Pizza Tossing

Posted by Adam Kuban, April 1, 2004 at 6:06 PM

We got scooped on this one big time, but we'd be remiss not to mention this story. The April 5, 2004, issue of The New Yorker features a Talk of the Town item about the U.S. Pizza Team's George Giove, who competes in the freestyle pizza toss. The U.S. Pizza Team is in Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy, this week for the World Pizza Championships. "Dough Dreams" begins:

George Giove, a twenty-nine-year-old journeyman pizzaiolo (Italian for “pizza guy”), competes for the United States Pizza Team. He made his name in the freestyle pizza toss, on the strength of his double-dough toss-and-spin moves (across the shoulders, behind the back, through the legs, the whip, and the kick-flip), and for the creativity and flair of his routine, which he performs to pop music. Giove has a compact, chesty build, salami-size forearms, and quick hands. He speaks in a mixture of Brooklynese (when his grandparents came to America with their three sons, in 1971, they opened a pizzeria in Borough Park) and Staten Islandese (when Giove was a kid, some relatives migrated across the Verrazano Narrows and opened a place called Brother’s Pizza, in Port Richmond). Giove is also not afraid to exploit his Italian heritage to appeal to contest judges. At the U.S. Team Trials last year, which he won, he chose Toto Cutugno’s soft-rock anthem “L’Italiano” (the chorus is “I am the Italian, the real Italian”) for his freestyle routine. And at the World Pizza Championships, which are held annually in Salsomaggiore Terme, in northern Italy (the 2004 Worlds are this week), he won a bronze medal in the best-pizza-maker event—this was at the height of Operation Shock and Awe, when popular sentiment in Italy was strongly antiwar—for what he called his “pace” pie (pace is Italian for “peace”), which is topped with bacon, zucchini, and chunks of herb cream cheese. [continue reading "Dough Dreams" >>]

Watch a movie of some freestylers in action (pictured above).

Interestingly enough, Brother's Pizza was recommended to us by a bartender on John Street in the Financial District, right after E-Rock and I got back from sampling Staten Island's Nunzio's.

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Tags: Oddities