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Riccioni once kept Wedgewood Pizza open until 1 a.m. on busy nights, but more recently,
he's cut the dining room hours back to a 9 p.m. closing, mainly to clear the shop of
boisterous teens. He opens at 11 a.m., selling a multitude of slices at lunch to his
largely blue-collar clientele. But most of his booming business in in carryout.
Maintaining a system to handle the massive rushes that develop around his counter space on
weekend evenings is the result of a system he and his partners developed over many years,
with more recent adjustments as the demand grows ever stronger. The key to the
system is cooperation, headed by one or two overseers who monitor the ovens and examine
each pizza that goes in and out. Those overseers are usually either Riccioni
himself, his daughter Filomena, his son-in-law, Neil, his nephew Anthony, or a select few
others.
When we make a pizza," Riccioni says, "it has to be a certain way, not too much
[ingredients], but enough. Most of the time I have to call someone who doesn't put
enough; I never call a person who puts too much. I might tell them to put a little
less, but not too much. If they don't put enough, I get mad."
Riccioni maintains a strict policy of dispensing only pizzas he deems perfect. If he
notes a flaw such as a burned edge or insufficient toppings, he offers the pie to the
customer for free, or tells them he'll make them another one.
"Never do we have just one pizza in an oven. We fill up the first oven, then
the next, then the next. When we get the last one filled up, it's time to take the
pizzas out of the first one, then we go down the line and do it all over again."
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Turning over 2,000 Pizzas in a single evening demands a fine-tuned tracking system.
Riccioni keeps it simple and says he has no trouble keeping up with which orders go
where. He struggled for years, he says, to find tickets that would do the job during
the heaviest rush period. "Now I got one company making special tickets for me
with a big number on the top," he says. "the tickets are 5.5 inches long
and 4.25 inches wide, on nice, thick paper." The numbers stand about an inch
tall in thick black letters, and each block of tickets is numbered from 1 to 600.
Riccioni has developed a system of code letters that make filling out the order quick and
easy (such as "16RM," which means a 16-inch pie topped with mushrooms and
pepperoni).
Each ticket includes customer name, special instructions, and quantity. If a
customer orders six pies, the pies usually go into a single oven. If they want 20,
the crew does what it can to keep them in contiguous ovens.
He says the oversized numbers on the tickets allow counter workers to quickly spot an
order at a glance, even if its oven lies at the far end of the row. As soon as the
finished items come out of the oven and head toward their boxes, a new batch is ready to
go in.
That production process begins at 7 a.m., when the dough maker arrives and locks the door
behind him. Each batch he makes comprises a 50-pound sack of flour, which is mixed
in the simple manner his grandmother used: nothing more than yeast, flour, salt, water and
little oil. "Only five people make the dough," he says. "I
don't do anything special, but only three people know the recipe. It's no secret,
but I just let a few people know how to do it. If I let others make our dough, they
could go someplace else and make the dough same as me. Capisci? For the most
important job, I want people I know will be working with me for the rest of my life."
Riccioni never uses sugar in his dough. In fact, he has such an aversion to the
substance that he doesn't even offer it for the coffee he recently began serving in the
shop.
Each racked batch of dough goes into a long warming room, with another close behind it,
then another, then another. The line of prepped dough goes in one door, moves along
the line as the day progresses, and comes out a door at the other end. From the
warming room they go into the walk-in, where they have more opportunity to rise. A
third rise takes place once they're shaped into their pans. A typically busy day
sees the process employed on 30 batches, or 1,500 pounds of flour.
His attention to quality has led him to a series of purveyors; these days he's satisfied
with the ones he has. Many times - due in no small part to the quantities of food he
orders - he has developed personal relationships with the higher ups in many of those
companies.
next page: The Family Way
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