Scott Wiener took his love of pizza and turned it into a business.
He takes people around New York City and shows them the best that New York has to offer in the way of pizza’s.
When he’s not conducting pizza tours Scott Wiener writes an award-winning column for Pizza Today Magazine contributes to P M Q’s Pizza Magazine and PizzaMarketplace.com and judges pizza culinary competitions around the globe.
He’s been featured on CBS Sunday Morning. The Dr. Oz Show, the Travel Channel, Cooking Channel, Food Network, Discovery Channel, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, viceland, and in New York Magazine.
We spoke with Scott Wiener about all things pizza.
Q – All right Scott, it’s quiz time. How many pizzas were sold in the United States last year (2018)? Do you know?
A – I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I’m going to take a guess. I’m going to say 2 1/2 billion.
Q – You’re close. The answer is 3 billion pizzas were eaten in just the United States in 2018. Do you know how many frozen pizzas were sold last year?
A – Wow! I do not know. I’ll take a guess. It’s got to be in the hundreds of millions am my I close?
Q – The answer is-1 billion.
A – I didn’t think it was going to be 1 billion. So, you’re telling me that one third of all pizza sold in the United States last year were frozen?
Q – The way I’m reading the stats, 3 billion pizzas were eaten in the restaurants and 1 billion were sold in stores.
A – So, the frozen are not included in the other number?
Q – That’s what it sounds like to me.
A – Okay interesting. More than I would’ve thought.
Q – No wonder you’re in the pizza business!!
A – I’m not really in the pizza business as much as in the pizza information business. If I sold pizzas that would be a different thing.
Q – I see you went to Syracuse University. What was your course of study?
A – I studied radio, television and film production.
Q – You graduated from Syracuse with that as your major?
A – I did. I graduated in 2004.
Q – I guess that helped you prepare for a career you’re now in?
A – You know what? I didn’t know it at the time, but, yeah it absolutely did.
Q – How many pizza restaurants are there in New York City?
A – It’s probably around 2000. Somewhere around there. It depends on whether a restaurant that serves pizza counts. There are so many places that serve pizza that are not pizzerias. I think the number is around 2000.
Q – If you were not in a place like New York City, this idea of conducting pizza tours might not have worked. If you were for example in a place like Detroit there might not be enough places to point out to people, correct?
A – That’s correct. I actually started doing the tours when I lived in New Jersey. So I moved into the city, into New York because I knew I had to be where all the pizzerias are. Now, the history of pizza in New York and the variety of pizzerias all make it the right town to do this.
Q – How do you take people around to see these pizzerias? In a bus? A limo? A car? How does that work?
A – We basically do three methods of tour. We do walking tours. So, that could be a public or private group tour where we are in one neighborhood. Or, we could do a public bus tour or once a week, we roll around on a Sunday in a big, yellow school bus and we take 32 people. And the third way is you do a hop on tour. Sometimes a school group might come or a summer camp and they already have a bus and we just jump on their bus. We could do it anyway we need to. Helicopter, airplane, whatever.
Q – Have you ever done it in a helicopter?
A – I never have, but, I really want to.
Q – How much can you see from a helicopter?
A – It’s not about what you see. It’s about where you visit and what you eat, so, if we were in a helicopter we would just fly around to all of these great places and get there faster to beat the traffic.
Q – Where would the helicopter land?
A – You know what? That’s for the helicopter pilot to land. (Laughs)
Q – Are you booked every day with people wanting to take your pizza tours?
A – Not every day. Tuesday’s we usually keep off. In the winter we think about the schedule a little bit just because it’s colder and fewer people are traveling. But, in the summer will have it pretty much every day.
Q – What is the cost of taking the tour?
A – When we have a public walking tour it’s $55 a ticket and that gets the tour and pizza included and everybody gets a little notebook so you can keep track of your tasting notes. The public bus tour is $75 per person. We hit 4 different places about 4 ½ to 5 hours and again all food is included and the notebook.
Q – So, every place you go you get to sit down and eat pizza?
A – Absolutely.
Q – How many people can eat all that pizza?! I would think they’d be full after just one stop.
A – You’re usually filled up but we keep it limited to one slice per stop. So, you won’t be full until the third or fourth stop.
Q – What kind of questions do people ask you about pizza as you’re taking them around these tours?
A – We get really good questions about the differences between different ovens or different styles. When I make pizza at home what should I be doing if I want this style? A lot of questions about toppings and cheese. It just goes all over the place. People asked some really, really good questions.
Q – Do you eat pizza every day?
A – Yeah. I do. I usually keep myself limited to 15 slices per week. When I’m on tour it’s rare that I’ll eat at every stop because I know that I have a weekly quota and I can’t go past it.
Q – Where you live you have a display of over 1300 pizza boxes?
A – Yeah. It’s actually over 1400 now. It’s a lot of boxes! (Laughs).
Q – What got you into collecting pizza boxes? I can see they are interesting to look at.
A – I just figured when I started doing the tour that I wanted to know everything I could about every aspect of pizza. Since over 3 billion pizzas are sold in America, two thirds of those are sold in pizza boxes, take out, carry out, and delivery, whatever. So, I figured I should know something about the boxes. So, I started collecting them.
Q – Did you have to eat or visit every place you have a box from?
A – No. That’s a whole other story. I just collect the boxes in the way that you might collect baseball cards or action figures or stamps. People who collect these items buy them online or go to a conventions. For pizza boxes I either visit myself or somebody I know or somebody who is a customer on my tour will bring me a box. Sometimes people will bring me a box and say I found this in South Korea. I thought it was interesting and you should have it in your collection. So, I keep it.
Q – You just came back from Thailand didn’t you?
A – Yes, I did I was in Thailand for a couple of weeks actually working with a pizzeria.
Q – And, you were over there for what? Just to find out how popular pizza is in Thailand?
A – When I went over I was brought over by a pizzeria in Bangkok wanting to have my help in some of their marketing. So, once I finish that job I just traveled around the country a little bit. I ate some non-pizza things but I also ate a good amount of pizza.
Q – How popular is pizza in Thailand?
A – It’s popular but, it’s still considered to be a fast food. It’s not quite what we have in America.
Q – Because America has gourmet pizza and pizzas served up at franchise pizza restaurants.
A – Absolutely right.
Q – Since you’re a student of all things pizza, I’ve heard it said that pizza originated in Greece not Italy. What can you tell me about that?
A – That’s not true because the Greeks in order to have what we call pizza today you need to be talking about mozzarella and tomato which are not items that are in Greek cuisine. That one thread of truth to that is that the food and the word pizza itself may be derivatives of the Greek pita. And, the Pita is a flat bread which was probably brought into Italy with Alexander The Great pretty early on, 320 something . At that time the tomato wasn’t around in Italy, Buffalo mozzarella wasn’t really being produced in Italy quite yet, but it became the basis for it. It’s like the Pita, both the food and the word are linked to the word pizza. It certainly wasn’t something that was developed in Greece.
Q – It was developed in Italy then?
A – Right. But, to say that one group did it and another group didn’t is to say that you can’t have things simultaneously happen around the world that pasta was created in China long before Italy had it. Italy did not find out about it in China. There’s parallel development. So, the food we call pizza is definitely an Italian food but it doesn’t stand alone.
Q – Scott, when you get right down to it, how much is there to learn about pizza? Are you learning things about pizza that you didn’t know the day before?
A – Absolutely. I learned more and more every day about the fermentation process for dough, flour milling and history. History is a big thing. For a long time we had a lot of thoughts about the American pizza industry and some of the things we thought to be true aren’t exactly true.
Official website: www.scottspizzatours.com
