The Joe and Pat’s signature slice: vodka sauce pizza. Photo: Nina Friend.

By Nina Friend

Behind a green counter stacked with pizza boxes ten high, Casey Pappalardo slices a pie that crackles with each cut. He wears a black, flat-brimmed baseball hat and a black, long sleeve t-shirt, both embroidered in white with the words, “Joe and Pat’s Pizzeria and Restaurant est. 1960.” When Casey isn’t running the cash register or cleaning the coffee maker or repairing a burst pipe in the bathroom, he’s behind that counter, slinging dough and chatting.

Members of the Pappalardo family have run this roomy restaurant, on Victory Boulevard in Staten Island, since 1960. It is named for two of Casey’s uncles, who immigrated to the United States in 1958 from Naples, Italy, and transformed themselves from Giuseppe and Pasquale to Joe and Pat. After working at a pizzeria called Al’s for two years, the brothers decided to open a place of their own. Then, in 1962, the other seven Pappalardo siblings came to Staten Island. They all worked at Joe and Pat’s together.

According to data from the United States Census Bureau, Italians comprised about 7% of Staten Island’s total population in 1930, but over the next several decades that number grew to over 35%. Though the population has shrunk slightly since 2010, it has maintained a presence on the borough. The multi-generational ownership of Joe and Pat’s – as well as its multi-generational customer base – reflects Staten Island’s strong and stable Italian community.

Casey grew up at the pizzeria. He remembers going to work early in the morning with his dad, Ciro, before being dropped off at preschool up the street. When he was two years old, Casey used to stand on a milk crate behind the counter, banging dough with tiny, flour-coated hands. As much as Ciro wanted Casey to learn how to make pizza, he didn’t want his son to have to endure “the headaches, the long hours” of working in a restaurant. But Casey – now a tall, lean twenty-five-year-old who has a tendency to drop his g’s so that “making” becomes “makin’” – wanted to be his own boss. He felt comfortable around the restaurant – opening up each day, closing down each night, asking regulars about their families and striking up conversation with new customers.

In 2014, when his Uncle Joe decided to retire, Casey saw his opportunity. Ciro protested. He wanted Casey to go into finance or accounting or architecture. Anything but restaurants. But Casey “always felt a calling” to run Joe and Pat’s, he said, and Ciro couldn’t say no to that. So he and Casey bought out Joe and took over the family business. Or, more accurately, one of the family’s businesses. Ciro owns two other pizzerias in Staten Island and New Jersey, both called Ciro Pizza Cafe. Joe has another pizza place in lower Manhattan called Rubirosa, which he opened with his late son, AJ, and then passed on to his daughter, Maria. A bunch of Casey’s cousins own restaurants in the Staten Island area. And Pat, who moved away from pizza in 1974 when he decided to open a real estate firm, still works across the street from his eponymous restaurant.

When Joe and Pat first came to America they didn’t intend to open a pizzeria, but it was what they knew. Their father, Angelo, had taught them to bang the dough without patting. To run their fingers around the edges, careful not to stretch the dough because then it would bubble up instead of becoming crispy. According to Casey, the brittle, delicate pizza they serve has become a Joe and Pat’s trademark. He said, “No one has a cracker-thin crust like we do.”

Almost 60 years after Joe and Pat first came to Staten Island, the restaurant still uses the original recipes that they brought over from their small Neapolitan town, Trecase. “Same ingredients, same everything,” Casey said. Even though New York is now home to all kinds of different pizza, from the greasy one-dollar slice to thick and chewy squares, Casey doesn’t consider his own pies to have assimilated. “We have Italian pizza,” he said. “Italian people making it. Italian recipes. It’s Italian.”

As more Italians began immigrating to Staten Island in the mid-twentieth century, more pizzerias began popping up across the borough, until each section of Staten Island had a pizzeria that was the hangout for the surrounding community. If you lived in Port Richmond, you went to Denino’s. If you lived in Midland Beach, you went to Nunzio’s. If you lived in Castleton Corners, you went to Joe and Pat’s.

In the side room of Joe and Pat’s, which is long and narrow and has Grecian murals painted on the walls, a woman named Connie sat at a booth eating dinner with friends. Stocky and wrinkled, with coarse grey hair, Connie comes to Joe and Pat’s at least once a week. Her parents used to take her when she was a little girl, and now she takes her own kids. “It’s what you know,” Connie said.

People like Connie are what make Casey get up each morning for his fifteen-hour workdays – and what inspired him to expand. Along with his father and two of his uncles, Casey is opening a second location in Manhattan’s East Village, a few doors down from Black Seed Bagels and across the street from Momofuku Noodle Bar. The pizzeria is set to open within the next four months.

As a loyal customer for nearly as many years as Joe and Pat’s has been open, Connie doesn’t see the value in bringing the pizzeria to Manhattan. It won’t be the same, she said. Yet according to Casey, it’ll be as if he picked up the Staten Island Joe and Pat’s, put it on the ferry, and plopped it down at 168 First Avenue. “It’s going to be less of a slice shop,” Casey said, “but it’s still the same. Same feel, same great food.” The menu and recipes will also stay the same. The difference is that the new Joe and Pat’s will have 50 seats and a bar, turning the restaurant into more of a sit-down place than a grab-and-go.

Even though Manhattan is the toughest restaurant market in the country, Casey isn’t worried. He has confidence in the Pappalardo family brand to help the new location gain traction. “A lot of people know us through Rubirosa and just Joe and Pat’s itself,” Casey said. “It’s a well-known name.” So well-known that when Casey goes to the East Village wearing his Joe and Pat’s flat-brimmed baseball hat, people on the street come up to him and say, “Oh, Joe and Pat’s, I heard you’re coming here, I can’t wait.”

If Casey hadn’t gotten involved with Joe and Pat’s, he said that eventually he would have opened a pizzeria in the city. It’s always been his dream to have a place of his own. He used to imagine having a restaurant with a unique name and a unique feel, but he’s changed his mind about half of that equation. “Now,” he said, “Joe and Pat’s is my name.”

Nina Friend