Three Vancouver restaurateurs adding pizzazz to frozen pizza

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Over the last two years, we have all eaten a lot of pizza. For a restaurant, pizza is easy to make, cheap to produce, and safe to transport in a delivery bag. For consumers, pizza is the ultimate comfort food, and who hasn’t needed a lot of comforting recently?

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Chances are, though, that while you were you eating all that pie, you weren’t eating a lot of frozen pizza. Because let’s face it, most frozen pizza is terrible.

A trio of Vancouver restaurateurs is changing that. They are making Neapolitan-style gourmet pizzas with quality toppings and crusts that don’t taste like spongy cardboard, pizzas that you can keep in the freezer for the next time you’re too lazy to make dinner, pizzas that your kids will love and you won’t be embarrassed to serve to guests.

You may never have to wait impatiently for the delivery guy to show up again.

Nightingale Pizza

Chef David Hawksworth recalls how, shortly after he opened Nightingale in 2017, the mother of an old friend came in and exclaimed, “You’ve finally opened up your pizza restaurant!”

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“I said, ‘What?’ And she said, ‘Pizza was all you talked about when you were 19.’”

He laughs. “I like the simplicity of pizza. It looks super simple, but it’s super complicated at the same time. The flavour of bread — honest to God, I love bread. I like a little char on my pizza. And super, super simple.”

Mind you, Hawksworth wasn’t exactly planning to make frozen pizza as a career move. For that, he can thank the pandemic, which shut down his fine-dining restaurants and took his staff from 350 to 12.

“The world was falling apart and everything was closed,” he recalls. “I was looking at the pizza and everyone was turning to takeout.” Then he noticed that the pizza reviewer for Barstool Sports had turned to reviewing frozen pizza instead of restaurant pies. “And I thought, ‘That’s so cool.’”

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He tracked down the chef with the best reviews. The two became friends, Hawksworth learned how to make frozen gourmet pizza, and Nightingale Pizza was born.

At first, he and a small team made everything from hand, prepping at Bel Café and baking the crusts in Nightingale’s Italian pizza oven. That was a lot of work when they were making only 80 pizzas a day. It became overwhelming when they were making 500.

“We were doing this by hand until a month ago. We were even kneading the dough by hand,” Hawksworth says. “We had to get over $100,000 in equipment, but it’s keeping a lot of people going. We got a start-up business grant. We ordered another oven from Italy, and I bought a mixing bowl so big you can take a bath in it.”

What makes the three available Nightingale pizzas so good is a long fermentation that lasts “for many, many days” and creates a tender, flavourful, easy-to-digest crust. The toppings are the highest-quality local and Italian ingredients, and the slight char really does make the pizza taste as if it came straight from a restaurant pizza oven.

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And after all this time, Hawksworth still loves pizza. In fact, he still uses the two pizza ovens he has at home. “I know great pizza, and I can make pretty good pizza,” he says.

Best for: Gourmet toppings; tender, puffed, lightly charred crust.

Where to find it: Legends Haul, Nightingale, various retailers. See nightingalepizza.com for locations.

Munch by Nicli Antica

Last year, Arash Fasihi, a tech and logistics entrepreneur, was looking for a new business to invest in. “Through the pandemic, this whole notion of food coming to your home was in the back of my mind,” he says. But he wasn’t considering just any food.

“Going back to my childhood, my dad had a pizzeria back in Iran, and we opened a pizzeria when we moved here, on West 10th,” he says. “I can eat pizza every night. This was always a passion in the back of my mind.”

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In May, he bought Nicli Antica Pizzeria, which had already closed its Gastown location but was still making its much-loved Neapolitan-style pizzas at its busy North Vancouver one.

Why not freeze them, Fasihi thought, and in January 2022 he launched Munch, noting, “People can munch these pizzas any time.”

The Nicli uses the long, slow fermentation process that creates those flavourful crusts, and they still use quality Italian ingredients for toppings. But now you can store the pizzas in your freezer and, if you like, join a subscription service that will keep them coming to your door weekly or monthly.

“We’re going to bring that whole restaurant experience to your home, and you don’t have to wait for the delivery person to show up,” Fasihi says. “We feel like foods brings people together and why not get together at home?”

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Munch has 11 pizzas in their lineup, including a vegan margherita and their signature mushroom and blue cheese. Fasihi is already looking for a facility so they can take production out of the restaurant. And he isn’t stopping there — he also plans to launch a line of pastas and sauces later this year.

“We’re more of a software company operating a restaurant now,” he says.

Best for: Biggest variety of toppings, free delivery, subscription service available.

Where to find it: Legends Haul, Spud.ca. Order or subscribe though munch.ca.

Holy Napoli

It wasn’t the pandemic that encouraged Francesca Galasso to start making frozen pizza. It was the customers at her North Van pizzeria, Il Castello.

“We started Holy Napoli out of the pizzeria in 2017,” she recalls. “We started out really small because customers were always asking to buy our dough balls. The packaging was terrible, but the product was really great. Customers loved it and we thought, maybe there’s something there.”

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She started researching the frozen pizzas that were available in grocery stores and says, “Nothing resonated with me as a young millennial consumer. Not the esthetics or the product, nothing, and I tried every frozen pizza on the market.”

She and her partner decided that they could create a frozen pizza that replicated the pizzeria experience at home “without compromising on quality at all,” its thin crust made with Italian 00 flour and a long, slow fermentation. “It’s all about the crust,” she says. “It’s really that hit of carbohydrate when you dive into a really good crust.”

For a year, they made and froze pizzas every night after the restaurant closed, and sold them through the restaurant. “I was covered in flour all the time,” she says with a laugh.

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Soon they found a facility in Port Coquitlam where they could top, freeze and package the pizzas, although they still had to bake them in North Van, where the pizza oven was located. Eventually, Galasso decided to concentrate full time on Holy Napoli and sold Il Castello (it’s now Farina a Legna).

Today, Holy Napoli offers five different types of pizza, as well as the original dough balls, and is available in 600 stores across Canada, as far east as Quebec.

“We found that people just wanted a good frozen pizza,” Galasso says. “Our business is really resonating with people. Who doesn’t love pizza?”

Best for: Classic toppings, soft crust, dough balls, widely available retail.

Where to find it: Legends Haul, Spud.ca, various retailers. Visit holynapoli.com for locations