Extra Extra Pizza was built by three career restaurant workers who decided that if they were going to work that hard, they should share in the profits. After taking classes with Cooperation Buffalo, they started their restaurant in cooperation with micro-developer Frits Abell, making 549 W. Utica St. into the sort of restaurant they actually wanted to work in.
Joey Pucciarelli, Bridget Murphy, and Soon Ho Sim opened in 2022. A fourth partner, Gabe Burgos Nieves, joined them a year ago. Employees have a path to ownership, and since last month, a 401(k) retirement account with a 5 percent employer match.
Somehow, they do it at prices commensurate with Buffalo’s pizza superstars. With ownership always on the floor, Joey and Bridget can still care for their six week old boy, and make it work.
Many restaurateurs with children have to choose. A more flexible restaurant model might help.
Extra Extra Pizza is also one of the only restaurants open on Monday night, when coincidentally bottles of wine from its list are available at half price.
The menu has everything you want from a pizza shop: salads, including a bracing giardiniera ($4), cheesy garlic bread on housemade hoagie roll, dusted with romano ($11), and a big salad ($13).
Pizzas come in regular and gluten-free, vegan and not, and vegan includes both cheese and pepperoni, sourced from Strong Hearts. Check out the list of possibilities, fasten your seatbelts, and chase your own dream pizza, from $18 to $40 or thereabouts.
At Extra Extra, it’s the oil-cured eggplant for me. In ye olden times my family would get bushels of eggplant and store slices in vinegar, oil, garlic, and spices. Extra Extra’s takes me back to those heady days, even though these slices are emphatically Brooklyn, not Buffalo style.
That means two hands, or folding, with crackly corniciones and judiciously leopard-spotted undercarriages. Another fine touch is the principled service. Extra Extra Pizza is the first place I was interrupted from spending too much money at a restaurant. When I got to the fourth topping on one off-menu excursion, they warned me that it was too much.
Defending the customer’s happiness and the restaurant’s reputation by turning down money is the sign of a happily empowered restaurant worker.
The other extra in Extra Extra Pizza is its oasis of simplicity at bill-paying time.
Somehow many American diners believe tipping is normal, instead of a barbarous worker-degrading system allowed to flourish in only two outlaw nations on the entire planet.
Not at Extra Extra Pizza. No moral banana peel to step over before you can leave, no quick tussle with the better angels of your nature before putting a number on the line. Just pay the price.
All that, and Extra Extra Pizza charges going rates for topnotch Buffalo pies.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that this summer’s forecast calls for financial hurricanes for locally owned restaurants.
As your restaurant scout, I’m alerting you to a slow-motion hurricane reshaping your dining opportunities. Normally I avoid getting shouty, but when I see a duty to warn, it’s hollering time. This is me popping smoke, setting off parachute flares, and dunking my EPIRB.
Independent restaurants are blinking out, going dark from financial and personal long Covid. The cause is no mystery. Since the pandemic, everything in the restaurant world has gotten worse.
People are going out less. Headcounts continue sliding from pre-pandemic numbers. All major inputs – workers, real estate, utilities, ingredients – are more expensive. Setting menu prices when you can only guess what eggs and fresh tomatoes will cost next month is nerve-wracking.
While the pandemic made some customers more appreciative than ever, it sent many in the other direction. Blind or morally deaf to the humans serving them, they issue orders like they’ve just swanned down the Downton Abbey staircase. They’ll complain about the inconvenient hours and menu prices, then keep notes on reasons to subtract dollars from the tip.
People who have options besides running independent restaurants will take them. Many will debate until their hand is forced, the accounts run dry, and the purveyors put them on COD.
Extra Extra Pizza is in a relatively good position to survive, surrounded by an audience it has already cultivated. Most independent operations don’t have people waiting for a chance to sit down.
So it bears repeating that this would be an excellent time to pick a locally owned place you want to remain part of your life, and try to help it survive. In the changing restaurant environment, evolving species like Extra Extra Pizza may have a better chance of survival in a financial monoculture.
Perhaps its example can spread, and rise elsewhere, as yeast does. Do worker-owned restaurants work? At Extra Extra Pizza, the proof is in the pie.
549 W. Utica St., extraextrapizza.com, 716-248-2994
Hours: 5 p.m.-9 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, noon-10 p.m. Friday, Saturday. Closed Sunday, Tuesday.
Prices: appetizers $4-$11, pizzas $18-40
Parking: street
Wheelchair accessible: yes
Gluten-free: pizza, salads
Vegan: pepperoni, cheese
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