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Recipe Pizza Biography

Source(google.com.pk)
Retiring after more than 50 years in the restaurant business, Al Carozza is not yet sure what he's going to do with his free time.

The owner of Amore Restaurant in Springdale, which has been in business at 921 Hope Street for 39 years, is leaving the business on Sunday and taking his signature pizza recipe, learned in his mother's kitchen in Italy, along with him. Carozza, a Stamford resident and father of three, is retiring from running Amore to spend more time with his grandchildren and because, as he notes, after nearly 40 years of working early mornings and late nights, it's time to call it a day. The restaurant, however, will still exist in a new iteration: Carozza has sold Amore to celebrity restaurateur Bruno DiFabio, who will keep the name but alter the interior and the menu, Carozza said.

Even in its newer form, Amore will retain its history as Stamford's second-oldest restaurant (Pellicci's Restaurant, on Stillwater Avenue, is the oldest). Amore employs nine people as kitchen staff and waiters; once the restaurant changes ownership, two of those employees will be retiring, while the rest will be looking for other work.

"The restaurant is definitely going to be missed," Carozza said of his mindset on retiring. "I've gotten so attached to my customers that I'm not going to walk away without being emotionally tied to this restaurant."

Amore Restaurant has seen first-hand many changes in the restaurant business, the neighborhood and the local economy, and has weathered the swells and troughs accordingly. Carozza can recall when customers took a while to get accustomed to smoking bans inside restaurants, and when the economy started to take a downward turn a number of years ago. Regular customers would disappear for a while, and then return, and lulls in the business would be compensated by busier periods. The way to handle these changes, Carozza said, is to be patient and maintain consistency. On a busy day, Amore could get about 150 customers into the restaurant, Carozza said.

"Think of the times they've made it through, the different recessions and all the restaurants that have come and gone in that time," said Jack Condlin, president of the Stamford Chamber of Commerce, who remembers holding business lunches at Amore. "It shows that their food was always good, home-cooked food and was consistent."

Carozza credits his work ethic, whether making pizza in the kitchen or, as he has done more recently, managing customers front-of-house, to good early training. Born in Abruzzo, Italy, he moved to the United States in 1956 at the age of nine and began working in a drugstore in Yonkers, N.Y., where he learned how to treat customers so they'd return satisfied, he said. His first restaurant, Pat's Pizza in the Bronx, eventually led to a string of other restaurants in New Rochelle, Stamford, Greenwich and Bridgeport. When Amore opened in 1976, Carozza and his wife, Patricia, who passed away six years ago, worked from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. to get the business running.

"When I opened up, people were all over the place," Carozza said. "Then that slows down, and you build up a client base and people start to come back every week, every month. It's the consistency of being dedicated to opening the door at the same time every day."

"Business changes, it goes down and then people come back," he said. "You can't be greedy in this business. It's not set in stone that you'd make X amount of dollars each year."

Aside from its longevity in Springdale -- which Carozza described as a quiet little village when Amore first opened -- the restaurant is known for its pizza, he said. In 2009, Amore won the title of the city's best pizza, according to the Stamford Pizza Tour, an informal survey conducted by three Stamford residents. But, when Amore Restaurant reopens under the leadership of DiFabio, a former judge on the Food Network show, "Chopped," and owner of Greenwich's ReNapoli, customers will taste a new recipe. Carozza noted he'll be happily returning to the restaurant as a customer. It will be an adjustment, he said.

"The first weekend I have off, I'm going to be so uncomfortable not being in the restaurant," Carozza said. "I'm going to be free to do all the things I want to do and I don't know what to do. It's going to be funny."