Allan Appel Photo
George Carranzo, ready to pack up at Grand Apizza.
George Carranzo had been working off and on in pizzerias since barely becoming a teenager. But it wasn’t until the snow-filled winter of 2005, when he recalls driving shift after exhausting night shift in a plow truck for the City of New Haven, that he decided it was absolutely time to make a big life change: to buy a pizzeria and go into business for himself.
Roll the clock eighteen years later and Carranzo, the owner of Grand Apizza at 111 Grand Ave. near Clinton Avenue, is ready to make another life change, and the successful pizzeria is up for sale.
“I’d like to see someone come in to continue it as a neighborhood place and to grow it,” he said.
And neighborhood place it is.
Carranzo ought to know. When he left the job at his uncle’s pizza restaurant in West Haven, at age 14, and his parents told him he’d better hustle up another job, and don’t be slow about it, Carranzo walked down the hill from Lexington Avenue in Fair Haven Heights, where he and his family lived, and asked for work at Grand Apizza.
Carranzo with friend and helper Nick Russo.
“Do you wash dishes?” Carranzo recalled being asked.
“No,” he replied. “I make pizza.”
Grand Apizza was established just a few storefronts down from the current location on Grand Avenue in 1955 by Fred Nuzzo (whose brother Nick established Modern Apizza on Upper State Street a few decades earlier) and became wildly successful from the beginning as G.I.s returning from service in Italy were demanding more and more of the real thing.
So in 2005, Grand Apizza was already 50 years old and making a style of pie that, in Carranzo’s words, “the whole neighborhood grew up on.”
And, as Fair Haven was once a city apart from New Haven (until they merged in the late 19th century), Carranzo insists that Grand Apizza’s style has always been slightly yet still significantly distinct from what has developed in New Haven.
“New Haven’s [dough],” he explained, describing both Modern and the restaurants all along Wooster Street, “is paper thin. Ours is a little thicker. Our dough’s more New York style in thickness but the flavor is still New Haven flavor.” It’s the “ground-up Italian plum tomatoes, never a sauce.”
Today the business continues to be 95 percent Fair Haveners, mostly foot traffic, he said. Only in the last few years, triggered by the pandemic, has Carranzo gotten into the delivery side of the business, using primarily Slice and other third-parties.
Business is good, but like all food operations, staff come and go because “nobody makes a career working at a pizzeria.” Not if you don’t own one, anyway. And because he’s a self-described non-delegating kind of pizza maker, he is always there.
It’s a lot better than driving the plow through snow storms, but Carranzo says he’s tired, no longer a 30-year-old, and eager both to do something new (unclear what that might be) and to spend more time with his wife and two daughters — one of whom has autism and requires lots of care.
While it’s traditional in the Italian community both to learn the family business and later to hand a business off to a family member (Carranzo’s first job and where he learned to beat pizza dough was at his uncle’s restaurant in West Haven), that’s less so these days.
And when Carranzo’s older daughter decided to become a nurse, not a pizza entrepreneur, he knew the time was right.
When a reporter reminded him that just a couple of dozen pizza boxes of distance down the block the old Strong School is poised to be renovated and repurposed as a mixed income development with some 50 apartments full of potential pizza eaters, Carranzo was unpersuaded.
“I’m growing grumpy and the hours are getting to me.”
A family friend has been trying to market the place for a year or so, but a new real estate agent is now in the pictures, Carranzo said, and potential buyers are coming by.
Although if the price is right, yes, he would sell the property to a buyer who might turn the spacious store into another kind of business, or even into apartments. Yet it’s his preference that it continue as the neighborhood place it’s been for the last … 68 years, a life-time of pizza.
That also includes decades as an early sponsor of the Dom Aitro Little League up the Grand Avenue hill in Fair Haven Heights (where Carranzo grew up); as a regular supporter of fundraisers for families with kids with autism; and, more recently, as purveyor of hundreds of pizzas to health care workers and first responders during the darkest intervals of the Covid epidemic.