. You just fucking past the time. So one of the whatever store
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  guys comes over and opens up a line. He's like, line tends open,
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  and now fucking thirty five people just rushed to this line. I'm like,
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  all right, just open now. I got a teenage girl telling my
• 12:28
  mom my, mo, Mom'm over here over here. I'm like, what
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  the fuck is this is crazy? Yes, sir, my uh no worries
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  my uh My take now is this is? This is what's happening with the
• 12:41
  rise in minimum wage. Uh you know, it's easier to not hire people
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  just have himself. Check out those machines paid for themselves, and why pay
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  the staff to come in? And I think this is just the bottom of
• 12:58
  this, or I should say the tip of the iceberg going down of this
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  is the future, like especially with AI coming in, Like everyone bitches for
• 13:09
  a minimum wage, but like especially in the restaurant world, like we can't,
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  like I make eight dollars an hour. I don't. I'm not asking
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  for anymore that'll put like place like Stonebridge would survive it, but other places
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  won't. You know, like I grew up working for five fifty an hour,
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  Like that's what teaches you. It's what hardens you. Yeah, it's
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  it's what it shows you what hard work you know, and you get raises
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  and it's just it's a it's a corporate ladder kind of thing. You climb
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  it. You're just gonna hand somebody sixteen eighteen dollars an hour to start to
• 13:39
  do what. I don't blame target in these corporations. They have bottom lines
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  too, And this is why we're stuck with and now and now, this
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  is why like these fucking brawls break out at these places, Like I was
• 13:54
  getting like I'm as laid back person. I'm getting frustrated. At one point,
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  I'm like, I'm not fighting to go to line ten. I could
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  care fucking lass. I'll wait my time. But these people are like banging
• 14:03
  cards trying to get over there. Yeah, it's nuts, It's nuts.
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  Sorry I went off on a tangent there. Okay, sure, show you
• 14:09
  can do what you want. So all right, back to pizza. So
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  now you're at Peppie's now. I think I asked you this question when we
• 14:18
  were Nautilus. I was like, you know, what's your favorite? And
• 14:20
  you kind of were like, man, I don't do that, but there's
• 14:24
  the Holy Trinity. Yeah, so you know. So here's my feeling on
• 14:28
  the Holy Trinity. They're fantastic, they're world class, they're iconic. Can't
• 14:37
  argue any one of those points. But here's my thought process. And what
• 14:41
  I've seen in my time in this pizza world is that those guys get all
• 14:48
  the ink, all the headlines, all the newspapers, all everything. And
• 14:52
  I'm not begrudge but but but here's the deal. So the way I describe
• 14:58
  it is Sally's Peppi's are modern, and I also want to include it really
• 15:01
  should be the Big Four. But the Trinity sounds better obviously because it's three.
• 15:07
  But one place that doesn't get enough ink on the old school pizzerias is
• 15:13
  a place called Granda Beats. They were actually right down the street from Modern
• 15:18
  and just by the look on your face, I could tell you I've probably
• 15:22
  driven by it a million times, but I don't. Yeah, so it
• 15:26
  s well, it's it's actually it's still on State Street, the original building.
• 15:30
  But the Nuzzo family there were two brothers, and I forget Nick and
• 15:35
  I don't know, I forget the gentleman's name, but the two Nuzzo brothers.
• 15:39
  So the way the history story goes is that before it was Modern,
• 15:46
  it used to be I think Washington Street Pizza, and it was something else
• 15:52
  before that. And actually a gentleman by the name of Toli, last named
• 15:54
  totally who's got Toli's in He's Taven. He started the original pizzeria, then
• 16:00
  he sold that the someone else. Bottom line is one of the Nuzzo brothers
• 16:06
  took bought the old I believe I think it was either State Street or Washington
• 16:11
  Street Pizza. He changed the name to Modern. So do you know what
• 16:18
  year that was? I want to say late forties. Ohhh okay, yeah,
• 16:23
  so we're talking. Yeah, so he ran it for obviously a really
• 16:30
  really long time, but in between probably well, I would say late forties,
• 16:36
  early fifties, because that's when the war ended. The other Nuzzo brother
• 16:38
  was in World War Two, so he came home looking for work, went
• 16:42
  to work with his brother. I think he was there five or seven years.
• 16:48
  From there, he started his own pizza rea called Grand Abez on Grand
• 16:55
  av So I think maybe five eight, ten years ago. His son,
• 17:03
  mikey Abeats, sold the State Street location I'm sorry, Grand Application to a
• 17:14
  gentleman that worked for him but for a long time, and then he went
• 17:15
  out on the shore line. So there's a Grand Abeats in Guildford, Clinton
• 17:22
  and Madison, and their pizza is phenomenal. How long they've been there,
• 17:30
  they've off the shore line. I want you know again, I want to
• 17:34
  say, what's twenty twenty three? Yeah, I want to say, you
• 17:37
  know, two thousand in the last fifteen years or so, right, So
• 17:44
  they built three restaurants out on the shore line. Make long story short.
• 17:49
  I truly believe the quality of their pizza should put them in that trinity category,
• 17:56
  right, But where I was going with this was one of the things
• 18:00
  that I do, which we can talk more about later, but I do
• 18:03
  pizza reviews, so I review the pizza, the place, and the personality.
• 18:08
  Obviously we'll talk about Dave Portnoys a little bit later, but prominently what
• 18:14
  I do is stick in Connecticut, stick to New Haven style pizza. Where
• 18:19
  I'm going with this is that I actually never heard of them before I did
• 18:26
  started doing the reviews. Truth be told of Grand Beats and when I eat,
• 18:36
  so now I shouldn't feel so bad. No, no, no no,
• 18:40
  But I don't claim to be a New Haven person anyway, So that's
• 18:42
  okay. Here's the thing. If Sally's Pepper's a modern twenty years ago they
• 18:51
  were major league and then everyone else was double A, triple A college,
• 18:57
  well the scales have changed drastically. So you've got places like grand like place
• 19:10
  on Forbes av A boy, the name just escapes from me, but I'm
• 19:15
  gonna come back to it. Ernie's on Whaley Avenue, Tipsy Tomato on thirty
• 19:19
  four. There's a place in Torrington called Sassil's Cold Fired Pizza. Probably one
• 19:25
  of the biggest huge players is a place in it called Fuco in Cheshire.
• 19:33
  Yes, the parties in West Haven, Yeah, Zoo Parties and Mike's are
• 19:37
  absolute classics. You know. They are all in that same tier as the
• 19:41
  Trinity. What's the one in the Haven that was on State and moved?
• 19:45
  It was right near like Diesel. There was Dilegna, and then there was
• 19:51
  another and they they combined their names. I forget what the heck their name.
• 19:56
  They're what they're called. I thought they were solid. Yeah. I
• 20:00
  had it once and it was good. Yeah, I mean obviously bar.
• 20:03
  But where I'm going without mentioning every single person is uh, the game has
• 20:08
  changed for New Haven style pizza. Right. They set the bar and people
• 20:11
  are coming up to that bar. Can I can I say one thing?
• 20:17
  Say whatever you want? I feel that I can't say this about the Worcester
• 20:22
  Street stores, but their sister stores. I knew this was I knew this
• 20:29
  was coming. Uh. I'll just I'll just fire one out. Peppi's at
• 20:33
  the casino trash. I can't say trash because I'm drunk at the time.
• 20:38
  I usually buy it. Yeah, and it feeds my craving. But I
• 20:44
  like how you do your reviews. And the last part of you said personality.
• 20:48
  They have none up there. Granted I give them the benefit of thatw
• 20:52
  They're dealing with a lot of idiots at the casino, But I'm not one
• 20:56
  of them. I am always you know, I'm in the business. I'm
• 20:59
  very polite, I tipped very generously, and I've just had I can't go
• 21:03
  all down on all the experiences I've had, but I'm done with them.
• 21:07
  I'm done with them. You're done with them in general, or don't?
• 21:08
  No, I mean I would always go to New Haven. That's what I'm
• 21:11
  saying that the two one what's there and Modern Modern is actually my personal favorite.
• 21:17
  But uh yeah, no, I mean I know Sally's has sold their
• 21:19
  different ownership now too correct. Yeah, we'll go over that if you want.
• 21:23
  But but what my point is, like, I get it that you
• 21:26
  want to branch out, but just the authenticity is not any of these other
• 21:30
  places, and the one of the casino I'm done with. Yeah. So
• 21:34
  before I forget the place I wanted to mention before on Forbes, av is
• 21:40
  called from Friscos. So here's my thought process on what you just talked about.
• 21:48
  So a couple of things and a lot of people they use the word
• 21:51
  franchise and they sold out and all this other bullshit. And so here's the
• 21:55
  real deal. Sally's was purchased by a food service company and with the general
• 22:02
  thought of branching out locations, right, okay, which they've done, and
• 22:08
  they've done at a much slower pace than Peppies for a bunch of reasons.
• 22:15
  Now Peppies is still family owned, okay. And what a lot of people
• 22:21
  don't realize is that there were a bunch of families when they just had Worcester
• 22:25
  Street. There was a bunch of families. And there's a saying in business
• 22:29
  everyone's trying to stab at the same bowl. There are a bunch of family
• 22:33
  members that all worked at the one location, really too, because the spot
• 22:37
  behind them, right. But the bottom line is they wanted their family to
• 22:41
  be able to all make a living, so they got some investors, they
• 22:47
  got some money together. And I don't know the whole financial story behind it,
• 22:49
  nor is it any of my business. But the bottom line is a
• 22:52
  lot of these locations are now generally run by family members. I've heard people
• 23:00
  just like you say, I won't go to this one, I won't go
• 23:04
  to that one. It's not the same it's not everything. But here's the
• 23:07
  thing you don't have. They now have fourteen sate satellite or you know,
• 23:12
  whatever you want to call them, other locations. They're all in business,
• 23:17
  they're all doing well. Here's the thing. We got spoiled going to Worcester
• 23:23
  Street for a lot of years. What a lot of people don't realize is
• 23:27
  the places that they have, all these other locations. They don't have the
• 23:32
  background that we have. They're used to Papa John's, Papa Gino's, you
• 23:37
  know, Greek pizza. Not that it's particularly bad, but just it's very
• 23:40
  different. So when they go to the casino, or they go to the
• 23:45
  Worcester location, or they go to wherever, you know, Rhode Island,
• 23:48
  Massachusetts, they're in another world because there's nothing like that where they are.
• 23:56
  I think Sally's is probably, you know, having a little bit of a
• 24:02
  transition, you know, issue with what they're trying to do. The other
• 24:06
  thing people don't realize is that our New Haven style is charred and other people
• 24:14
  think it's burnt, which I don't really ever understand because barbecue is one of
• 24:18
  the most popular foods in the haldwide world, and mostly really good barbecue.
• 24:25
  I mean, they sell burnt ends. You know, a lot of barbecue
• 24:26
  is burned and there's a flavor that comes from that. But if you're not
• 24:30
  used to it, it's a challenge. I was involved with the pizza fest
• 24:37
  that we had a Bridgeport. I actually co sponsored it with connis Or Media
• 24:41
  and New Haven Pizza School. Where I'm going with this is we had a
• 24:45
  panel and it was called Icons and New Haven. So we had the consiglios
• 24:48
  from Sally's, We had Pat from Ernies, we had Lou from Abat,
• 24:57
  Francis from Frank Peppy who his mother was Peppi's daughter, and then we had
• 25:08
  Doug Coffin from Big Green Truck next door. But where I'm going with this
• 25:15
  is that one of the things that Francis said, he said, one of
• 25:18
  the problems that we have in our other locations is that people want a different
• 25:23
  pizza than what we want to give them. Like our signature pizza is charred,
• 25:30
  well done, thin, it's not round all the time. And he
• 25:33
  said, so we have, you know, we try to go somewhere in
• 25:38
  between because we have to have our ovens now at a different temperature. And
• 25:42
  what a lot of people don't realize is that these ovens are in art.
• 25:48
  They're true coal fired ovens. They're actually a fac simile of what they have
• 25:52
  down in the Haven, and it's a constant struggle. You can't take one
• 26:00
  hundred and something years of an oven and try to recreate that in you know,
• 26:06
  South Norwalk or the Casino. That's a great point, but I'm gonna
• 26:10
  unfortunately put a kabash to that thought. So here it is, so without
• 26:15
  getting too technical and talking about ovens, because I can probably talk your ear
• 26:18
  off about it. So those are commercial bread ovens one hundred plus years old.
• 26:26
  An oven like that has a metal frame, much like if you ever
• 26:30
  looked at I'm sure everyone has traveled along the highway and saw commercial buildings going
• 26:36
  up and houses have two by fours for framing, but commercial buildings have these
• 26:41
  big steel girders. So bottom line is there's a it's a big oven and
• 26:45
  it's got a big steel structure underneath, which you've never seen attached to that
• 26:51
  steel structure or firebricks, which is what the pizzas are made on their top.
• 26:56
  Bottom side when a lot of people don't realize is that, yes,
• 27:02
  the oven is original. The only thing that's original in the oven is the
• 27:06
  frame those firebricks. Because they are hot cold, hot, cold, hot
• 27:11
  cold, seven days a week through in sixty five days a year, ten
• 27:15
  years, twenty years, forty years, they get changed out. Yea,
• 27:18
  so those ovens have been changed out, guessing twenty times firebrick wise. So
• 27:29
  yes, it's the original footprint, it's the original metal frame. But the
• 27:34
  bricks themselves, the fire bricks absolutely not original. Okay, so great point.
• 27:45
  How about this? Then you take a Sally's. Just we'll focus on
• 27:48
  Sally's. Sally's opens up ten restaurants and let's say ten years. Want to
• 27:52
  hear it's almost like you go into a regular restaurant and you you order food
• 27:57
  that you were at all the time, and your dish comes out, your
• 28:02
  seafood risotto comes out and it's a little running today, or it's a little
• 28:04
  overcooked, or you know, it was Bob back there tonight. Na,
• 28:08
  Bob's not here tonight. I had a feeling Bob wasn't here tonight. Yeah,
• 28:11
  it's all right, it still tastes good, no problem. Blah blah
• 28:15
  blah. Is that the same in the pizza world, Like you got a
• 28:18
  guy that's starting the oven up in the morning he's making the dough. He's
• 28:23
  you know, he's basically prepping for the whole day. He's the guys.
• 28:27
  He does it six days a week, but on Sundays he likes to watch
• 28:30
  football. He's not there, and you're going on Sunday you get the pizza's
• 28:33
  like, you know, it's a B plus today, it's usually today.
• 28:37
  You know that has the factor into it. When you stretch yourself thin,
• 28:41
  well you hit the bull's eye. So I know you're in the restaurant business.
• 28:48
  A. The secret to the restaurant business, at least from a food
• 28:52
  standpoint, is consistency, right. So what's happened probably to both those places
• 28:57
  is that they had a group of people that worked at these places for ten,
• 29:02
  twenty, thirty forty years, and now all of a sudden, all
• 29:04
  those people are elsewhere at the other locations. The other thing, and you
• 29:11
  also know there's probably to be an issue, is that the labor pool is
• 29:15
  not great right now YEA for restaurants. So there's a difference between someone who
• 29:23
  makes pizza for a passion and someone who makes pizza for a paycheck. Passion
• 29:29
  paycheck very different, passion over paycheck every time, as a consumer, correct,
• 29:36
  but that's unfortunately not and I'm not saying all the people that either one
• 29:41
  of those places are not passionate or you know, but the bottom line is
• 29:45
  it goes from family owned seeing people making the pizza all the time to now
• 29:51
  you're hiring someone as a job. So it's not going to be the same,
• 29:59
  and yes, every day is going to be maybe a little bit different,
• 30:03
  but that's just a that's an issue not only with Salies and Peppies,
• 30:08
  but with a lot of places. Yeah, you know, I run this
• 30:11
  Facebook group called all about New Haven Style of Beats and I get, you
• 30:15
  know, at least once or twice a week pizzeria is coming on looking for
• 30:19
  help. And that's pizza makers, dishwashers, prep people, cashiers. I
• 30:30
  get calls all the time, Frank, do you know anyone to make you
• 30:33
  know? So it's a tough road. It's a tough game. Like we
• 30:38
  do. We do Pizza's stone Bridge and we had we've been doing it for
• 30:44
  I don't know, close to twenty years and we had two good stretches where
• 30:49
  we had the same guy every summer. You know. We only do it
• 30:52
  Friday, Saturdays, sometimes Sundays, depending on them, you know what's going
• 30:56
  on there, and it's late night and it's you know, goomed up,
• 31:00
  people grabbing slices and they think it's great. You know, we obviously lacking.
• 31:06
  Yeah, we actually lack, you know, we lack consistency there.
• 31:08
  I'm not, I'm not. I'll be the first to admit I think some
• 31:11
  days our pizzas fucking great. And we had this kid, Pete. Uh.
• 31:15
  He was our last guy that was there about six seven years and he
• 31:18
  left a couple of years ago and he started. I brought him down to
• 31:26
  dominic, uh, just to learn how to how to stretch the dough yea,
• 31:30
  And he picked it up quick. And the kid was great. He
• 31:34
  took pride in it. And we we were making some pie some nights and
• 31:40
  we were fucking taking pictures of him, sending them to bar stool like,
• 31:42
  yo, you gotta come down here. You know, never worked, but
• 31:45
  you know what, I appreciate his passion. But he ended up crazy like
• 31:48
  moved out to Thailand and he's teaching English now. One of those weird stories.
• 31:52
  But but uh, you know, now we got the kid Gabe,
• 31:56
  and Gabe you know, makes a great pie. But you know, it's
• 32:00
  just the inconsistency of you know, sometimes it's oversauce, sometimes it's you know,
• 32:06
  I don't know, it's it's fine. But you know, he also
• 32:09
  was a cook there too, so he's pulled in a couple of different directions
• 32:13
  and I get it. And uh, you know, with the weather,
• 32:15
  the way the weather has been wacky, it's like, you know, should
• 32:17
  I come in now, should I come in later? It's not a consistent
• 32:21
  pizza business there. It's more than an amenity for the crowd late night.
• 32:24
  You have to serve food. Sponge, yes, yeah, yeah, definitely
• 32:30
  sponge. We're going back to this. I almost got my ass kicked there
• 32:37
  one night. I got out of there quick. Uh so yeah, So
• 32:43
  like it's it's you know, you get into that consistent model and you know,
• 32:51
  I guess I was wrong about the ovens, but I don't know,
• 32:55
  like the and the shortness is that and turn over too, yeah, like
• 33:00
  I see it. As you know, we go through so many so much
• 33:04
  turnover there, and a lot of these young kids, these young busters,
• 33:07
  they're just they're there for the paycheck and they have to be told what to
• 33:13
  do at all times. Like they just don't pick it up. They don't
• 33:15
  get it, and that pains me the same. Moving forward in the future,
• 33:21
  what work ethic is going to be like, because I've been the same
• 33:24
  place for almost twenty five years and it's just not the same on that side
• 33:30
  of the ball, No, sir, it's a huge issue. One of
• 33:35
  the biggest questions people ask me all the time is why don't I open up
• 33:37
  my own pizzeria? And I basically tell him because I don't want a fucking
• 33:42
  headache, yep, And that's really what it would be. Yeah, it's
• 33:46
  a tough deal. It's a tough game, and I want to make sure
• 33:50
  I make this clear. You know, making pizza really any food, But
• 33:54
  because we're talking about pizza is an art form, you know, and I'm
• 34:00
  not trying to make this anything more than it is. But the bottom line
• 34:02
  is that, you know, you really have to know what you're doing,
• 34:07
  love what you're doing, and you know, have passion and every single pizza
• 34:12
  you make. And that's a hard person to find, yeah, because it's
• 34:15
  not you know, on a busy Friday, Saturday, Sunday, especially a
• 34:22
  Lent Friday, Lent and Friday, you know, a lot of these people
• 34:25
  are banging out hundreds of pizzas. Some of the big pizzerias are easily two
• 34:31
  three, five hundred some a thousand pizzas a night. Now, obviously that's
• 34:36
  not one person, but the bottom line is, and that's what people don't
• 34:38
  understand, you know. I always kind of laugh at this where people say,
• 34:43
  oh, I went there and it sucked, right, you know,
• 34:45
  I'm not going back or this, you know, but it's like the expectation
• 34:49
  is that every frigging pizza is gonna be I call a mona pizza like and
• 34:55
  it's just not reasonable. And then I say to myself, so you know,
• 35:00
  at your job, whatever you do, are you perfect? Do you
• 35:04
  pour the perfect drink every time? Do you pour? You know? Do
• 35:07
  you put enough water in the pot? And you know, I'm making this
• 35:10
  stuff up, but it's like everyone expects perfection, but most people are not
• 35:16
  perfect. Now I've been perfect a couple of times. Yeah, yeah,
• 35:21
  yeah, So you're the you're the one You're the one guy only a couple
• 35:25
  of times. So you see where this is going. Oh yeah, no,
• 35:29
  you're you're one hundred percent correct. I read food reviews all the time,
• 35:32
  like these people are a whack. Yeah, Like, what the fuck
• 35:35
  do you want. Yeah, especially with COVID hit and like, you know,
• 35:38
  like like I'll do Jimmy's for example, Yep, Jimmy's pizza went you
• 35:43
  know, strict obviously take out everyone had to do in the beginning. They
• 35:45
  stayed that way for a long time. Even when they were allowed to reopen,
• 35:49
  they stayed, you know, just take out. And you'd call that.
• 35:52
  Granted I work weekends, but my girlfriend would call on a Friday.
• 35:54
  I said, babe, call it four thirty. Just get the pizza in
• 35:58
  the house right because they're gonna they're gonna take the phone off the hook at
• 36:00
  five thirty because they're gonna be backed up fucking one hundred pizzas. And you
• 36:07
  just you gotta learn that game. And I know that game. So I'm
• 36:08
  like, you know, Friday, Saturday during COVID, calling your order a
• 36:13
  three thirty, go pick it up, reheat it later, you know,
• 36:16
  like, yeah, tell him, don't cut it, don't slice it,
• 36:19
  you need to put it in the oven or three quarter cook it, whatever
• 36:22
  you want them to do. Yeah, and uh, you know so and
• 36:25
  then people are, oh, Jimmy's has gone downhill or this place isn't the
• 36:30
  same, And I am guilty of that with Peppies at the casino. But
• 36:36
  I've had like it was like five straight times. With a fourth time,
• 36:39
  I was like really drunk, and I'm like, all right, I'll give
• 36:42
  him one more shot. And I was like, Jesus Christ, they did
• 36:45
  it. They didn't cut my two pizzas once. They didn't cut them.
• 36:47
  I got up, I got up to the room and I had to pull
• 36:52
  out my fucking pocket night I got it for everyone, and that was it.
• 36:58
  I'm done. But it makes for a good story. Oh it's a
• 37:00
  great story. I just don't want it. To tell it again, or
• 37:01
  you know, or tell a different one with them. I'm sure I'll order
• 37:05
  again. I love Peppi's pizza. I'm not here shitting on them. I
• 37:08
  think the whole point is, you know, when you franchise out or whatever
• 37:13
  you want to call it, you're gonna run into this because you don't have
• 37:16
  your your family's not there. You may have your fami like a family member
• 37:20
  running the place, but they're not there twenty four to seven, and you
• 37:24
  know, and you're hiring kids that live up in Montville, you know,
• 37:27
  and they don't fucking know, and they're there for the paycheck and I always
• 37:30
  say, you know, hell if if you you know, Peppi's is now.
• 37:36
  So there was Frank Peppi, there are kids, so I think there
• 37:38
  are three, if not four generations of Peppi slash Roselli. But my point
• 37:46
  being is what an honor to start a business over one hundred years ago and
• 37:52
  still have it rolling and now have ten or twelve or however many family members
• 37:59
  involved in the business. That's a freaking amazing success. There's always going to
• 38:04
  be people that are gonna be bitch moon to complain about something. You're just
• 38:07
  simply never gonna be able to make everyone happy, no never. I mean,
• 38:12
  we put on that pizza fest a month or so ago. It was
• 38:15
  a shitty day, it was raining, there was a tornado weather for you
• 38:19
  know, and we got all different kinds of things and the ticket price into
• 38:22
  this and that, but you know what, we had three four thousand people
• 38:25
  packed in that place on a probably one of the shittiest days of the year.
• 38:30
  And the point being is, yes we had people that complained, and
• 38:34
  yes we did some things not well, but we did a lot of things
• 38:37
  really well, right, And so with the elements, just like just go
• 38:40
  with the flow. People Yeah, it's like, yeah, people convince about
• 38:45
  the dumbage shit. Well, people like the bitch right, That's truly what
• 38:51
  it boils down through. There's a lot of Karen's and better the male version
• 38:54
  is what is the male version? I think I read it the other day,
• 39:00
  Joe. I don't know, Bob, Bob. I think you're probably
• 39:04
  Karen and Bob. It's not Frank, No, it's not Frank. Kurt.
• 39:09
  How we'll do Kurt, Kurt and Karen. Okay, all right,
• 39:13
  before we get into our little rundown, we haven't really talked about a pizza
• 39:16
  school yet, So explain it, like, is can anyone sign up?
• 39:21
  Is it classes? Is it or in person? Is it? One on
• 39:23
  one? What do we got? So I'll tell you a little bit about
• 39:27
  the pizza school. So, again, being a serial entrepreneur coming out of
• 39:31
  an IT world background, I took three things that I love to do.
• 39:37
  One is to talk, two is to teach, and three is to make
• 39:42
  new Haven style pizza. I put him in a bowl, mixed him up
• 39:45
  and came up with new Haven Pizza School. Started at about a year and
• 39:50
  three months ago. The first two or three months, a lot of what
• 39:52
  I did was go to people's houses and to give you kind of a general
• 39:57
  idea. Every class is kind of the same thing, but just a different
• 40:00
  size and place. I start with a little history of Newhaven Pizza. I
• 40:06
  go over how to make the dough, how to make the sauce, how
• 40:08
  to bawl the dough, stretch the dough, assemble the pizza, launch it,
• 40:13
  bake it, eat it. And then everyone knew you can do at
• 40:15
  home in your own oven or you need to get everything is home centric cool.
• 40:21
  So ninety nine point nine percent of people are all consumers homeowners. I
• 40:27
  go over what you need to do with your home oven, what you need
• 40:30
  to have, how to bake it, what a lot of people tell me,
• 40:35
  And it's kind of was My goal was to create an experience. You
• 40:39
  know, I get a lot of couples, I get a lot of date
• 40:42
  nights, I get a lot of families. One of the big things that's
• 40:45
  really happening, it kind of happened, I call it serendipitously, is I'm
• 40:51
  starting to do a lot of team building events. So I have my brick
• 40:53
  and mortar, which is what I call my class standard classroom that you know,
• 40:58
  anyone could come to obviously you have to sign up and pay for it
• 41:02
  before. It's not just a show up event. But I have my brick
• 41:06
  and mortar classes which I do at next Door in the Haven and now Nautilus
• 41:09
  and Milford. Yeah, I started last month. I'm doing one a month.
• 41:15
  Cool, I'm I'm in, I'm coming out and checking it out.
• 41:19
  Nine to eleven's the next one. I have a golf tournament that day,
• 41:22
  so let me Well it's at night, but you'll probably shift. But every
• 41:28
  month I'm gonna do one down there, and you know again, brick and
• 41:30
  mortar team building events. I've done a bunch for Harford Healthcare and a couple
• 41:36
  other places. I have a bunch coming up. I do Uney training wood
• 41:39
  fired oven training. A lot of people was that first one training? What's
• 41:44
  that? Unei is a small little portable oven and there's all different kinds of
• 41:49
  small portable ovens. But the problem with those types of ovens or that they're
• 41:52
  made for a specific style of pizza, which is called Neopolitan. So neapolitan
• 41:58
  is uh that thick? Yeah, it's kind of Zonelli makes Neopolitan pizza on
• 42:06
  most but StrEG I think, and they're very good. Yeah, they're just
• 42:13
  different. Yeah, so I do any training, portable oven training, wood
• 42:17
  fired oven training, and I've actually done probably two or three restaurants who want
• 42:23
  to start doing New Haven style pizza. So that's really kind of the pizza
• 42:30
  school in general. I've been super, super lucky and humbled to have gotten
• 42:37
  a tremendous amount of press in the last year. I've been on Channel eight
• 42:42
  three times, Channel three twice, Fox sixty one News twelve from page article
• 42:49
  in the Register, I had an article in the Wall Street Journal about two
• 42:53
  months ago. I got interviewed about a month ago for the Washington Post.
• 42:59
  That article is gonna come out soon. I've got none of those. I've
• 43:07
  got a New Haven Pizza book in the works and a New Haven Pizza podcast
• 43:13
  coming nice. We're gonna run that out of probably I'm gonna do that with
• 43:16
  Connoisseur Media, So you know, whether it's Start ninety nine or whatever,
• 43:22
  decide they decided to do it on. Yeah, so what's what's obviously pizza,
• 43:25
  but what's like the platform behind it, Well, that's still in the
• 43:30
  works, but we want to kind of do it like remember back in the
• 43:32
  eighties and nineties where they had the fan you know the talk show. Yeah,
• 43:37
  I mean, which isn't anything different than probably what most people do nowadays.
• 43:40
  But that's really what's gonna be. It's gonna be a subject topic.
• 43:44
  We're gonna have maybe a pizzeria come down, bring a couple of pizzas,
• 43:46
  do like a little review, talk to the owner, get the history bs
• 43:51
  with them, and you know it's gonna be like New Haven versus New York
• 43:55
  pizza. People are gonna be able to call in give their opinions. That's
• 44:00
  generally speaking, what it's going to be about. Nice. So what is
• 44:07
  obviously New Haven is your number one? What's style pizza? Do you rank
• 44:10
  them? But do you have a second favorite? Because I do? And
• 44:14
  you're probably gonna laugh at any when I tell you about Chicago? Is it
• 44:19
  deep dish? We didn't get to me yet, We're on you. I'm
• 44:24
  trying to turn this baby. I'm turning it. So I will tell you
• 44:30
  that my second favorite pizza outside of New Heath is your next pizza? Right,
• 44:37
  is actually a Detroit pie? Oh come on, yeah, man,
• 44:40
  you're gonna bust my balls over Chicago. Is this a battle Chicago or Detroit?
• 44:45
  Yeah? Detroit's it? So I got a guy that helps me at
• 44:51
  the pizza school. Guy's name is John, and he turned me on to
• 44:55
  this other style called tavern style, which is really good too. What a
• 45:00
  lot of people don't know, and quite honestly, up until probably about five
• 45:04
  years ago, I didn't know either. Truth be told, is you know
• 45:07
  they're twenty to thirty plus different pizza styles in the whole world. Yeah,
• 45:13
  Neopolitan and New York being two of the most popular. What a lot of
• 45:16
  people don't realize is really outside of Connecticut, in New England, a lot
• 45:21
  of people don't know about New Haven style, right. You know, it's
• 45:23
  starting to grow, It's in Florida. It's I travel, I see some
• 45:28
  spots yep, yep, and it's getting there. But you know, I
• 45:30
  don't fucking want them to know. Seriously. I could give a fuck if
• 45:35
  they fucking know, fucking stay out in Idaho and eat your fucking Greek style.
• 45:39
  Seriously, Like, if you come here, like people that come from
• 45:44
  out of town, yeah and come to stone Bridge, I direct them right
• 45:46
  to New Haven. Or if they're like they don't want to go into the
• 45:49
  city, they go to some parties in West Haven. Easy parking on the
• 45:52
  street, you get a great pie. But like, I'm cool with keeping
• 45:55
  it here. I know they want to expand, but yeah, no,
• 46:00
  that's the thing, you know, I mean, yeah, and we're here
• 46:05
  for the pizza. Shut up. Yeah so so I could so, yes,
• 46:10
  Chicago style. I just always liked deep dish. I went to Chicago,
• 46:15
  went to I think we went to Luminatis. It was one of the
• 46:17
  two big ones. I think it was Luminatis we went to, and I
• 46:22
  just, I just I don't even consider pizza anymore. No, no,
• 46:24
  it's not pizza. It really isn't. I agree, it's castle, but
• 46:29
  I love it's just the sausage and the sauce and it's fucking forking knife and
• 46:34
  it's delicious. But honestly, like, I think second favorite for me would
• 46:39
  probably be, like, honestly, I don't mind Greek style, only because
• 46:44
  you kind of grew up on it. Like pretty much every pizza you got
• 46:46
  delivered when you were younger, it was Greek style, right for the most
• 46:51
  part. Uh, I ate a lot of Papa Ginos as a kid,
• 46:54
  never liked dominos, never liked Papa John's hot. Yeah, well there's your
• 47:00
  deep dish right there now. Detroit style, I always thought was Sicilian?
• 47:07
  Is that the same? Well, it's similar, it's similar, like almost
• 47:12
  like Pizza Hut brought Detroit style pizza into like the the American lexicon with their
• 47:15
  commercials. I'm like, what the fuck is Detroit style? Detroit style is
• 47:20
  made and a very specific pan with a very specific cheese brick. Cheese is
• 47:24
  what actually lines the side of one, and then the sauce is on top
• 47:29
  and it doesn't go on top until the pizza's done, and so it's got
• 47:31
  its own little you know, you can consider it pizza though, because you're
• 47:37
  though, Yeah, but Sicilian's pizza, and it's the same, it's the
• 47:40
  same kind of thing. So why do you why do you call Chicago pizza
• 47:44
  not pizza? Then I didn't say, yes you did. He said it's
• 47:46
  a castle roll because Chicago actually is made with like a pie crust. It's
• 47:52
  not even dull. So it's really you don't want to go there. I'm
• 47:58
  telling you, well, no, I'm gonna lose to you in this debate,
• 48:00
  obviously, but I gotta fight my fight. But listen, in all
• 48:05
  in all fairness, when Pizzeria Uno was down the street or in Milford,
• 48:09
  yeah, you know, I went there certainly a couple of times a year
• 48:14
  for something completely different. Mashed potato. Yeah, I mean that thing was
• 48:19
  pretty good. Oh yeah yeah. It was like it was like an appetizer
• 48:22
  though. It was like it was like a mini self served mashed potato on
• 48:25
  top of their pizza crust. Yeah yeah, but I enjoyed it. You
• 48:30
  know, it was really heavy, but it was tasty what I wanted every
• 48:34
  day. Absolutely not the question I had for you. You might not want
• 48:37
  to answer this, but I'm gonna ask you anyway. Colony. I got
• 48:42
  thoughts on Colony when they first moved to Milford. I'll be the first to
• 48:47
  admit that I was just going off of what everyone else was saying because I
• 48:51
  had never had it before, and it was nine percent negative, ten percent
• 48:54
  positive. I would go there to my friend's work there still due to this
• 49:00
  day, and I wouldn't even order pizza, just go there and drink.
• 49:02
  And then I ordered a pizza one night and I was like, you know
• 49:07
  what, this is fine. Then I took some for takeout, and here's
• 49:10
  here's my thing with Colony. Eat it there. Sure, it's fine.
• 49:15
  I think it's got good. I still think they kind of like give you
• 49:20
  the middle finger when you order a topping and they just like throw like three
• 49:22
  sizes of pepperoniani and charge with three dollars seriously, or sausage or any of
• 49:28
  these toppings. But yet you order olives and you can't even see your pizza.
• 49:31
  Uh, I'm okay with it. It grew on me. But like
• 49:37
  I said, if I don't finish the pizza, I'm not taking the rest
• 49:39
  home. I'm not taking it home. I'm not. I have to eat
• 49:43
  it there it turns into cardboard. Yeah. Yeah, So you know,
• 49:50
  we will probably eventually talk about Portnoy. But my feeling with Colony is the
• 49:54
  same way I feel about Portnoy as a business person. I think what Colony
• 50:01
  did, and I think there's five partners. I think one of them's a
• 50:05
  hockey player. I have a tremendous amountorspect for them because they kill it and
• 50:12
  they laugh every time they go to the bank. Do you know why they
• 50:15
  kill it? Well, one of the reasons, I just say why,
• 50:17
  I don't. I don't know their formula, but the kids love it.
• 50:21
  They packed. I don't know about other towns, but they get all the
• 50:24
  little league teams after basketball, like those they cater to a lot of those
• 50:30
  kids like and and you know you'll see tables at twenty fucking twenty pies going
• 50:35
  out. That's a fucking four tab right there, and a lot of booze
• 50:38
  they sell. Yeah, and you know, the place is beautiful inside,
• 50:44
  it's open, it's clean, it's got a lot of character to it.
• 50:49
  But a lot of people don't know that. Obviously, the original colony was
• 50:51
  from Stanford, and so you know, I think they bought that person out
• 50:55
  or you know, getting the whole background, I'm not one hundred percent sure.
• 50:59
  But so the actual pizza itself again, I agree, definitely got to
• 51:02
  beat in there. It's just so different from New Haven style that you know,
• 51:09
  again it's a one or two time a year. It never trusted the
• 51:13
  pie that is so uniform every fucking time it comes out. Well, that's
• 51:15
  because it's sheeted and it's made in a pizza form pan, right. So,
• 51:21
  and that's the thing, you know, I used to work at Marriott.
• 51:22
  We did a pizza hut there. Conveyor belt boom, Yeah, like
• 51:25
  that much oil on the bottom of the pan. Yeah, you throw it.
• 51:29
  It came out perfect every time. But I think it's like everything else
• 51:32
  people who love or hate it. Yeah, you know, to me,
• 51:36
  if I go there, I get a pizza. Yeah, I mean I'm
• 51:38
  yeah, why not. Absolutely, it's certainly not bad. You get eat
• 51:42
  it all the way to the crust. It's just different. Yeah, it's
• 51:44
  just different, you know. And it has grown on me though. But
• 51:47
  like I said, I'm not I'm not taking it home now. Is that
• 51:51
  before drinking or after drinking? I'll go there over? No, yeah,
• 51:54
  I'll eat it sober like we Actually the last two years we've gone there for
• 51:59
  my birthday to start. We all met there and then we go over to
• 52:01
  Citrus and bounce around town. But yeah, we'll get like four or five
• 52:04
  pies before we really get after it. And you know, I can eat
• 52:07
  a whole pie too, just fucking those are scoobies. Yeah yeah, yeah,
• 52:12
  all right, we'll get into PORTINOI right now. But first, what's
• 52:14
  your favorite topping on a pie? Favorite topping on a pie? Would one
• 52:19
  topping? That's it? You're not gonna like this answer. You don't say
• 52:22
  anchovies or olives or mushrooms garlic? Oh all right, that's not I don't
• 52:28
  count that as a topping, like like a meter vegetable kind of topping,
• 52:31
  pepperoni or bacon or two my favorites. Yep, I'll tell you that.
• 52:37
  One of the pies, and it's non traditional New Haven, but a New
• 52:40
  Haven style that still to this day absolutely blues me out of the water.
• 52:50
  Root thirty four tipsy tomato. I haven't been there yet. I gotta go.
• 52:53
  Stuffed shrimp pie. Oh wow, will change your fucking life? Yeah,
• 53:00
  how's it changed your life? I love I love seafood, I love
• 53:05
  shrimp, and I love a real buttery, crackery, filling taste and it
• 53:09
  clicks all the buttons for me. It's amazing. These shrimps cooked well the
• 53:20
  so it's like the stuffing spread along with the pizza. It's basically it's basically
• 53:23
  a stuff shrimp but decommissioned kind of pizza, de constructed on the pizza.
• 53:29
  That's awesome. So that is I'm gonna give every game. That's the deal,
• 53:34
  dude. Another place that I absolutely love is Ernie's and Wally have their
• 53:42
  meat ballpie is to die for. The cool thing about Ernie's and you talked
• 53:47
  to we were talking before about consistency. Pat who owns it, Pat the
• 53:52
  Rizzo, He's the only person that's made pizza there the last thirty forty years,
• 53:59
  So you can't get any more consistent than Ernie's because he's the other one
• 54:04
  who makes pizza period. And the story is Peppi's your favorite only because like
• 54:12
  you've moved from Sally's the Peppi's. Granted it was because of family. So
• 54:15
  yeah, you know, it would be a real It would be a really
• 54:21
  close tie with Sally's and Peppi's because I have a lot of history and a
• 54:24
  lot of memories at both of those places. Yeah, like Sally's New Haven
• 54:30
  Plane, which is basically the dough, the sauce, pecorino, and again
• 54:35
  I put garlic on it. It's freaking phenomenal. And I actually get a
• 54:39
  real interesting pie at Peppi's. I actually get a New Haven Plane and I
• 54:45
  have them put roasted chicken on it, so it's something very different and it's
• 54:50
  not on the menu. I ask them to make it for me. And
• 54:52
  I'm not anyone special down there, but they'll do anything anyone wants, you
• 54:54
  know. I know they're known for their clam pie, and I like their
• 54:58
  clam pie. Just don't I'm not a big claim person in general, but
• 55:06
  you know they're they're both just on a good day. They're hard to be.
• 55:10
  Yeah, all right, let's get into him. He's been coming up
• 55:14
  in conversation a little bit. The one Yeah day Portner el President day.
• 55:21
  Now funny we were saying this before the show. He actually yesterday, just
• 55:23
  yesterday, shocker. Uh, he bought back bar Stool Sports from Penn Media.
• 55:30
  Now Pen Media bought there was like another churn Off group whatever this whole
• 55:37
  thing read online. But he sold to pen about four years ago and you
• 55:45
  know, kept kept the CEO, kept the president role, like you know,
• 55:47
  they had some agreement in line. But over the last year he started
• 55:52
  to realize the mistake he made. Uh, they were kind of basically silencing
• 55:57
  him a little bit. He had to fire one of his best best guys,
• 56:00
  Mincy. I mean Mincy kind of sucked up said the N word,
• 56:04
  but he said it a while reading a song or like just you know,
• 56:07
  singing to a song. Didn't realize he was on camera. I don't know
• 56:10
  who the story, but they had to fire him. Then they made him
• 56:14
  take down stuff in his store that was deemed controversial. So I kind of
• 56:19
  knew this writing was on the wall. I just thought he would leave,
• 56:21
  to be honest with you, But ESPN bought Pen. Long story short,
• 56:24
  I'm assuming somewhere in that deal, you know, Portnoy want nothing to do
• 56:28
  with ESPN. They hate each other. ESPN probably wants nothing to do with
• 56:30
  him. They probably went to Pen and said, listen, get rid of
• 56:35
  the bar stool side of it and we'll buy you. So they probably gave
• 56:38
  a sweetheart deal to Dave to buy it back. And that's where we stand
• 56:43
  today. But obviously everyone knows Dave through the one bite. Everyone knows the
• 56:46
  rules pizza stuff and his reviews. I watched him. He just he ran
• 56:52
  through Milfredy to Papa's back in May or June. You know, I think
• 56:59
  he's a little above his you know, they were cool when he wasn't as
• 57:01
  well known. I think he brings a lot of I would say, you
• 57:07
  know, like for the smaller places that he visits, it's great for them.
• 57:10
  I think it's publicity. It's free. From what I understand, I
• 57:14
  don't think anyone pays for it. Uh. And he's kind of created a
• 57:21
  you know, an awareness to you know, obviously brought a good awareness to
• 57:23
  New Haven style. He called it at the pizza capital of the world.
• 57:28
  What are your what are your thoughts on him? And I don't know what
• 57:31
  what do you think? Have you ever met him? I never met him,
• 57:36
  So here are my thoughts. And I think this is very fair.
• 57:39
  And people say, oh, you don't like him because you do pizza reviews,
• 57:42
  and but yeah, and that's not true. But here's my here's my
• 57:46
  thoughts. So as a business person myself, I have a huge, huge,
• 57:52
  huge amount of respect for Dave Portnoy, what he's built, what he's
• 57:58
  done, how he's done. So from that perspective, huge respect from a
• 58:07
  pizza perspective, And I'm gonna clearly, more clearly define this as a you
• 58:13
  know, he's not a pizza guy, meaning he's probably never made a pizza
• 58:17
  in his life or knows very little bit about it. He's a personality,
• 58:22
  he's an influencer. You cannot argue with what he's done good for a lot
• 58:29
  of places. What other people don't know is that the places that he's gone
• 58:34
  given not so great reviews have had unfortunately just the opposite effect. But no
• 58:38
  one ever ever talks about that. They just talk about the places that he's
• 58:43
  blown up. So listen in fairness business, a lot of respect as a
• 58:50
  pizza person, not particularly a lot of respect. The thing that really bothers
• 58:53
  me more than anything is again kind of being a technical pizza person and it
• 59:00
  kind of a maybe growing pizza personality. And I've had my own pizzaiha,
• 59:06
  so to speak, is mobile pizza business. Once you put a pizza in
• 59:12
  a box, it's a different game. So the fact that he's doing pizza
• 59:17
  reviews out of a box and some of them have been sitting in there for
• 59:21
  five minutes, ten minutes, twenty minutes, maybe longer, it's unfair and
• 59:25
  it's not really the correct way to do it. And I'm not too my
• 59:32
  own horn because there's Dave Portnoy and you can't see me, but Dave Portnoy
• 59:37
  is way up on the scale and the pizza Gavones is weighed down on the
• 59:39
  bottom of the scale. But one of my opening lines when I do my
• 59:44
  intro is all my reviews are of him fresh pies, never anything out of
• 59:49
  a box. So that's kind of how I feel about him. He's gold.
• 59:55
  I mean, you know, what I feel and what he does are
• 59:59
  two different things. People either love him or hate him, And my thought
• 1:00:02
  process for doing my pizza reviews was I was never trying to compete with Dave
• 1:00:07
  Portnoy, because that would be foolish. I just wanted to get all the
• 1:00:09
  people that didn't like him. So if there were five or ten million people
• 1:00:14
  that love Dave Portnoy, there were five or ten ten million people that hated
• 1:00:17
  him, and I'm trying to kind of get those people. Right. It's
• 1:00:22
  funny because you know, I watched them and like when he went through Milford,
• 1:00:27
  when he went to Papa's, I think it was his first time in
• 1:00:29
  Milford. Reading all the comments when it finally came out, you know,
• 1:00:35
  and like it was funny. It was like it literally is. It's like
• 1:00:37
  it's like fucking Republicans and Democrats. If they know him, they love them.
• 1:00:40
  If they don't, who the fuck is this guy? And it was
• 1:00:43
  like right down the middle of fifty fifty I was just reading. I just
• 1:00:45
  laugh. I'm like, you know, I happen to know him, Like
• 1:00:47
  I said, I don't mind him. Uh you know, like you said,
• 1:00:52
  his reviews are from a box. I think at the where he is
• 1:00:57
  now, it almost has to be like he can't go I want to sit
• 1:01:00
  in a restaurant and not be bombarded with a fucking a gazillion people and a
• 1:01:02
  big media fucking frenzy. So I get it why he does it now.
• 1:01:06
  But but back in the day before anyone know him, he probably should have
• 1:01:08
  been doing it straight off and then his things one by everyone knows the rules,
• 1:01:12
  but he takes twenty. Yeah, well, I think that's the that's
• 1:01:15
  the joke behind it. I think, you know, But I now I
• 1:01:17
  see all these others, like some guy from like Ireland who does him.
• 1:01:21
  He was at Modern and uh, there's this. This is one guy.
• 1:01:24
  This is one guy ran across He's he either lives in Canada or Buffalo,
• 1:01:30
  one of the two. I can't figure out. Dude. And he's like
• 1:01:35
  and he only gets pepperoni. Yeah, and he's got like this mulidi with
• 1:01:40
  this you know, this Canadian accent. So he's probably from Canada and he's
• 1:01:45
  fucking ho like he just I don't think he realizes that he's funny. He's
• 1:01:51
  naturally that, yeah he is. He's just like he's just kind of goofy
• 1:01:53
  stick. Yeah, he doesn't anybody like puts a pizza up all good flop
• 1:01:57
  this and that he goes these random places no one's ever heard of, and
• 1:02:00
  obviously, well I'm not from Buffalo or Canada. Yeah, but there's one
• 1:02:05
  thing that I always pick up from him, and that's the cup and char
• 1:02:09
  pepperoni. And right when I heard him say it, I knew exactly what
• 1:02:14
  he meant. But I've never heard that term before. Yeah, and I
• 1:02:17
  kind of look for that. I don't see that around here. Yeah,
• 1:02:21
  it depends, you know, the problem with the cup and char. A
• 1:02:22
  lot of people will know there's a lot of different types of pepperoni, and
• 1:02:27
  there's a lot of different grades and qualities of pepperoni. So the best I
• 1:02:30
  always tell people in my classes, the smallest stick you can buy that you
• 1:02:35
  have to cut is probably usually the best quality. A lot of the pepperoni
• 1:02:38
  that a lot of pizzerias sell or put on their pies are all, you
• 1:02:44
  know, in a bag or so that's just I'll call it garden variety pepperoni.
• 1:02:50
  But there's a place in Vermont actually quote Vermont Smoking Cure, which I
• 1:02:55
  think is probably the best pepperoni that I've ever tasted. And there's zo which
• 1:03:00
  I forget it's made in the United States, But there's a place called Pennsylvania
• 1:03:06
  Macaroni company that sells it or one of their distributors. I brought it from
• 1:03:08
  there. Bottom line, cup and chart is a very specific pepperoni. It's
• 1:03:13
  definitely more on the expensive side, which is more than likely why a lot
• 1:03:15
  of places don't use. It's a little thicker. I must think it's like
• 1:03:20
  a little smaller in diameter. It cooks, it's what it does. It
• 1:03:23
  kind of becomes a little cup and it's got a casing on it. When
• 1:03:28
  it's heated actually shrinks the circle and so it cuts up. And the cool
• 1:03:32
  part about it is the edge of the pepperoni, if done correctly, has
• 1:03:37
  that little blackens. Yeah. Yeah, so yes, And I've had it
• 1:03:40
  before and I'm like that, like I appreciate a good pepperoni, like colony.
• 1:03:45
  It's just a big like fucking yeah. I think they shaved that shit
• 1:03:49
  thinner than they're shaving garlic and good fellas. I swear to God, like
• 1:03:52
  the cynegrates full it off that poorly cutting the I have seen that thing,
• 1:04:03
  man. But yeah, so that guy's funny. I don't know. Oh
• 1:04:08
  he always starts out with we're here, and I'm like, oh, this
• 1:04:11
  fucking Canadian dude keeps coming over my feet, so I just said, fucking
• 1:04:14
  I subscribed to him. Yeah, but I gotta I gotta see some of
• 1:04:17
  your reviews. Yeah, you know, I mean since i've what's your favorite,
• 1:04:20
  what's like your favorite like not pizza, but like your favorite place you've
• 1:04:24
  been do you did the review and like, god man, that was awesome.
• 1:04:28
  There there are several of them, you know, the one that the
• 1:04:31
  ones, that couple of ones that stick out are you know Grandad Beach.
• 1:04:35
  I did it in Madison, and I was just blown away because I never
• 1:04:42
  heard of him. I never knew how much they had history wise, and
• 1:04:45
  the pizza's absolutely frigging phenomenal. Yeah, same thing with uh Ernie's. You
• 1:04:53
  know, I actually used to work down the street from Ernie's in my twenties.
• 1:04:56
  I worked at this place called Bill's Carousel ice cream shop, and we
• 1:05:00
  used to get pizza from Ernie's. But back then I was just like,
• 1:05:02
  I was just hungry and I ate it. But it's a really cool place
• 1:05:06
  in there. It's like a throwback from the sixties or seventies, you know,
• 1:05:10
  the panel walls, the uh you know, it's just a cool place.
• 1:05:13
  And another place that's fantastic is next door on Humphrey Street in the Haven,
• 1:05:18
  which is where I do a lot of my classes. Yeah, Humphreys
• 1:05:23
  East. Yeah, Well, a lot of people don't know about that place.
• 1:05:26
  Is that everyone at least in Connecticut knows about the Big Green Truck.
• 1:05:30
  Doug Coffin started it twenty years ago, So he sold the Big Green Truck
• 1:05:34
  and he opened up next door. So if people like Big Green Truck pizza
• 1:05:40
  but don't want to wait for the next Big Green Truck party, they can
• 1:05:44
  go down to the next door and get the same pizza on the truck there.
• 1:05:48
  And that's a really you know, Doug is just probably one of the
• 1:05:51
  most genuine, nicest people I ever met in my life. He is very
• 1:06:00
  supportive of what I do. And what a lot of people don't know is
• 1:06:03
  that he actually does his own pizza making classes. So I have a ton
• 1:06:08
  of respect for someone that basically not that I'm particularly competition, but is doing
• 1:06:13
  the same thing he's doing allowing me to do it at his place. Right,
• 1:06:16
  That's the kind of person that he is. Yeah, No, that's
• 1:06:19
  that's a great point I used to get. You brought it up earlier.
• 1:06:23
  Was it was in Passing when you're talking about Wister Street, but at Oh
• 1:06:27
  yeah, and I used to work in New Haven. I was. I
• 1:06:30
  was in college, so I was like twenty twenty twenty two five, that's
• 1:06:35
  when I graduated. It was my freshman year. I was working at the
• 1:06:42
  where was the hell? I was at that New Haven Financial Center or whatever
• 1:06:45
  with the pyramid on top. I was a security guard there. Yeah,
• 1:06:48
  downtown, was a security guard right, work in the three to eleven shift.
• 1:06:50
  Sure, Me and the other guy's got nick. We would order abots
• 1:06:55
  two or three times a week, whether it's pizza or you know, or
• 1:06:57
  dinners or whatever. But brought some memories there. I've never I've been back
• 1:07:00
  to that place since I worked down there. But it's funny you mentioned that
• 1:07:03
  because lu a Bat who owns it. He was the craziest guy ever interviewed
• 1:07:11
  ever. Because I do similar what you do with my review. So I
• 1:07:14
  go in there, sit down, get to pizza's review them, talk about
• 1:07:16
  the place, and then I sit down with the owners. So that's the
• 1:07:19
  people plays personality. So I talked to every one of the owners and lou
• 1:07:24
  Is just they broke the mold when they made him he's funny. He's a
• 1:07:30
  magician. He did magic tricks for us. He made this pizza pop out
• 1:07:34
  of a team. Can I mean just you you can just see where where
• 1:07:39
  we're going. Yea, And he is just he was the craziest review I've
• 1:07:44
  ever done. Nice, I got it. It's funny when you think of
• 1:07:46
  Worcester Street, I feel I don't feel bad. I know they all do
• 1:07:48
  well down there, but from an outsider standpoint, Oh it's Peppi's and Sally's.
• 1:07:54
  Well just get past those, you know, And then you got the
• 1:07:57
  Italian ice place. What's up? Libby's on your left, and like you,
• 1:08:00
  what's the one on the end, and Ellis is across the street?
• 1:08:02
  Trace like, there's so many good Ye it's a it's a historic street.
• 1:08:10
  I always used to say, it's probably the one street in New Haven where
• 1:08:14
  you don't have to lock your car. Yes, it's self governed on that
• 1:08:16
  street. Yeah, there's so much traffic and so many people moving in and
• 1:08:20
  out. Yeah it's crazy. But all right, so this is all so
• 1:08:27
  we did that. We got the Pizza school, you got the go bones
• 1:08:30
  with the reviews. You're doing a lot of stuff. You got your I
• 1:08:32
  t business. Still got a lot of stuff hands, a lot of a
• 1:08:35
  lot of things going on over there. There's no moss that grows under my
• 1:08:39
  yet, right, great, that's awesome. So you're gonna join me from
• 1:08:43
  our little rundown at the end here. Yeah, all right, some random
• 1:08:46
  shit that crosses my dumbass mind. I read like maybe two months ago that
• 1:08:51
  if you type the word fucking and it goes to ducking on your phone,
• 1:08:55
  that they stopped that it's not true because I typed it today and ducking came
• 1:08:59
  up. I don't know. I actually literally, I'm not even joking.
• 1:09:01
  I read that like that they're gonna because then there was like memes and it
• 1:09:04
  was like I never once meant ducking. Well, it's funny you mentioned that,
• 1:09:10
  because I swear to god, I type not all the time, but
• 1:09:14
  I type a lot of texts I'm sure we all do, and always it
• 1:09:16
  auto corrects to ducking. Yeah. But then what I what I've figured out
• 1:09:20
  is that as soon as I type fucking on the left hand side, at
• 1:09:25
  least on an iPhone, if you hit the word, it won't auto correct,
• 1:09:28
  right. I haven't gotten used to that yet, that yet. Yeah,
• 1:09:30
  But you're right, Yeah, it's the middle one that they'll switch to.
• 1:09:33
  Yeah, or I just put in fostrophe. I just say fuck you
• 1:09:40
  mega millions hit last night ye one point six million, and I think our
• 1:09:44
  billion in Florida. Yes, I played, so I don't ever play.
• 1:09:47
  So I played. What was last night? Tuesday? I played Saturday.
• 1:09:51
  I bought ten tickets. I played yesterday. I bought ten tickets. In
• 1:09:56
  twenty tickets, I hit one number. That's it. I matched one number
• 1:10:00
  in twenty tickets. Wit something for that, like it was my money back.
• 1:10:06
  Well, like if you if you if you bet one hundred or you
• 1:10:10
  bet a dollar for a hundred tickets, you should get like a five dollar
• 1:10:14
  coupon or something. Yeah, like Keino, Like if you play like ten
• 1:10:16
  numbers in Keno and hit zero, you get like your money back, like
• 1:10:19
  your dollar back, you know, like one out of Oh my god,
• 1:10:23
  I'm like, there's no one to no one wins. But that lottery system
• 1:10:26
  is probably one of the biggest scams. It is such bullshit. And then
• 1:10:29
  the thing that I'm gonna lump summit, and then the fucking yeah you know
• 1:10:31
  they're gonna collect fucking five hundred million dollars. The thing that I laugh about
• 1:10:35
  when you see the commercials on TV or radio is then they have another commercial
• 1:10:41
  following it about gamblings. I'm like, come on, dude, you watch
• 1:10:47
  like it's it's so funny watching the progressions over the years and with gambling,
• 1:10:51
  like it used to be like when we were in college and high school,
• 1:10:55
  it was like, oh no, like you got a bookie. You know,
• 1:10:57
  I still have a bookie, but you know it's easier on FanDuel now.
• 1:11:00
  And it was like, oh, and I remember I had to burn
• 1:11:01
  my books one day. I was I was booking through a guy at University
• 1:11:05
  of Haven and he called me up and he's like, yo, burn your
• 1:11:08
  books. The cops are onto us. I'm like, oh shit. I
• 1:11:11
  was like, so I was like twenty one, I was twenty four in
• 1:11:14
  college still and whatever. So like, and then as the progresses and then
• 1:11:17
  you get older and you just kind of you still keep connections and you bet
• 1:11:20
  here, you go to the casinos open and you get rid of that itch
• 1:11:25
  there. And then all of a sudden, the same thing with marijuana.
• 1:11:29
  Uh. The states are like, wait a second, we could we could
• 1:11:33
  be generating money here if we legalize this, and okay, well, let's
• 1:11:38
  legalize marijuana first, and let's make our taxes off of that and make dispensaries
• 1:11:43
  pay us all this money to stay open. I mean, they're they're they're
• 1:11:45
  legalized. Maffia is what they are. And and then you have the gambling
• 1:11:49
  and okay and Draft Kings and Fandels. Sure, so it's it's not it's
• 1:11:55
  no, it's no joke or no, no, you know that. I
• 1:11:59
  think Draft Kings is Foxwoods and Mohegans Fandel like this. There's there's these partnerships
• 1:12:03
  they have and yeah, it's fucking nuts. And they're getting all these residuals.
• 1:12:10
  And I know they were pissed when the casinos moved because they tried to
• 1:12:13
  buy both and the Indians were like, oh, fuck yourself, you took
• 1:12:16
  enough. Yeah yeah, well yeah, exactly exactly. Uh you know Ben
• 1:12:21
  and Jerry's anyway, So it's just crazy to see all that. And you're
• 1:12:26
  right with the mega millions, it's like, right, all these they're all
• 1:12:30
  it's all the same. And I'm sure you know this. But most of
• 1:12:31
  the people, and I don't know the exact statistic, although I think it's
• 1:12:35
  extremely high. Most of the people that win these lottery big lottery numbers within
• 1:12:41
  three to five years, or dead broke. Yeah, they don't know how
• 1:12:43
  to spend it, or they get scammed, or they give it away away.
• 1:12:46
  It's gotta be hard to piss away one point six billion years. That
• 1:12:51
  would be a tough one. You could buy the Ottawa Senators, you know,
• 1:12:55
  even after all the taxes and ship You could buy an NHL team for
• 1:12:58
  that monem. I feel, you know what is if you're lucky enough to
• 1:13:00
  win any of those lottery tickets and you piss your money away, your piss
• 1:13:04
  poor in three to five years, you deserve it. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:13:09
  yeah, Well, I don't want to label people that buy a lot of
• 1:13:13
  a lot of tickets, but they're probably they're probably not fiscally responsible. I'm
• 1:13:17
  just saying I go to the grocery. I go to the corner store,
• 1:13:20
  just like everybody. Yes, yes, I read last night that Wayne Brady
• 1:13:27
  is now pan sexual. I don't even know what that means, but it
• 1:13:30
  came across my news feed. Good for him, I think, Uh,
• 1:13:33
  staying on pan sexual. Uh, the women's soccer team has been eliminated from
• 1:13:39
  the World Cup. About that. A lot of a lot of you know,
• 1:13:44
  mixed emotions. You know, some of the players on the team are
• 1:13:47
  stout USA supporters and some aren't. Uh. The biggest aren't is Megan Rappano.
• 1:13:57
  And the interviewed are after the game, and I basically asked her,
• 1:14:00
  you know, how do you feel blah blah blah, and she just said
• 1:14:01
  equal pay. It's like it was their only comment. Yeah. So I've
• 1:14:05
  been kind of like researching this a little bit, and I came across this
• 1:14:10
  one article that basically said, comparing men's and women's, the Men's World Cup
• 1:14:14
  generates let's say four billion dollars. The Women's World Cup generates I think like
• 1:14:20
  three hundred and sixty million dollars. Okay, it's right. However, the
• 1:14:26
  women individually get twelve percent share revenue while the men only get seven percent share
• 1:14:34
  revenue. So they have a higher percentage scale than the men do. So
• 1:14:40
  what does that tell you? Be better? Promote it better? You know,
• 1:14:45
  like, you can't you can't not generate the same amount of money and
• 1:14:49
  expect higher pay. Right, And you look at w and have your bands
• 1:14:54
  on at three in the morning. You know, WBA the same thing,
• 1:14:58
  right, same exact thing, right, And the NBA and the NBA subsidizes
• 1:15:01
  the w NBA, so a lot of their money comes from the NBA,
• 1:15:05
  but they're not the ones that are generating their own money. Yeah, you
• 1:15:11
  know, it's a tough it's a tough discussion. It's a tough thing to
• 1:15:15
  have a side too, because I get it in theory. But what a
• 1:15:21
  lot of people don't realize is that sports is entertainment and sports is a business.
• 1:15:27
  It's television. It's just that simple it is. It's television. Yeah,
• 1:15:30
  it's like anything else. Does a Tom Cruise movie do better than a
• 1:15:33
  you know whoever movie? It's just it is what it is. Yeah,
• 1:15:36
  it's I don't think it's anything that they would gender except the fact that,
• 1:15:41
  sorry, the men play at a higher level. Well, a lot of
• 1:15:44
  people want to push their agenda even though it might not even make any sense.
• 1:15:47
  And I didn't think this might even be one of those situations. But
• 1:15:50
  I don't know. You know, I did play soccer a lot. I
• 1:15:54
  was never anywhere close to being professionals. So you know, was that your
• 1:15:59
  next named the Polish hammer? Different kind of hammer. I'm going to finish
• 1:16:05
  on this. I've been harping on this all year. I made it a
• 1:16:09
  prediction I'm the new year, that we will be visited by aliens. They'll
• 1:16:15
  be hard proof. So you know what I have been talking about the last
• 1:16:19
  couple of months. So this new report came out. A Harvard professor basically
• 1:16:28
  said that he has been examining an object moving faster, moving faster than any
• 1:16:36
  other stars around the sun. It has a harder material than any rock,
• 1:16:43
  and he has no specific explanation yet, but he is pretty much sure it
• 1:16:49
  is of an alien craft and he will continue to monitor it and then they
• 1:16:56
  can went on to ask him basically, you know what is this mean?
• 1:17:00
  And he's like, it's it's like realizing you have a neighbor when you didn't
• 1:17:04
  realize you had a neighbor. When you find a tennis ball in your backyard
• 1:17:08
  and you're like, oh, I guess somebody moved in. And it's really
• 1:17:13
  going to depend on how far advanced they are. Like I have a lot
• 1:17:17
  of people that are like Facebook and me like yo yo, Like they're either
• 1:17:20
  like on my side or like dude, I'll shoot your ship down right now.
• 1:17:24
  I'm like I'm like bring it, like seriously, I love I love
• 1:17:27
  talking about it. So I'm like all right, Well, if the universe
• 1:17:30
  is this old and you believe in the first of all, you gotta believe
• 1:17:34
  in the universe. If you don't believe in the universe, then whatever,
• 1:17:36
  you're a flat Earth or whatever you want to believe in. Fine, But
• 1:17:40
  if you believe in the universe, I feel it's undeniable that there's got to
• 1:17:45
  be life somewhere else. And if that life somewhere else is let's just say,
• 1:17:49
  one hundred thousand years older than us, not even a billion years,
• 1:17:53
  one hundred thousand, just think of the progress we've made in the last fifty
• 1:17:58
  years in technology, and I almost think a lot of this progress is from
• 1:18:03
  maybe some hints we've gotten from some other fucking person or a society in this
• 1:18:09
  universe. So that's my weekly alien update. You got anything they add before
• 1:18:15
  I give you your score? Couplet score, you couple of things. I
• 1:18:21
  think it's statistically absolutely impossible that there's not life somewhere else, maybe not life
• 1:18:30
  as we know it. Maybe they didn't look like us, act like us,
• 1:18:32
  but there's no possible way with the experience, right, It's just it's
• 1:18:39
  it's mind boggling, so mind boggling. You can't understand it. Then there's
• 1:18:43
  the whole religious side of it, which we're not going to get into.
• 1:18:46
  But I do believe in God. And you know, I had a huge
• 1:18:51
  cosation about this two days ago with a church goer, like an avid church
• 1:18:58
  goer. Yeah, and I'm not and uh, but we're gonna make a
• 1:19:00
  podcast out of it. It was great. It was great, Like I
• 1:19:02
  had a couple of beers conversation. Yeah, but yeah, the one the
• 1:19:08
  last thing I will tell you about this And I told very few people about
• 1:19:11
  this, and it's not anything seeking or anything. It's just absolutely the single
• 1:19:15
  most craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. So when my kids were
• 1:19:19
  younger, every year I would take each of them away separately, so it's
• 1:19:25
  me and my son or my daughter, right, and we went basically New
• 1:19:28
  England. So it took my daughter probably six seven years ago to Hershey Park
• 1:19:38
  in Pennsylvania. So we stayed at the big Hershey Hotel and in the back
• 1:19:43
  of the Hershey Hotel is a big fire pit area and there's a bunch of
• 1:19:45
  seats and everything around it. So we did all our stuff for the day
• 1:19:49
  and we went got something eat and then we went out to the back to
• 1:19:55
  the fire pit. So I'm sitting down on a chair and all of a
• 1:20:00
  sudden, I look out into the sky and I have no reason to lie
• 1:20:03
  about this. I actually started to get goosebumps. I saw a bunch of
• 1:20:09
  blasts in the sky, like there was something up there shooting something else.
• 1:20:16
  And it was probably for about ten minutes. It went on and went off,
• 1:20:20
  went on and went off again. The best thing I could describe was
• 1:20:24
  something was shooting something else because you could see something being fired from a plane
• 1:20:29
  or a helicopter whatever, shooting something. I don't want to say down,
• 1:20:32
  but shooting something something right. And I was just like, I didn't say
• 1:20:39
  anything because I didn't want to get anyone nervous, or my daughter, who
• 1:20:42
  was young at that point. But when I got back to our room,
• 1:20:46
  I did a little bit of research because I was curious if there were any
• 1:20:53
  military bases within fifty hundred seventy. You know, it just kind of did
• 1:20:58
  that stuff, and I just kind of let it go. But I don't
• 1:21:01
  know what that was, but it was not was there anything nearby? No?
• 1:21:06
  No? Not normal? Yeah, crazy, isn't it crazy? Yeah?
• 1:21:12
  I'm telling you, I've had my own experience. I've said it on
• 1:21:15
  the show before. It was right right in Westaven and uh, I'll never
• 1:21:18
  forget it. Like yesterday and I luckily had a friend with me and we
• 1:21:24
  shared the experience and it was just one of those things. And like he
• 1:21:27
  he lives in Florida now and he's like, dude, whatever you want me
• 1:21:30
  to come on, we'll talk about it. I'm like, well, when
• 1:21:31
  you're in the area. I don't want to do that one over the phone.
• 1:21:32
  I want you to sitting right there, yeah, with a cocktail in
• 1:21:35
  front of you, and let's rehash this fucking story because I don't know what's
• 1:21:41
  what's that line from uh, we're not alone, We're not there? Yeah,
• 1:21:46
  yeah, yeah, all right. Frank Zapski, the pizza guy Vona
• 1:21:50
  Polish Pizziola as I say that, right, Uh, thanks so much for
• 1:21:55
  coming on the show. Thanks for the pizza. By the way, he
• 1:21:57
  brought me a homie pizza from his house. You're welcome, half cheese,
• 1:22:00
  half New Haven stad Wild garlic peccardino. Uh. I followed all your stuff.
• 1:22:06
  Please follow me back obviously check out this will be on YouTube. I
• 1:22:12
  accidentally, UH didn't start the video until about two minutes in so, but
• 1:22:16
  obviously the podcast will be released right away. Uh you can check out my
• 1:22:20
  website day Drinking with dog dot com. Uh. Starting to get that up
• 1:22:25
  and run a little better tomorrow with my guy Matthews. Next week I'm gonna
• 1:22:29
  be reviewing the movie Sounds of Freedom with Corey. I have to go see
• 1:22:32
  it on Monday. Uh Corey from work. She was astonished by the movie
• 1:22:36
  and I've read a lot of stuff about it, so I can't wait to
• 1:22:40
  watch it and discuss that. As for a review, Frank, I don't
• 1:22:44
  really review my guests. I don't put like you put numbers on it,
• 1:22:48
  but I'll get I'm gonna I'm nine point two stamp it. I'm gonna finish
• 1:22:57
  on a little jelly roll. Need a favor because I'm going to see him
• 1:23:00
  in about four hours down a bridgeport. Thanks so much, guys, Frank,
• 1:23:03
  thanks again, thank you. I'll see you swam pump. Yes,
• 1:23:06
  sir, I only tough to God when I need a favor, and I
• 1:23:15
  holy prayer for night. Got a prayer. So who the hell am I?
• 1:23:21
  Who the hell am I to expect a savior? Oh? If I
• 1:23:27
  holy it? Talk to God when I need a favor for God. I
• 1:23:31
  need a favor and amazing this, but I ain't been living them world sweet
• 1:23:40
  rispand more sundays drunk off my last than I haven't church our color King James,
• 1:23:46
  only been saving dust by the nights day. And I don't know what
• 1:23:51
  to say by the time I phone my hands. I how it South to
• 1:23:58
  God when I need a favor, and I only pray for n I got
• 1:24:05
  the prayer, so they're hell'em out who They're hell him out? Two
• 1:24:12
  weeks back to Savior. If I want it, talk to God when I
• 1:24:17
  need a favor God, I need a favorite