343: Pizza Week with Dan Richer of Razza

0:00This episode is brought to you by Rezi and American Express. Resi is a digital platform that connects restaurants to restaurant lovers by elevating dining experiences, providing original industry content, and helping to fill some of the country's most exciting dining rooms. Because restaurants have always been more than just places to eat. The amazing world of restaurants is just a few taps away in the Resi app and at resi.com. Before we get to the show, I wanted to acknowledge that this week is going to be a little different. It's Pizza Week, and we will be dropping episodes with a little more frequency in the feed.

0:33I'm here with producer Shalia Harris to talk about Pizza Week. So let me ask you, are you a pizza fan? I am a massive pizza fan. What do you like about pizza? So for whatever reason, a pizza parlor has always been the third space in my life. And I'm not really sure why that is. I don't know if it's something about like the universality of pizza, But even growing up, like there was like this brick oven place around the corner from my parents. And like that's where, you know, we went every Saturday night or if someone was in town, we went there. Like they threw my like high school graduation party.

1:07It was just like where we were if we weren't at home. And I even think about like there was this one summer where Roberta's had a brick oven on the boardwalk. I was like just about out of college, but still had a lot of free time with friends. And like I went there like probably three, four times a week and just had a pizza on the beach. For whatever reason, like it's just always a place that's felt like home. Yeah, you know, I can't agree more. You know, this is a great week of conversations. Get into the X's and O's of pizza, the different styles. We're going to talk to some really, really cool people, really big names in pizza.

1:40But really, when it comes down to it, these operators are talking about the community that they've built in their pizza restaurants. That's really one of the things that they really pride themselves on. You know, pizza arrives in multitudes, and we'll be featuring interviews with pizza professionals from all over the country who cook in many different styles. Up first is an interview with Dan Richer, the owner of Ratsa in Jersey City, New Jersey. It's such a cool place. I really am inspired by Dan's work, and I hope you all dig into Pizza Week on This Is Taste.

2:17Pizza is my platform for discovering the world. It's so interesting how many different subjects from history and society, culture, all of the sciences, from chemistry to biology, agriculture, thermodynamics, you have to understand the very basics in order to cook pizza properly. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbarg.

2:45Dan Richard is the owner behind Ratza in New Jersey City, New Jersey. Yeah, yeah, New York Times critic Pete Wells once called Ratza the best New York City pizza, not New York. And the 2017 assessment brought a swell of pizza freaks across the river to sample Richard's pie. In this interview, we talk about the review that changed everything. and we dig into how Richard describes his pizza, his obsession with bread, and his great cookbook, The Joy of Pizza, Everything You Need to Know. We loved having Dan in the studio to kick off Pizza Week. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

3:28Dan Richer, welcome to This Is Taste. Thanks for having me. Exciting to have you here to talk pizza. Yeah, just you're a real local legend. Thank you. How do you feel about that when I say that? I think I'm just me. I know, I know. But, you know, Pete Wells is writing this in 2017. We'll get to that article. Is New York's best pizza in New Jersey? That question mark? Well, he answers it with three stars. That happened in 2017. We'll get there eventually, your journey at Ratsa and what you're doing there. But I want to first just get into some pizza talk. You grew up in Jersey. You work in Jersey.

4:10But when I say NYC pizza, what is NYC pizza? It's definitely the region of New York. So what to you is this regional pizza that I think has a defined role in our lives but also is pretty defined? What do you think? Yeah, I think it's really important to define. Are we talking about pizza in New York or New York style pizza? Oh, right. Because they're very different things. Right. Tell me, let's split it up. Do it. New York's a city. And there's so many different styles of pizza. You can get Chicago-style tavern or deep dish at a place like Emmett's. You can get arguably better Neapolitan pizza in New York City at Una Pizza Napolitana than you can in Naples.

4:51Yeah. The Neo-Neo scene, we'll get into that. Yeah. You know, and every style possible is within New York City. So that's not necessarily New York style pizza. Yeah. Yeah. New York style pizza is its own thing. What is it? You know, it's a street food. It's a 18 to 24 inch large pie baked at lower temperatures than Neapolitan style pizza. Originally in a coal fired oven because that's what was here. Yeah. Lombardi's comes to mind. Right. Exactly. And then eventually when gas ovens started to proliferate in the 40s and 50s, then the temperature got a little lower. The pizza changed a bit. And now there's electric ovens.

5:45There's just so much there. So it's kind of hard to compare a coal oven New York style pizza to one produced in an electric – Like a baker's pride, like a bread oven when you get to like, I mean, like those coal ovens are getting up past 900, right? You know, where the coal is for sure, but not where the baking chamber is. Yeah. What are we looking at there? I have no idea. Yeah, it doesn't even cross your mind. But yeah, the baker's prides, the ones that we know when you go to the slice, quote unquote, slice joint, those are the ones that in the 50s were proliferated and created this lower temperature pizza.

6:23When you say it kind of changed, what do you mean? I think you. I think the characteristics of the pizza changed. So it's hard to compare New York style pizza in a coal oven versus one in a gas oven. Yeah. But they're all big pies, usually cut in eight slices. You got low moisture mozzarella cheese, which is a little drier than fresh mozzarella. And cheese usually covers a decent portion of it, 80 to 90 percent of it. Yeah. And it's crispy. It's crispy and it seems that in parts of the country like the Midwest where fast food pizza was invented, Little Caesars and Domino's, paraphrase of course, they were taking some notes from this style of bread oven New York City pizza, right?

7:06I'm sure they were. Yeah. But then mass producing it. But doing it in like the McDonald's way, yeah. But I mean I got to shout Little Caesars. Like have you ever had Little Caesars? I have once. You're one and done with Little Caesars. Yeah, I actually had a friend who, you know, growing up, all of his birthday parties were always Little Caesars pizzas. And I just remember being grossed out about it. Oh, even as a child. Oh, wow. You had a certain taste. Well, those were like my like birthday, birthday fifth grade and eighth grade probably was Little Caesars parties. Where did you grow up? I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in west side of Michigan.

7:40So I definitely had plenty of Little Caesars. Domino's was not really quite our pizza. We had Hungry Howie's, which is a pretty good Midwestern chain. But, yeah, I think Midwest invented the fast food pizza in some ways. But then you grew up in Jersey. So tell me about in Matawan with one T, not two. Funny enough, I went to a school called Matawan with two T's. You went to the one with one T. Yes. What was it like for you? You know, so we were in the shadows of New York City. A lot of people from New York, my parents included, moved from New York to New Jersey to raise a family. And with that came a ton of pizza.

8:19You know, there's 10 pizzerias in every single town. And you'll be kind of your family has a favorite that is your go to spot. But depending on where you are, like I used to run errands with my mom as a child. and we knew the best pizza place in each of the towns surrounding our town. And you went to them like not just Friday nights but many nights? Many nights. So pizza night was Tuesday night and Friday night in my house. Okay. And then, of course, the random slice here and there throughout the week. It's so affordable and accessible that, you know, where can you feed your kids for, I mean, back then a slice was a dollar.

9:02Yeah. Now it's a little bit more, but still, for under$10, you can feed your family. Yeah. Not just your family, but like your friends, your office mates. You know, it's the best catering option for many people. It's fucking delicious. For sure. It's hard not to like. It's hard not to like. I'd like to get into your journey. You opened your first pizzeria at 26. Yeah. You hustled it into existence. I read in your book, which is great, The Joy of Pizza. Tremendous book. We'll get into that, too. What was that like hustling into existence? What was this shop like, your first pizzeria at 26? So I bought an existing pizzeria that was failing, but it had been in existence since 1990 or so.

9:44And it just had a really bad pizza recipe, but it had two wood-fired ovens. Oh, wow. It was wood. Cool. Yeah. Huh, interesting. In 1990? In 1990. Yeah, wow. Yeah. They've been around for a very long time in the United States, but they didn't really get very popular until probably early to mid-2000s. Okay, okay. So what's it like working as a 26-year-old? Did you take on debt to open this place? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What's that like? Yeah, so I maxed out three credit cards, and I borrowed small sums of money from probably 10 or 11 different people, paid them back with interest over five or six years, and, you know, I bought a pizzeria.

10:29It was crazy. And ultimately, that pizzeria did well? Did it succeed? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was in a great suburban town. The community really wanted me to be successful. So I just, I didn't want to let them down, and I didn't want to let any of my investors down. Yeah, there's got to be some level of pride there when you're thinking about opening a place and taking a little bit of debt. You don't want to let people down. Yeah. Yeah. What was the most popular item there? margarita pizza yeah just margarita um you end up opening rots and we'll get to that but i would like to first get into the new neapolitan movement that happened in new york like i would say the aughts like the mid aughts places like roberta's kind of you know out in bushwick pioneered it but there's places like una pizza neapolitano certainly um making one of the best pies um in new york at the time.

11:24So what was going through your head as somebody who really understood pizza, who loved Italy when this new Neo moment was going down? Yeah, I ate at all of those places and many, many more, especially at that time when I was in my early 20s. I wanted to eat every pizza that I could possibly fit in my mouth. Yeah. So I'd come to Manhattan and go to six pizzerias in a day constantly. And I never liked Neapolitan pizza until I had Anthony Mangieri's at Una Pizza in Apolidana. That for me was life-changing because there was an aroma to his crust that I never experienced ever. The one on 12th Street?

12:08Yeah. Yeah, the original East Village location. Yeah. Yeah, I started going there in like, I don't know, maybe 06 or 07 until he closed and then moved to San Francisco. Yeah. And then I would go visit him there. Yeah. He's also from Monmouth County where I grew up. Yeah, he had the spot out in Highlands. Yes. Highlands, yeah. I'm so sad that he closed because it's right by my house. Yeah, right. Yeah, you live out there too. Now, you're saying that you liked Anthony's pies, but many of the pies weren't hitting it for you. Yeah, I did not like the texture. Interesting. That soft, more pliable. Yeah.

12:44Sometimes the cheese wasn't even fully melted. Yeah. All those black leopard spots, but with dough that was not fully cooked. And also didn't have development in flavor, too. No flavor development. Yeah, it was like a bomb of just dough. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you tasted burn, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah, so I didn't really like it. And I knew, I didn't grow up in Naples. Yeah. I have no ties to Neapolitan-style pizza, and it's not something that I wanted to put out into the world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I agree with you. Sometimes like when it wasn't melted fully, it wasn't working that well. There's a real like cooking art, not just like the dough and like the two to three day dough process, but the cooking of it wasn't being done fully.

13:30Exactly. We're building this. I think listener might be understanding what we're trying to do here is, you know, I'm trying to build towards what you do at Ratsa, which is hard to define. If you're like taking this context of like New York City and Jersey and like the traditional 1950s bread oven style pizzas and then this new Neapolitan moment, which we all were feeling in the mid aughts and Keste as well comes to mind. There's so many of these new neo spots, some good, some not. Then you have kind of land on your own style. Yes. Which again, I'm just going to have to say in September 2017, Hedlund appeared in New York Times is New York's best pizza in New Jersey.

14:11Um, so let me first ask you, we'll start with the review because this is like the review. And I think to this day, probably outside of the Guy Fieri review is one of the most famous Pete Wells reviews. Did you know he was going to write this about your pie? No, no, not at all. It was incredible. I mean, I he he fact checks. So he called me. So I knew he was writing something. Originally, I thought he was going to be writing something about Jersey City food in general. I couldn't imagine him reviewing a pizza place outside of New York. Like, what would be the point? But when I read the review, it was pretty good.

14:50Yeah, it was pretty good. So the first time you had a sense that what was happening was you read that headline and you see maybe the stars? It was like online? It was online. Yeah. I was at the restaurant making dough and I read it and it was a surreal moment for sure. Yeah. Did your phone start ringing? It did. Yeah. I'm impressed, I'm sure, we're calling you. Yeah. But customers, they were like, whoa. Yeah, all friends and family. It was like my wedding day. Amazing. So let's get to the actual style that you're doing there because I think that's what's important. It's like Pete hit this in his review, but I'd like to get your sense of it's not a traditional pizza.

15:29I think it's got its own unique Dan Richards style to it. For sure. Yeah, so when I kept being disappointed by Neapolitan pizza, I just, I didn't know where to start. So I came up with a list of like seven different characteristics about the pizza that these other ones weren't hitting that I wanted to. And it was number one, structural integrity. I wanted to be able to pick it up with my hands and have it be crispy. Yeah. None of that sagging stuff. Yeah. No. I wanted deep caramelization on the rim of the crust, also on the underside of the crust. I wanted the cheese to be fully melted, and I didn't want the sauce overly reduced.

16:18So fresher sauce in some ways. Just a brighter sauce that had the right moisture content. Better word, yeah, brighter sauce. Yeah. I hate when pizza has that area where the tomato is exposed to the heat of the oven, and it gets real thick and pasty and acidic. It's literally tomato paste. Like when you get open that can, you're like, this is like that crappy slice. Exactly. I hate that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You reject that. Yeah. So this list of seven characteristics was kind of like my framework. And then I started to study bread making and cheese making and talking to tomato canners and farmers and everybody, everybody surrounding the products that I was using.

17:02and I did the work. I did the research and kind of reverse engineered my characteristics by learning the science and practicing every single day. So you start with dough. You become a bread baker, right? So I actually, that's the hard part. I started with the tomato sauce and the cheese and all the toppings. It's low-hanging fruit. Yeah. I guess it's like the easiest stuff. Exactly. I mean, tomato sauce for pizza is just really good tomatoes and then you do nothing to them. Are you thinking Stanislav? Is that what you're going for? Like those California tomatoes? Are you doing it? So we do tomato tastings at the restaurant every year where we'll talk to our distributors and have them drop off a sample or two of the best tomatoes that they have.

17:49We line all these up, 12 or 13 of them. And then we do a double blind taste test. And we taste based on individual characteristics. So the characteristics that make up a tomato are the color, positive flavor attributes, negative flavor attributes, sweetness, acidity, texture, and whether there's a large percentage of seeds and skins in the tomatoes. Those are the characteristics that I look for when I'm tasting. So, again, I came up with a list of characteristics about tomatoes in order to decide on the tomato that we were going to use. and so you have your staff do a double blind and so you're then deciding um at a certain point in the year when what you're gonna buy yeah yeah we do it every winter every winter yeah that's that's fun i mean it's it's intense i'm sure because you really want to get it right but it's not intense it's it's more fun yeah and educational yeah it really helps my team develop their palettes yep yep yep um so what have you there's always a there's always a clear winner okay or or two interesting so so what can you say like who has won recently who do you who do you use yeah so typically the winner is um either gustoroso from gustiamo they import italian food they're in in the bronx every product that they sell is phenomenal yeah including their tomatoes and then the stanislav's alta gucina is it's a tomato that's only only sold wholesale but it's a fantastic tomato it hits all those characteristics modesto california yeah around there i guess the farms around there uh right near lodi i think lodi okay i'm a little i'm sorry californians bad geography um so you'll like will you blend them or like how does that work when you have two version like two varieties okay so i never understood why pizzerias have one vat of sauce.

19:42Right. And they use it on every pizza. I think that there's so many great tomatoes out there that why not use them all and not necessarily blend them all into one big vat, but have three separate containers with three different kinds of tomatoes and use them on different pizzas and use them for their inherent strengths and characteristics. Interesting. So you're going with two tomatoes, two canned tomatoes. We have four. Oh, okay. You have four. Nice. Yeah, we have a yellow tomato also that Gustiamo imports. It's from Campania. It is phenomenal. It's so interesting, actually, that when we taste this yellow tomato, everybody thought it was sweeter than the other tomatoes.

20:30Which wouldn't make sense. No. It didn't make sense to me. So I actually, I put the tomato sauce under a, in a, a refractometer, which measures the bricks, like the actual sugar content. Like a wine maker would do. Yeah. Exactly. And it was substantially lower than all of the other tomatoes. Is it a color thing? It doesn't read as anything different. It's red. I mean. It's actually a very low acid tomato. So acid and sweetness balance each other. Yeah. and because it has very little acidity our brains perceive it to be sweeter fucking fascinating it's so interesting yeah and and so let's move on to the the dough um you know we know that time creates flavor there's development right in time can oh great correct me dan it can it might not it might there might be actually just wait you're just wasting your time yeah it depends it's events.

21:25Longer is not always better. Love that. So case in point, Anthony's pizza at Una Pizza is a same day dough. So he mixes it in the morning and then uses it that night. It's a very short fermentation, but he gets better flavor than any pizza pretty much out there. And dude doesn't run out of dough. I mean, if he only needs a day, he's not running out of dough. No, he's running out of dough. It does take a few hours. You know, it takes the processes, you know, five, six, seven, eight hours. So it does need time to ferment, but it's not the four day, five day dose that that a lot of people are touting as being better.

22:06Yeah. It just goes to show that longer is not always better. Yeah. It's just marketing speak. For sure. Because we as a society, we love age statements. And people really just not understanding the process. Right. You know, as pizza makers, we control the rate of fermentation. And Anthony's is just moving faster. What's yours at right now? Time-wise? Yeah. So we have multiple different recipes. Yeah, we have a same-day dough. We have an overnight dough. We have a two-day dough. And we have a three-day dough. Okay. Depending on our needs. Right. And they're different recipes, too. So each one is intended to be aged that long.

22:49Yes. I mean, it sounds like you're running like a real bread program in your pizzeria. Like that's true. We are. Like that's what I think I hope our listeners, listener you, are understanding that pizza starts with this bread program. And like the best pizzas out there starts with bread. A thousand percent. Pizza is a flat bread with condiments baked onto it. Yeah, totally. Right. You have to understand bread making in order to make great pizza. There's just no other way to do it. We can talk about olive oil at the end, but cheese is the next major component for pizza. What are you thinking? What is your philosophy?

23:22And again, the joy of pizza is your book. And you outline all of these elements in like a really great way, but a little bit of science nerdery or a lot actually, but also some color and voice. But what about cheese? I, again, I like multiple different cheeses. Let's talk about the main one, you know, mozzarella. Yeah. I love fresh mozzarella. I don't love shredded low moisture mozzarella that's on most New York style pizzas. I haven't really found a good one that I love. Plus, we are baking in a wood-fired oven. So, our temperature is a little too high for that stuff. That cheese typically performs better at slightly lower temperatures.

24:03In the bread ovens we were talking about earlier. Yep. Exactly. So, I love making our own fresh mozzarella. I think it's such an amazing process, one that really needs to be dialed in, and that's one that I'm always trying to dial in a little bit more. Just so we can get the right – we want control over how our cheese melts and flows, right? And if the moisture, fat and protein balance within the cheese is out of balance, the cheese won't flow. Wow. Yeah. But that's hard to do because you're working with like humidity. You're working with like outside factors. Also with like milk sources, I'm sure you're using farms in local farms.

24:53Well, so we actually buy the curd like most people who make their own fresh mozzarella. We don't have the storage facility. You're not going from straight milk. You're going from curd. Exactly. Right, right, right. We would need a 50 ,000-gallon tank to hold the amount of milk that we would need. They got some warehouse space in Kansas City. I mean, you could probably get something going on. I wish. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wish. So you buy the curd. So then you just - And we do the stretching process. Tempering the curd, cutting the curd. I see. And even within that process, there's so many variables and there's so many things that can go wrong.

25:26And it all does start with the milk. And in the summertime, this is the second summer in a row that we've had issues with our cheese melting this time of year. So I spoke to the guy that runs the plant last week, and we were talking about how the milk changes in the summertime. And they have to take corrective measures on their end to make sure that we get a curd that we can then make into mozzarella that will melt properly. Wow. And it's really interesting. It was a very hot, very hot year. He said climate change is wreaking havoc on farms and the cows are just not producing milk the way they would in the winter, spring or fall.

26:15Wow. So the milk component is drastically different than like winter milk. Yes. Wow. That's really interesting. Who's the farmer? oh i have no idea yeah yeah just it's a big company yeah yeah and it's not one farmer i'm sure they're getting from a bunch is it like like within the new york region or do you yeah they're right outside of albany oh cool upstate okay yeah i said the wildfires this year wreaked havoc also yeah from may and june yeah it must have been tough i mean all ag was affected by that man um yeah so okay so that's our our mozzarella but like i said i like having multiple different products.

26:55We work with a farm in Sussex County, New Jersey, which is all the way up north. They are raising Jersey cows on their farm. They're milking the cows in the morning, making cheese that afternoon, and we get it the next morning. Amazing. It's incredible. And so we have different versions of the margarita pizza, and I love doing them side by side because they are so completely different. What do you call them on the menu, these two different styles? We have the Jersey margarita. Yeah, yeah. We're about to start serving the summer margarita, which is different. We have the yellow margarita with those yellow tomatoes from Campania.

27:29And then we have our standard margarita. That's like kind of the best in show. You can just do like a margarita tasting at your restaurant. We do. Yeah. That would be so fun. Yeah. Let's talk about the menu. How does the menu set up? Like how are you doing pies, different ones like specials every day? Do you have a standard set, obviously a menu? Yeah, so our menu is we reprint our menus every day, which is unique for a pizzeria, but it just makes sense. Yeah. Because, you know, if corn season starts today, you know, I'm not going to start six weeks early with corn because my summer menu is coming out or anything.

28:13So most of the menu is static. They're classics. They're not ever coming off the menu unless there's a supply shortage of the very specific products that we use for those pizzas. It's like the pepperoni, the margaritas. We have a mushroom pizza. Most of the menu is standard, but then we have the seasonals that come and go as the seasons change. Right, right. That must be the fun part about your job. And you're writing a lot of these recipes? All of them, yeah. Yeah, you're writing all of them. Good, okay, good. It's your recipes. Yeah. I mean, obviously we do work together collectively as a team.