Bigger slice
Storied pizzeria heads to Yonkers
By JOHN GOLDEN

Pizza connoisseurs of New York, take note: a popularly acclaimed family enterprise in Connecticut will venture across the border into Yonkers next spring to open the first of several pizzerias in Westchester County.

The third-generation owners will bring their grandfather’s original recipe for his signature dish, white clam pizza, with them.

A New Haven institution since 1925, Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana is scheduled to open May 1 at 1955 Central Park Ave. in Yonkers on the site of the recently demolished Ricky’s Clam House. The approximately $2.7 million project is a joint venture of Frank Pepe’s Development Co. L.L.C. in New Haven and Trifont Realty Inc. in Yonkers. A principal in that family-owned commercial and residential real estate company, 75-year-old Vilmo Fonte, owned and operated Ricky’s Clam House for 40 years. Trifont will have a 3,500-square-foot office on the second floor of the new building.

The 4,000-square-foot, brick-facade restaurant will employ about 50 full-time and part-time workers and seat about 120 customers.

“This will be our first venture outside our home base of Connecticut,” said Kenneth Berry, chief operating officer of Frank Pepe’s Development Company. He said the company hopes to build three or four more restaurants in Westchester over the next four to five years. William Fonte, of Trifont Realty, said the business partners are looking at sites in New Rochelle, Rye, North White Plains and Port Chester.

“They will be a clone of our New Haven operation,” Berry said, with the same menu, ingredients and recipes passed down by founder Frank Pepe to his daughters and subsequently to his seven grandchildren actively involved in the business today.

“The only two differences between what we do now and what Frank Pepe did in 1925 is that we have air conditioning and refrigeration,” Berry said. The pizzeria’s sausage still is supplied by the original sausage-maker, another family business in its third generation in New Haven.

“Our menu is very simple,” Berry said. “It’s pizza, beer, soda and wine.” In Yonkers, the testimonial-garnering Pepe thin-crust pizzas will be baked in a 14- by 14-foot, 30,000-pound oven custom-built on the premises that replicates the oven installed by Pepe in New Haven in 1938.

The Pepe family in 2006 took that same tradition-adhering recipe for profitable business to Fairfield in Connecticut. Last year, a third Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana opened in Manchester, Conn. Both have done “exceptionally well,” Berry said, and the company’s development arm is considering one or two other locations in its home state.

Berry said New Yorkers, many from White Plains and Port Chester, make up about 10 percent of business at the Fairfield pizzeria. “Over the years, the New Haven location has gotten a lot of exposure with New Yorkers tracking up to Cape Cod,” he said.

As for the new venture into New York, “I think anyone in the sit-down restaurant business knows the value of a site on Central Avenue in Yonkers,” Berry said. “It meets our demographic requirements, our traffic requirements. It’s just a lot of people, and I think they’ll love our pizza.”

“There is no pizza like Pepe’s around here,” said Fonte, who has often made the culinary pilgrimage to New Haven’s Wooster Street. “That thin crust, all natural ingredients, it’s out of this world.”

Frank Pepe came out of the Old World baking trade of his native Italy and settled in Connecticut, applying his skills at a bread oven of ancient technology to the New World art of pizza making. Pepe also proved himself an astute businessman who designed his restaurant operation with great efficiency. That same layout will be duplicated in Yonkers.

“They’ve been doing it over 80 years,” Fonte said. “It’s very successful and from a logistical standpoint it’s very efficient. Frank Pepe was ahead of his time. Logistically he was a genius.”

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