This was the sixth year for The Brooklyn Pizza Co. to enter the Midwest Regional Pizza Competition.
Hosted by Performance Foodservice and Pizza Today, the contest brings independent pizzerias together with the goal of taking home the coveted title of Best of the Midwest and advancing to the national competition in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Seymour pizzeria had never made it to the finals of the Midwest competition until this year.
There were 30 independent pizzerias entered in the nontraditional category, and Brooklyn Pizza was among the top seven that were introduced onstage at Belterra Casino Resort in Florence.
When the top three were announced, the Seymour shop was the first named, taking third place.
“I was like, ‘What? Nice,’” Shawn Malone, owner of The Brooklyn Pizza Co., said of his reaction to hearing his shop’s name called.
“I think third is great,” he said. “Some of the people we were against were Pasquale’s and Parlour. Pasquale’s was No. 2, and Parlour was No. 1. Those are big independents. Pasquale’s is everywhere. It was good. I grew up on it when I was a kid. They were in Columbus where Target is.”
Brooklyn Pizza is a single-unit independent restaurant.
“So even in that tank, we were a small fish, but it felt really cool,” Malone said. “I was proud of my team. We were represented well that day and cooked well.”
Each pizzeria was placed into a group of five to prepare and bake a pizza of its choosing in ovens as people watched the action. Malone said this was the first year contestants were allowed to create something new, but it didn’t have to be on their menu. They could make anything as long as they were buying their products from Performance Foodservice.
“Not only were we using 100% their product, we were the only pizza shop that actually sells our pizza, which was cool,” Malone said. “It felt very good about the fact that we placed third with a pizza we already sell every day.”
That pizza? Nashville Hot Chicken Spicoli. It includes a garlic Parmesan base with fresh broccoli, chopped spinach, mozzarella, provolone, shredded cheddar cheese and Nashville hot chicken.
Malone said Spicoli has been on the Brooklyn Pizza menu for two years, but Nashville hot chicken wasn’t added until later.
“It was our vegetarian crowd looking for something else besides a cheese pizza,” he said of how Spicoli came about. “A lot of our customers kept adding the Nashville hot chicken because they like it on the sandwiches or in their salads. It just became a popular pizza around here over the last year or so. It has really picked up, especially with adding the protein out of the Nashville hot chicken.”
When Malone and his staff learned about the rule change this year, they still wanted to make a pizza already on the menu.
“We were like, ‘This is the pie for us,’” he said. “It’s different than anything anybody’s doing out there, so we just went with it. We knew it was a great pizza.”
Logan Barnard was the sous-chef for the competition. They had 30 minutes to prepare and bake two pizzas. The best one was for the judges, and the second one was available for attendees to try.
On his descriptor for the judges, Malone explained how Spicoli got its name from Sean Penn’s character in the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” who orders a pizza during class.
“‘This is the pizza pie your friend Spicoli would have ordered back in high school,’ so it was a good little lead-in about what the judges were reading about the pizza,” Malone said.
He overheard people noting it’s a great pizza with great Nashville hot sauce.
“To me, it’s more like a barbecue and heat kind of mixed. It’s a great flavor,” Malone said of the sauce.
That night during the contest, Malone said it was intense being in a room with a couple thousand pizzeria and restaurant peers.
“There were some innovative people in that room and just great people in general,” he said. “Independent pizzeria owners are just really cool people and kind, so you meet all of these people.”
The drummer of Naked Karate Girls, a band that performed during the convention, provided a drumroll when the top seven finalists were onstage, and Malone said it was great hearing Brooklyn Pizza among the top three.
The contest has been conducted for 10 years, but Malone said he was reluctant to enter in the beginning.
“I went to a couple and didn’t do it and then started thinking about it more and thought, ‘Well, this is actually something we want to do,’” he said. “We want to create different pizzas around here and have them on the menu, weird things, and I think we achieved that with some stuff.”
The first “funky pizza” on Brooklyn Pizza’s menu featured Flying Pink Pig BBQ pork barbecue, pickles and barbecue sauce. It later was entered in the Midwest competition.
“Now, we just have an elaborate menu of odd pizzas,” Malone said.
A few menu items are named after friends based on items they order.
“I’m trying to incorporate legends of our era into our menu, people who are relevant to the older people in our community as well as the younger people,” Malone said. “These things that we’re tying into our community are some of our biggest sellers.”
Now that Brooklyn Pizza has had a taste of the top three, Malone and his crew look to continue coming up with unique creations to enter in the Midwest Regional Pizza Competition.
“The fact that we’ve stuck with it this many years and tried to keep doing it, said what we wanted to do, this was really a shot in the arm,” he said. “We all came back fired up, like, ‘Man, what are we going to do next year?’ I’m still of the mindset that I want to get it on our menu. I always want to serve it. People are adventurous eaters. They are ready to try some crazy stuff.”
While new menu items are coming to Brooklyn Pizza at the end of this month, the prize-winning pizza will remain.
“I think the Nashville Hot Chicken Spicoli now will have a feature. The Spicoli will always have its own slot on the menu,” he said. “This kind of became a thing that people wanted, so I think we should give it its own title.”