The Trenton Times published the following article on May 12, 2013. To read the full article, click here.
Trenton’s famed Papa’s Tomato Pies to be featured on Cooking Channel’s ‘Pizza Cuz’
By Mike Davis/The Times
on May 12, 2013 at 7:39 AM, updated May 12, 2013 at 1:31 PMTRENTON — It makes for good television: Papa’s Tomato Pies has weathered the city’s economic and social changes for 100 years and lays claim to being the oldest family owned pizzeria in the country.
The Chambers Street restaurant will be featured in the half-hour series “Pizza Cuz” on the Cooking Channel at 9 p.m. tomorrow, as the show’s hosts explore the restaurant’s long history and its legacy in Chambersburg — once a bustling neighborhood of Italian immigrants that has now become a thriving Latino community.
“Pizza Cuz” revolves around the travels of cousins Francis Garcia and Sal Basille, who visit pizzerias across the country learning how to make dough and toppings and discovering everything they can about pizza.
Garcia and Basille taped their show at Papa’s in January, focusing on the pizzeria’s 100th anniversary and spending time in the kitchen with owner Nick Azzaro, who said the duo asked for a lesson in “mustard pies,” a Trenton delicacy in which mustard is cooked into the pizza dough.
Azzaro said it was mystifying why, of all the types of pies on the menu, they wanted to try a mustard version.
“I didn’t understand it either,” he said. “I make all kinds of pies, and they wanted a mustard pie.”
Azzaro’s grandfather, Joseph Papa, opened the pizzeria on Hudson Street in 1912 and moved it to the current Chambers Street location in 1945.
The family lays claim to the title of “oldest pizzeria in the United States,” Azzaro said.
Their main competitor for the title, New York City-based Lombardi’s Pizzeria, closed for a decade in the 1980s and was reopened under a new family’s ownership.
“We’ve never been closed. It’s still the same family, the same restaurant and the same business,” Azzaro said. “Everybody in my family — uncles, cousins, grandfathers — has been in the pizza business.”
The “Trenton tomato pie” is recognized by enthusiasts as a special kind of pizza, prepared in reverse with cheese and toppings cooked underneath the tomato sauce.
People come from all over — Connecticut, Ohio and Missouri this week — just to eat the pizzaOn the Papa’s website, Azzaro speculates on why the Trenton tomato pie wasn’t just called pizza for short. “Sign makers charged by the letter, and ‘PIZZA’ is five letters shorter than ‘TOMATO PIES,’” he writes.
According to a news release from the Cooking Channel, tomorrow’s episode is titled “Neighborhoods” and focuses on neighborhood pizzerias in Connecticut and Michigan as well as Papa’s.
Other businesses have closed or moved from Trenton, as city problems have worsened, but Azzaro, who still lives in Chambersburg, said the changes have been marginal in his area.
“People make it out to be terrible,” he said. “I’m here every night until 1 a.m., and I walk home in the streets. There’s nobody around. I don’t know what everybody’s afraid of. Over here, where I’m at, I don’t have any problems.”
In the last year, two much-loved Trenton locations of DeLorenzo’s pizza — a half-mile walk from Papa’s — have shut down.
One left the city for greener pastures in Hamilton, citing the deterioration of the neighborhood around the Hamilton Avenue location, and the other deliberately went out of business so that its owners could retire.
But it hasn’t stopped out-of-state visitors from trekking to Azzaro’s restaurant, taking photographs at its tables and asking for Azzaro’s autograph.
“People come from all over — Connecticut, Ohio and Missouri this week — just to eat the pizza,” Azzaro said. “It’s crazy.”
Comcast subscribers can view the Cooking Channel on channels 122 or 1281, and Verizon Fios customers can find it at channel 166.