Manna for the Masses
The Long Journey
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Manna for the Masses
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Riccioni's grandmother was his first and most profound culinary influence. Her careful work with dough remains his fundamental model for bread making, as well as other food production skills. The family would kill one pig a year, he says, and that meat would last the entire year. The basic technique they used in prepping and storing that pork remains his model for sausage making, though the quantity has swollen to 850 pounds of port butt each week. Until recently he made all 850 pounds of it himself each Monday, until finally he decided to give himself a break from the grind and found a commercial producer, Fontanini, willing to faithfully follow the basics of the old family process. His youth in Italy was a period when he learned flexibility and resiliency in his work habits, taking whatever assignment would get him by, rejecting no job as too menial. A tour in the Italian military had Riccioni cooking for 30 men, and other jobs he held after that included mass food production in a variety of settings. Slowly, without reali  zing his life's work, he was picking up the skills he needed. His career
hopping included a stint in the kitchen of a well-regarded hotel in Rome, where he kept
his eyes and ears open and learned more about the art of high-volume food production.While at that job in 1960, he met an American tourist, Rose DiArcangelis, who was in Rome for a vacation. When she returned to the United States, they began writing to each other. In 1961 she returned to Italy where they were married. His enthusiastic decision to accompany her to her hometown of Youngstown, he says, quickly turned to regret. "You're young and you want to go," he explains, "but then, after I came, I knew I did wrong. It was tough. I didn't speak English, and there was no job when I came. People say there are no jobs in this country, but in 1961 it was worse than today." But Riccioni had learned in Italy that hard work is the key to a good life, and he carried that attitude across the Atlantic to his new home in Ohio. He found a day job at a car wash. It was at his night job as a dishwasher where he met Bruce, who taught him the ropes and then eventually came to work for Riccioni. Thirty years later, Bruce still works part-time for his old understudy. Through his brother-in-law, he landed a railroad construction job and began hustling among the three jobs, sleeping when he could fit it in. When the railroad industry fell off due to changing times, he found another job as a house painter. "I never painted in my life," he recalls, "but after I started painting, I worked 14, 16 hours a day. Nobody could beat me with a six-inch brush!"  A steel fabrication job allowed him to whittle his job roster down to two, painting and steel work, that finally provided him with a respectable income. Riccioni felt secure with his new life in the Land of Opportunity. He learned enough English to get along, but he never did master the language as well as he wishes. "I don't learn English that well," he explains, "because I'm all the time working." In the mid-'60s one of of Riccioni's friends, Jerry Bianco, an Italian-born, New York chef transplanted to Youngstown, opened a pizza shop with another friend of his, Pasquale "Patsy" Accocia. Two years later, Bianco died, and Patsy persuaded Riccioni to join the business. After a six-month trial period, during which he kept his other jobs, Riccioni decided he and his partner could work well together and made his fateful jump into the restaurant business. When Accocia died in 1987, Riccioni was on his own. That was three years after Riccioni decided to attend the first Pizza Expo, held in Orlando, Florida, in 1984, to see if he could improve his pizza-making skills. by then his culinary professionalism, as well as his intense involvement in community and charitable affairs, had become evident to the wider community of pizza people. As a result, he was awarded the National Association of Pizza Operators' Pizza Maker of the Year Award - an honor he still remembers with a swelling of pride. Since then he's continued to involve himself in the community, usually offering donations of pizza to help an endless variety of organizations. The two-inch thick stack of thank you letters he's received are weighty testament to the man's civic involvement.
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