A history of Vancouver told through pizza

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When the global history of pizza is written, Vancouver will not play a starring role. That honour will go to Naples or New York.

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But pizza can help us understand the history of Vancouver’s past century: a story of immigration, multiculturalism, entrepreneurship, art, innovation, commerce and crime.

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Modern pizza originated in southern Italy in the 18th or 19th century, and the dish has always been associated with its country of origin: The classic Margherita pizza, the story goes, was named after Queen Margherita of Italy, patriotically topped with green basil, white mozzarella, and red tomato sauce to match the colours of the Italian flag.

Ever since its arrival here about 70 years ago, Vancouver’s pizza has — like the city — been shaped by people from all over the world.

Some Italians — and Italian Americans and Italian Canadians — are purists, aggressively loyal to a specific, rigid idea of how pizza, the food of heaven, should or shouldn’t be prepared.

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Anthony Falco, a New York-based international pizza consultant, doesn’t go for that kind of fundamentalism.

Falco grew up in Austin, Texas, and says his “outsider perspective” means he’s free of “those partisan loyalties to Chicago pizza or New York or anywhere.”

“Pizza is now the world’s food,” said Falco, who has worked with pizzerias in more than 20 countries on four continents, helping him appreciate regional differences.

Anyway, he points out, pizzas were always an intercontinental endeavour.

“There’s no pizza without Mexico,” Falco said, because tomatoes were brought to Italy from Mexico. Mozzarella di bufala is produced from the milk of the water buffalo, a species originating in the Indian subcontinent, he said. Basil is native to Southeast Asia, and wheat came from the Middle East.

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“It’s all a big mash-up,” Falco said.

It seems fitting, then, that the diversity of a multicultural, coastal city like Vancouver should be reflected in its pies.

The beginnings

One version of pizza’s history in Vancouver traces the dish’s arrival to one of the city’s most storied institutions: The Penthouse Night Club.

The four Filippone brothers — Joe, Ross, Mickey, and Jimmy — opened The Penthouse in the 1940s, first as a speakeasy, then as a supper club. For the past half-century, The Penthouse has been a strip club, still owned by the same family.

The Filippones came from Calabria, in Italy’s south, and they often hired young southern Italians to work at The Penthouse, said Ross’s son Danny Filippone, who runs the club today. In 1949, a young cook named Giuseppe Cipriano from Naples — considered the birthplace of pizza — landed a job in The Penthouse kitchen, where he started making pizzas.

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By Cipriano’s reckoning, they were the first pizzas served in Vancouver, he told The Vancouver Sun in 1993. The dish was not immediately popular with customers. Cipriano and his family went on to run their own restaurants, including Cipriano’s at 24th and Main.

“The Penthouse always claims that we were the first ever to serve pizza in Vancouver,” Filippone said, but it was a point of contention between his father, Ross, and Ross’s friend Tevie Smith, who founded The Snackery.

“Tevie was a really good friend of my dad, and they used to always argue, all the time, when they were playing racquetball: Who had the first pizza?” Filippone said. “Tevie would always tell people he was the first, my dad would say he was the first. It was an ongoing, fun argument.”

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Smith, who died in 2019 aged 86, was described in a 2008 Vancouver Sun story as “one of the great characters in Vancouver … a restaurateur, a bouncer and a rounder, a guy who’s been a fixture in certain parts of Vancouver culture since the early 1950s.”

After graduating from Vancouver’s Kitsilano Secondary School in 1951, Smith moved to San Francisco, where he discovered pizza. He brought the dish back home, first selling slices at the Pacific National Exhibition, before opening what he called Vancouver’s first pizzeria: The Snackery, at 15th and Granville.

Smith, who came from a poor Jewish family, recalled in a 2016 interview with the Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. that he was able to open The Snackery by persuading the father of his friend Jack Wasserman — who built a legendary career as a Vancouver Sun columnist and self-described “saloon reporter” — to invest in the pizza business, and bring in other members of the Jewish community.

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“The Jewish kids, all of them, grew up in The Snackery,” Smith told the archives.

“It wasn’t just pizza,” Smith said, estimating — with numbers that are difficult to verify today — that he made two tons of corned beef and six tons of pickles every month at the restaurant.

Hot cheese and the slice-price wars

Falco, the New York-based pizza consultant, lived in Seattle in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and often visited Vancouver, where he was struck by two things that, it turned out, went together quite well: abundant weed and cheap pizza.

At that time, cannabis was still illegal, but “Vancouver was like the Amsterdam of North America,” Falco said. He marvelled at the proliferation of buck-a-slice pizzerias.

“It’s such a novelty to be able to get a slice of pizza for a dollar, we didn’t have anything like that in Seattle,” he said. “It was a great combination: just smoke a joint and eat a bunch of pizza. I thought it was like a real adult Disneyland.”

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In the early 2000s, several Vancouver shops battled each other with ever-lower prices: 99 cents a slice, 93 cents, 87 cents.

In some cases, the secret ingredient may have been larceny.

While Dave Jones was the Vancouver Police Department’s inspector in charge of the downtown core from 1995 to 2003, he saw “all these inexpensive pizza places popped up magically,” which were often the site of late-night fights after nightclubs closed.

After retiring from the VPD, Jones worked as a security consultant for the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association, and quickly learned that cheese was the most frequently stolen item from downtown supermarkets. Shoplifters, he said, were often observed stuffing large blocks of cheese down their pants in stores, before selling the goods to nearby pizzerias.

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Back in the early 2000s, Jones said, he and his team of loss-prevention officers made a point of avoiding the handful of pizzerias they knew were buying stolen-and-stuffed-down-pants cheese, preferring to buy their slices elsewhere.

He has no knowledge of a similar black market today, he said, and wouldn’t want to discourage people from supporting local pizzerias. But, during those cutthroat slice-price wars two decades ago, “hot” cheese seemed to be one way some operators cut costs on their most expensive ingredient.

‘The world’s food’

If pizza is, as Falco says, “the world’s food,” you can taste a range of international influences in Vancouver.

The distinctive sesame seeds on the crust of Uncle Fatih’s pizzas, for example, came from the company’s founder, Fatih Ilcin, who is originally from Turkey, where almost every savoury pastry includes sesame seeds, his daughter Naz McCarney explained.

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“He thought it would be an interesting and fun way to incorporate a bit of Turkish culture into the pizza,” McCarney said.

Today, Uncle Fatih’s might be the biggest made-in-Vancouver pizza business: Ilcin started the business in 2004 as a single by-the-slice shop at Commercial and Broadway, and expanded it into an empire with nine locations — with more on the way in Richmond and Calgary — and more than 120 employees.

At the other end of the scale is Zaccary’s Pizza, a small shop on Oak Street where only one pair of hands has kneaded the dough for three decades, founder Leo Sarantopoulos. In the early days, Sarantopoulos tried a few employees, but it didn’t work out, he explained.

Today, Zaccary’s has limited operating hours, and other than a couple of part-time delivery drivers, it’s a one-person operation. Like an artist, Sarantopoulos follows a meticulous process, making the pizza sauce daily in small batches so it doesn’t turn sour.

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Like many other Greek Canadians, Sarantopoulos cooks his pizzas in a pan, instead of placing them directly in the oven. While traditional Neapolitan pizzas have thin crust, sparse ingredients and are blasted at high heat, many Greek-owned pizzerias — like Kitsilano institutions Olympia or Double DD — use thicker crusts and more toppings.

The Greeks have created some of Canada’s most noteworthy pizza innovations.

The Kolitsas family is credited with creating Regina-style pizza (thick crust, stacked meat, slices cut into squares) in the Saskatchewan capital in the 1970s.

Sam Panopoulos is believed to have invented Hawaiian pizza, first adding canned pineapple as a topping at his pizzeria in southern Ontario in the 1960s. Panopoulos’ creation has proven divisive. While Hawaiian pizza is popular around the world, it’s reviled by others. The debate has prompted international incidents, with Iceland’s president supporting banning the fruit as a pizza topping and Italy’s ambassador in Britain publicly denouncing it as “a huge problem.”

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Pizzerias owned by Indian Canadians are an important fixture in many towns and cities in B.C.

One of Vancouver’s most popular is Supreme Pizza, which was — like the Filippones’ The Penthouse or the Kerasiotises’ Olympia — opened by a group of brothers. Tarlok, Karnail, Amrik and Iqbal Bindra, originally from Punjab, opened Supreme on Victoria Drive in 1985.

While many Indian pizzerias include toppings like tandoori and butter chicken, Supreme sticks with more standard fare: pepperoni, peppers, mushrooms. But regulars often ask for their pizza “Indian-style” — which means adding ginger, cilantro and spices — and “in the old oven,” the shop’s decades-old deck oven, as opposed to the more modern conveyor belt-style oven. The Indian-style blend makes the pie medium-spicy and the old oven makes it extra crispy. Neither option is listed on Supreme’s menu — but if you know, you know.

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When Paul Natrall, a member of Squamish First Nation, was a kid growing up on Squamish territory on the North Shore, his grandmothers used bannock, the flatbread that’s a staple of many of North America’s Indigenous people, to make pizza.

Today, Natrall is a chef, and bannock pizza is one of the most popular items offered by his food truck and catering business, called Mr. Bannock. For more than a decade, he’s been making the classics — cheese, pepperoni, and Hawaiian — on bannock. More recently, he’s started partnering with local sustainable meat farmers to source more local meats for pizzas, like elk salami and duck prosciutto.

“You can’t beat fresh and local, right?” Natrall said. “You can put pretty much anything on bannock. … And who doesn’t love pizza?”

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‘Home with an open door’

In the 1978 Kitsilano Secondary School yearbook, Natalino Bastone’s grad write-up predicted he’d “open his own Italian pizza joint.” Fourteen years later, he and his cousin Franco did just that, around the corner from their school.

Over the last 30 years, Nat’s Pizza has been more than a business. It’s become a neighbourhood hub, the way some pubs, cafés or hair salons can be a focal point for a community. Some newer pizzerias, like AJ’s on East Broadway, have also fostered a neighbourhood-hangout vibe.

The Bastones support various community events and causes. Kitsilano grads have celebrated weddings at Nat’s, and others have had Nat’s pizzas delivered to their wedding reception. Sometimes, when former classmates died too young, friends gathered in mourning at Nat’s. Just because it seemed like the place to go.

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“It’s basically an Italian home with an open door,” Nat says. “You just gotta pay a couple bucks for food.”

The walls of Nat’s are covered with a hodgepodge of photos of longtime customers. One of them is Kits ’94 grad and former Vancouver Sun paper boy Ryan Reynolds.

Reynolds never forgot Nat’s, even after becoming an A-list Hollywood star. In 2015, when he was starring in the locally filmed big-budget superhero flick Deadpool and the production required 32 pizzas to use as props, Reynolds made sure the pies came from Nat’s. In May 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down graduation ceremonies around the world, Reynolds called Bastone to buy 385 Nat’s Pizza gift cards for Kits High grads, good for one large pizza for every member of the class.

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Reynolds has also repeatedly publicly expressed his love of Kerrisdale’s pizza-and-Greek restaurant Minerva’s, which surely hasn’t hurt their business.

The slice business has never been easy, says Nat Bastone, but given rent, property taxes and inflation, things have never been as difficult as now. Bastone muses that the wildly fluctuating prices of ingredients like cheese might soon force him to list “market price” on his menu beside pizza slices, the way restaurants do for lobster.

Bastone says he just tries to keep treating today’s neighbourhood kids the same way they always did: “We want them to feel like it’s their place.”

“It’s a simple thing in life,” Bastone said. “When things are difficult, a slice of pizza never hurts.”

A great pizzeria can be a crucial feature of great neighbourhoods, which, in turn, make great cities.

It’s possible a city could be world-class without pizzerias. But I wouldn’t want to imagine it.

dfumano@postmedia.com

twitter.com/fumano

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