Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Before Paulie Gee's name became synonymous with pizza, he was Paulie Giannone, who worked in IT. After years of a career he wasn't that passionate about, Paulie and his wife Mary Ann decided to switch gears and focus on a true love, pizza. Paulie and Mary Ann started hosting weekly pizza parties in their backyard, where they could test out some of their new recipes. Once things had been perfected, they opened their first location in Greenpoint.

Paulie Gee's now has franchises all over the country. Now, Paulie and Mary Ann are sharing their recipes with a new cookbook geared towards home cooks. The book is titled Pizza From the Heart: 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta, Salads, and More. The recipes in the cookbook looked so delicious that my producer Jordan went and booked a reservation at the restaurant while she was working on this segment. True story. She's going on Saturday night. Pizza From the Heart is out now. I'm joined now by partners in life and pizza, Paulie Gee's founder Paulie. Hi, Paulie.

Paulie Giannone: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Mary Ann, nice to meet you.

Mary Ann Giannone: Hi, how are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well. Thank you so much for calling. Hey, listeners, Paulie Gee and Mary Ann are here, and they're taking your calls. What questions do you have about making pizza at home? Maybe you're looking for a perfect pizza dough recipe. Maybe you're just not into that cooking. You just want to know what to put on it. Our experts are here. Give us a call at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You worked in IT before opening the restaurant. When did you decide to turn your passion into business?

Paulie Giannone: Well, I was looking to do something. I know it wasn't what I was doing because I really didn't have a talent for it. I wasn't getting where I wanted to. Eventually, I wanted to have my own business. Somebody talked us into being multi-level marketeers, if anybody knows what Amway is. Through that, I learned a lot about starting your own business and believing in yourself and making commitments.

I had to do something. A friend of mine knew about this restaurant chain, a breakfast and lunch place called Le Peep. He wanted me to open up a Le Peep. There's only one here in the northeast in Edison, New Jersey, and it did very well. The rest are out west. He said, "I tell you what, I'll build you a restaurant. It'll be all yours. You give me 5% of the gross and we'll go from there." I said, "You know what? This is better than what I'm doing right now," because I love to cook. We'd cook at home. We both loved to entertain.

I had to do something. Friends said, "Open up a restaurant." I said, "I don't want to do that. I don't think so." I went down that road. I realized I became a pizza enthusiast in the mid-'90s. Discovered a place in Coney Island called Totonno's, which I'm sure a lot of people know about. I started going on a hunt for great pizza. At that point, while I was thinking about and looking, thank God that we didn't find a space in New Jersey to open up a La Peep, because then I wouldn't be here talking with you today, which is a great honor, by the way.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Paulie Giannone: I decided, instead of doing this Le Peep that I would build a pizza oven and prove to myself that I could do it, because that's one of the things I learned. You got to believe that you could accomplish something if you go after it. I did that. My friend was very disappointed, although I didn't realize it. I thought he was going to invest in the pizzeria like he'd invest in Le Peep, but that didn't happen. The reason I wanted to make pizza instead of opening up a restaurant, because it was a simpler process.

Alison Stewart: Mary Ann, he comes, he says, "Honey, my love."

[laughter]

Mary Ann Giannone: I'm not sure if he said exactly that way.

Alison Stewart: He said, "Hey, I want to go. I want to start a business. I'm thinking about a pizza business." What questions did you have?

Mary Ann Giannone: Well, I'm not sure that I had a lot of questions. I just kind of knew that we had to do something differently because he hated being in the corporate world as I did when I was. He had done that for so many years. I had other careers, and I was kind of in and out of things. I was able to do a lot of that because he did stay in the corporate world with the benefits and all that.

Eventually, I could see in his early 50s, he was very frustrated. I said, "If you're not going to do it now, when are you going to do it?" I guess we threw caution to the wind in a big way. When I look back at it, recounting it for the book, and I knew what we were doing, I guess, at the time, but when I looked back at it, I kept saying to myself, "Wow, we did that? We did that?" It's like we just kept going forward because I always felt it was like we were going in the right direction.

Paulie Giannone: One of the things that we learned from Amway was, "Keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting." Her first question was, I used this thing to build the oven in the yard, in our backyard to build the oven on, because it was easier than building a whole base from scratch. She would do gardening out there. Her very first question was, "What am I going to do about my plants?"

Mary Ann Giannone: Fair.

Alison Stewart: It's a fair question.

Mary Ann Giannone: It was a fair question at the time.

Alison Stewart: What made you launch in Greenpoint?

Paulie Giannone: Well, I wanted to open up in Williamsburg. I was totally infatuated. First, I was going to open up in New Jersey, trying to keep my job while I did this, which was not a good idea. A friend of mine, a very good friend, set me straight and said, "Look, you could take a salary enough to pay your bills." That opened because now, I could go to New York. It was much better because I knew I wanted to serve alcohol. It's a lot cheaper to serve alcohol in New York City than it is in New Jersey, but I was infatuated with Williamsburg.

One of the things that I did when I decided I wanted to do this is start talking to people who already did what I did. Two of them happened to be in Williamsburg. When I asked one of them, Mathieu from Motorino, if I open up in Williamsburg, would it be too close? I didn't expect him to say, "Yes, it would be too close." It was, "Ah, don't worry about it, Paulie," in his cute Belgium accent there. He said, "Yes, that would be a little too close." I decided, "I can't do that." Fornino was the other place. Both of these guys were very encouraging, very helpful. I was infatuated with Roberta's, if anyone knows about Roberta's.

Alison Stewart: Oh yes.

Paulie Giannone: I saw what they did. I love that place. I saw what they did. They went to another neighborhood adjacent to Williamsburg and created that neighborhood, basically. I said, "Well, I can't go there," but perhaps I could do what they did. I started looking around and the other direction was Greenpoint. There it was. Long story short, that's how we wound up there. I went there.

First, I went to Manhattan Avenue, where all the Polish restaurants are, and dollar stores. Nothing against Polish restaurants or dollar stores. I love them both, okay? I was looking for Bedford and North 7th. For those of you in New York City, you know what that is. That wasn't it. I found out that there was another street. Franklin Street and Greenpoint Avenue. I went to that intersection, and I knew I was home. I saw then, 16 years ago, what that intersection was going to look like today.

Alison Stewart: Ooh, you've got vision then. That shows that you had vision of what it was going to be.

Paulie Giannone: In that case, I absolutely did.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Joe, who's calling in from Allendale, New Jersey. Hi, Joe. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Joe Wyden: Hi. Hey, Paulie, you may remember me, maybe not, but we worked together at the Port Authority in the early '80s in One World Trade Center.

Paulie Giannone: Joe, what's your last name, Joe?

Joe Wyden: Joe Wyden.

Paulie Giannone: I'm sorry, [chuckles] but--

Joe Wyden: No, I didn't think so. Yes, I was in the systems group. You were doing app stuff.

Paulie Giannone: I loved working at the Port Authority. Both Mrs. Gee and I worked at the Port Authority, and it was one of the best places to work.

Joe Wyden: It really was, the good old days. Paulie, congratulations on your new career and your success with all your restaurants. I'm looking forward to getting your book and reading it. I have a question for you for the home pizza, which is baking steels. What's your opinion on baking steels versus pizza stones using an oven? I've got a wolf oven at home, and I guess I could crank up to 500 degrees.

Paulie Giannone: Wow, very nice. I never used either because I went right to the brick oven in the backyard that I built myself, but from everything that I know, the baking steel gets better results. I would encourage you to get one of these newfangled, little home ovens like an Ooni, or there's one I saw the other day that's called Halo. That has a turntable in it. Gozneys are very good as well. If you have the ability to do that, that could be a better way to go. If you're forced to make a choice between a baking steel and a pizza stone, I would go with the baking steel.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Paulie Gee and Mary Ann. They're the owner of Paulie Gee's and the authors of the new cookbook, Pizza From the Heart: 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta, Salads, and More. If you need advice on how to make pizza, you can talk to them. Our numbers, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Mary Ann, there's two kind of pizza dough in here. There's New York style and there's Sicilian pizza dough. What's the difference?

Mary Ann Giannone: Sicilian is more obviously, if you're from New York, you would know, a square pie and it's made in a pan. We also do a grandma slice at the Slice Shop also, which is a little bit thinner than the Sicilian slice. The New York style is, for the large, we do a 20-inch pie at the Slice Shop. That would have been a slice that we would have remembered from our childhood. We both grew up in Brooklyn and frequented a lot of pizzerias. I know every Friday night, my mother was a single-working mom in the '60s. We would order pizza. That's what we had every Friday night from Krispy Pizza, who's still there many, many years later. That's the kind of a difference.

Alison Stewart: Paulie, what is the secret to making really great pizza dough?

Paulie Giannone: Well, what you do is you start with someone's recipe and you experiment with it to get it just the way you like it, because whatever you're making, whatever you're cooking, you should be cooking for yourself, for the thing that you want it to taste like. I've always done that with all my pies. I won't serve a pizza just because I think a lot of people are going to want it. I like to make something that I love. Now, my pizza dough started by reading someone else's cookbook. A very famous baker called Peter Reinhart.

The name of the book was his homage to pizza called American Pie. He had a neo-Neapolitan recipe that I started with. At first, actually, my secret was to go to stop-and-shop and get a little pizza dough in a plastic bag and use that. In terms of the pizza dough, actually, the Sicilian and New York style dough is kind of the same. The other dough that we make is like a Neapolitan style. The difference in that is cooked in a much hotter oven. That's really difficult to do at home. If you get a really good little home oven like one of those Oonis or something, you might be able to. The secret is cook for what you want to eat.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about Pizza From the Heart: 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta, and Salads with Paulie Gee and Mary Ann. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Paulie Gee and Mary Ann, his wife. They are the owners of Paulie Gee's and the authors of the new cookbook Pizza From the Heart: 100 Recipes for Pies, Pasta, Salads, and More. We have Peter calling in from Bayville. Hi, Peter. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Peter: Hi. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Peter: I make pizza in the barbecue. I think I've gotten pretty good at it. A common theme I've been finding with my pies is that the pizza underneath isn't always evenly cooked. I like a nice, even bottom of my pizza. I was wondering, how could I improve on that? I put it in, basically, a baking sheet and I spread the dough around.

Paulie Giannone: Do you have hot spots on the barbecue? You might just want to experiment with-- Do you turn the pan around as you're cooking it?

Peter: No, I leave it in basically for the whole duration. It cooks in about 14 minutes. It doesn't really have a hot spot. It's kind of inconsistent.

Alison Stewart: That sounds like your answer.

Paulie Giannone: Yes, I think you should try experimenting with moving it around, seeing what happens if you turn it halfway through the bake, perhaps, or a few times, and that should help.

Alison Stewart: We got this text that says, "Pineapple on pizza. Yes or no? Time to end the debate."

Paulie Giannone: I have the end to that debate, okay. Pineapple is one of my prohibited peas. I had a number of things you don't put on pizza. They all seem to start with pea, poultry, pasta. One of them is pickles.

Alison Stewart: No pickles? Okay.

Paulie Giannone: Another one is pineapple. If you pickle your pineapple, that's a double negative, and that's okay. That's what we do at Paulie Gee's at 60 Greenpoint Avenue. We have a few pies with pickled pineapple on it.

Alison Stewart: How do you know, Mary Ann, when you're going to have double negatives [laughs] work out or when you have a sweet and a savory together? How do you know when it works?

Mary Ann Giannone: Well, that's not a question for me because I don't come up with the recipes. I always defer to him because he's an amazing cook. He always cooked at home. We always entertained, had a Christmas party every year for 50 people, and he would do all the cooking. I would be like a sous-chef and help with everything else. He doesn't ask me questions about recipes. I think I have three recipes in the book because I'm more of a cold dish person.

Alison Stewart: Got you.

Mary Ann Giannone: I do salads, smoothies, desserts, and that kind of stuff.

Alison Stewart: Well, how do you know it's going to make her happy? How do you know when the sweet and the savory are going to work together?

Paulie Giannone: I experiment with it.

Alison Stewart: Experiment? She's like, "I'll tell you how. Sometimes it doesn't."

Paulie Giannone: I don't know if it's going to make her happy. When I make myself happy, that's when I stop.

Alison Stewart: Talk about the Hellboy pizza. This is probably what you're most well-known for. It's a pizza with hot honey on top?

Paulie Giannone: Yes, Mike's Hot Honey. It has to be Mike's Hot Honey to officially be known as the Hellboy. What happened was we had a pie. I stole it from Motorino, who stole it from Fornino. Those are the two places I mentioned earlier. It's a basic, classic Neapolitan pie with hot soppressata and fresh mutzadel, okay? When I first opened up the restaurant, I needed to save money, so I took on apprentices. In exchange, we're showing them what we did so that they could go out and do it themselves.

I let them come in and work in the restaurant. I didn't pay them. It probably was not legal to do that at the time. I eventually changed that. A guy named Mike, who was making pizza at home, but more importantly, he had discovered this spicy honey when he was studying Portuguese in Brazil. He came into the restaurant, and I was chatting with him and his friends. He mentioned that he wanted to come in and be an apprentice. He had heard about it.

I said, "Sure, come in on Wednesday. My son will be here. He could teach you how to start stretching dough. Four o'clock will be great." He said, "Okay, I'm going to bring my condiment." I said, "Condiment?" "Yes, you'll see." He came in with his stuff. I had learned earlier that you can't make something in some-- He wanted to have that condiment on my pizza. That was his goal. He didn't care about making pizza, whatever.

I had learned earlier because I wanted to bond with our community. Right before we opened, I went to this Greenpoint food market. It was a floating market. It was wonderful. What happened was people would bring their stuff from home, and they would sell it at these markets once a month in church basements, different places. I met a guy there when we went making bacon marmalade. I said, "This would go to my pizza. When we open, come in."

Subsequently, a wonderful thing happened. That market was put in The New York Times food section on Sunday. Big deal, all right? You know who reads The New York Times food section on Sunday? The health department. They said, "You cannot do this. You cannot make food at home and sell it to the public." They shut them down. The one that we went to was, I believe, the last one.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Paulie Giannone: When the bacon marmalade guy came in, his name was Ross, I said, "This is great. Let's figure out what we put on. Listen, you got to make this in my kitchen." He did that. Then when Mike came in and he wanted to do this, I said, "Mike, you got to make this honey in my kitchen." We were closed on Mondays, and he started doing it on Mondays. Him and Ross were doing it together for a little while sharing the time slots. That's how it all started. Then eventually, we had to open on Mondays. He came in in the middle of the night to make it. Now, you could find him everywhere. The full-circle thing on this, he just started a new company, I guess, legally on how it works, in Brazil.

Alison Stewart: It's all full circle. Comes right around.

Paulie Giannone: It is.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Kathy, who's calling in from Greenpoint. Hi, Kathy, how are you?

Kathy: Hi. I am obsessed with your Slice Shop. It's my favorite slice in Brooklyn.

Paulie Giannone: Thank you.

Kathy: I've never been to your restaurant. I was just wondering like, "I'm a little intimidated. Do I need to order a whole pizza," that sort of thing. What can I expect from your actual sit-down restaurant? Do I need to dress up? Basically, also I want to convince my boyfriend to go there. He doesn't like pizza, so I need to know what we expect. [laughs]

Paulie Giannone: Okay. Well, in terms of the pizza, yes, it's basically one 12-inch pie per person. There aren't a lot of things on that menu other than pizza. We have some salads. Actually, we have some pastas now. There are things that he could enjoy. I would encourage him. I get the feeling that if you really want to go, he's going to follow you there, okay?

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Paulie Giannone: If you meet there, he better be there 15 minutes before you, okay?

Alison Stewart: Thanks so much for calling, Kathy. One of the pizzas featured here is the Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook. It's a collaboration with them. It's called the Hometown Brisket Pie. Hometown Brisket Pie. It sounds like it shouldn't go together, but it does. How did the collaboration come about?

Paulie Giannone: Well, I needed some wooden chairs. I needed some folding wooden chairs. Somebody showed me a picture that there's this brand-new barbecue place in Red Hook that had these folding wooden chairs, very old, because we had all mismatched chairs in the restaurant. That's one of the things that I tried to do. I tried to make the restaurant be casual. The staff doesn't wear uniforms.

Kathy, if you're still listening, you dress any way you want. The staff dresses any way they want. It's not a problem, right? I went to find out where he got the chairs. I met this guy. His name is Billy Durney. He's a master barbecue guy. He's amazing. We got to talking. I got the idea that I could put his brisket on a pizza. That's what I did. I did a little sweet and savory thing with the barbecue sauce. I used this sweet sauce. It was called "sticky" for some reason. I did pickled red onions. That's how that came about. Then I got the idea to take that pickled pineapple I talked about and put that with the brisket as well. That was another pie that we served at one time.

Alison Stewart: Mary Ann, I want to ask you about the sake pizza.

Mary Ann Giannone: Okay. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Sake pizza.

Mary Ann Giannone: Well, I think the idea behind that originally at 60 Greenpoint was that he wanted some type of a vodka pie, but he didn't want to do a vodka pie and be very pedestrian like everybody has to have a vodka pie now. That was even a while ago. He decided to make a sake sauce to put on the pie. That was also a recipe that he had made at home, which was the sake sauce.

Paulie Giannone: The reason it came about is because early on, we had an ill-fated brunch, and not having a full liquor license at that time. We only had wine and beer. I couldn't serve a Bloody Mary at brunch. You got to have a Bloody Mary, right? Instead, I had a Bloody Samurai and made it with sake. After six weeks, we pulled the plug on the brunch. I had all the sake left over and I said, "Aha."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] The backyard parties led to you being creative in different ways.

Paulie Giannone: It did.

Alison Stewart: Part of what makes pizza parties so special, these backyard pizza parties we were talking about, was your homemade limoncello. You include a recipe in the book. First of all, why did you want to include that recipe?

Paulie Giannone: Because it's special. We served it from day one of our pizza parties. I like the way I make it more than I get it in Italy. I go to Italy. They serve it. It's just too strong. I make mine a little milder. It meant everything. If you look on our original logo, there's lemons on there. The reason there's lemons is because of all the pizza tastings. We serve this limoncello. You get people a little buzzed. The pizza tastes better. A lot of times, I was at a point where we were bringing bloggers in. They were going to write about us. You give them a little homemade limoncello. You feed them for free. They're not going to say anything bad.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] It's so great to sit across from you because you love each other. You can sort of like--

Mary Ann Giannone: Most of the time. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: Most of the time. That's natural.

Paulie Giannone: You heard us on the way over.

Alison Stewart: Well, you're two Brooklyn natives. How did you meet, Mary Ann?

Mary Ann Giannone: We met at a disco in Bay Ridge in November of 1976. It was called Jasmine's at the time. Obviously, it's since gone, but that was when everybody was in our generation. He's a little older than me. Went out dancing on Friday and Saturday nights. It was just a great time to be in Brooklyn and New York. It was, I guess, the precursor to Saturday Night Live. We had been to that club also, but he came up--

Paulie Giannone: Saturday Night Fever.

Mary Ann Giannone: Saturday Night Fever. Sorry. He came up to me at the bar and he said, "Oh, I see you on the train." I said, "Likely story." I figured he was just giving me a line, but he had seen me on the train because I was working across the street. He was in the World Trade Center already. I was across the street in the US Steel building working for Whitewell. That was my first job. He did see me on the train, so he wasn't lying. [chuckles]

Alison Stewart: Paulie, what advice would you give to someone who wants to make a career switch like you did?

Paulie Giannone: If you love what you want to do more than your career, do it. If you do what you love, you're going to do it well. You're going to be successful and you're going to be happy. Try to do something where you're the boss. The greatest discovery I made was I was meant to be the boss and not have a boss. My heart, my mind is just so much healthier and wonderful. You have to do that no matter what it is. Now, a great example. That's why I wasn't good in IT. I did it for 30 years, but I wasn't wired for it. I wasn't happy. There were people who were so happy to get up at 5:00 in the morning to go do that.

Alison Stewart: Now, you're the boss.

Paulie Giannone: I am the boss.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Pizza for the Heart. Paulie Gee and Mary Ann, thank you for coming in.

Mary Ann Giannone: Thank you for having us.

Paulie Giannone: Yes, thank you for having us. A great honor.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way.