Pizza Quest Webisodes

Hi All, As many of you have already figured out, not all of the interviews we do here on Pizza Quest make it onto this website. We only post the Zoom video interviews here (and also on YouTube) because they are, well, videos.  But many of our shows are conducted on audio tape only, such as when we go to Pizza Expo and the Atlantic City Northeast Pizza and Pasta…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Chef Michael Friedman grew up in a New York area Jewish American household (in Westfield, NJ, to be specific) and, like me, was nourished by lots of Chinese and Italian food. Also like me, he attended Boston University’s School of Communications, so we share a kindred spirit connectivity. After paying his dues in fine dining restaurants around the world (including stints with Rich Melman’s Lettuce…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!     Our guest this week is Inja Radman, co-founder of New Culture Food, a company with a mission to provide the world with animal-free cheese, beginning with mozzarella, that actually tastes and performs like the milk-based originals. Even those with lactose or dairy sensitivities have a love-hate relationship with the current options of faux cheese, usually made with nut and seed milks. New Culture’s…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! This week’s episode features Jillana Miller and Ahmad Butler who, together, are Miller-Butler, a sizzling-hot mobile pizza and catering company, based in San Pedro, California.  Ahmad competed against me and 10 other finalists at the Real California Pizza Contest in Napa back in August, where we met and became friends. That’s where I first learned how Miller-Butler took on the competitive Los Angeles marketplace, survived…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!         Sometimes it just takes moxie. Shannon Mangini (aka @ThePizzaiola on Instagram)  is living proof of that. In just a few short years since graduating from college in 2018 with a degree in economics, entrepreneurship, and finance (Univ. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where she was also a lacrosse star) Shannon has, among other things, brought DiFara Pizza to the North Fork of…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Anthony Mangieri is one of our favorite guests and now that his NYC restaurant, Una Pizza Napoletana, has been recently anointed by one poll as the “best pizzeria in the world,” this is a timely return visit. In this episode, Anthony tells us all about his new line of frozen pizzas under the name Genio Della Pizza, and how he managed to create and package…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! I haven’t seen Ronnie Costello in 53 years, since he was the catcher on our high school baseball team, and 60 years since we attended Belmont Hills Elementary School as kids. We lived on different sides of Mary Watersford Road, the street that, like the Maginot Line, separated the mostly Irish and Italian kids of “The Hill,” from the mostly Jewish kids of Penn Valley….Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, Bill Crawford, former Air Force jet fighter pilot and now owner of Righteous Slice in Wexford, Idaho, shows us all about his Grand Prize winning El Pollo Barracho Pizza (aka “Drunken Chicken” pizza,  with tequila marinated chicken) from the 2024 Real California Pizza Contest, sponsored by the California Milk Advisory Board. Peter competed in this contest too (and didn’t win), working directly…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest.  Yes, the Yodi’s are back! John Arena and Brian Spangler, our two original pizza gurus, who helped launch these Pizza Talk/Pizza Quest shows during the pandemic, are joined by the global bagel poet laureate of our time, Philip Korshak, for a delightful conversation of show-and-tell as we celebrate the emerging bagel renaissance across the land. More and more pizza operators are getting into bagels, as…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! Yes, bagels are back — with a vengeance! — as wonderful shops are bobbing up all over the country in much the same way as the proliferation of their “kissing cousin” –donut shops — seem to be everywhere (but rarely do we see a bagel and a donut shop combined in one operation — could this be the next big thing?) . The bagel cycle…Read More…