By Connor Adams Sheets
Mark Boe called up DiNardo’s Restaurant and Pizzeria in Whitestone last week to order a few pies, just like dozens of other pizza lovers.
But Boe and his family are no local foodies looking for a quick slice because they live way outside of most city pizza joints’ delivery areas.
Luckily, DiNardo’s delivers anywhere, so when Boe told Rocco DiNardo, the shop’s owner, that he needed five hot-sausage and pepperoni pies sent to his home in the Seattle suburb of Redmond, DiNardo made it happen. He came recommended by an old friend of Boe’s who lives in Malba named John, who knew DiNardo had a fill-any-order mentality.
“They can’t get decent pizza out there, obviously. The kids are crying for New York pizza,” DiNardo said. “John and Boe were college buddies and they were talking on the phone, Boe says, ‘We don’t know where to get New York pizza.’ So John said, ‘Look, DiNardo’s makes great pizza and they made 50 pies for the University of San Diego,’ so they contacted us.”
And that was that. DiNardo took down the order, which included the five pizzas and 12 containers of various pasta sauces, and told him he could overnight them from the UPS store in Flushing Monday night. On Tuesday afternoon, the load arrived at Boe’s office in Seattle, frozen straight out of the oven and packed in a massive styrofoam-lined box.
He had not tried the food yet by Tuesday evening, but Boe said he and his 17-year-old son and twin 15-year-old son and daughter were eagerly awaiting their bounty, which was hard to come by. Boe called a number of pizza places on his own before finding DiNardo’s.
“You just can’t find this stuff in Seattle. The pizza is not New York, lets leave it at that,” Boe said via phone from the Evergreen State. “My kids, every time I visit New York they want me to bring something back or order something for them, and no one else was able to accommodate me except Rocco.”
As DiNardo said, no distance is too great if someone really wants his pizza, which is of the thin-crust, gooey-cheese, New York style so hard to find elsewhere in the United States.
In October, DiNardo’s, at 145-16 14th Ave., supplied 50 pizzas for the University of San Diego Toreros football team to munch on en route to a game against Marist College in Poughkeepsie at the behest of a coach from Long Island who craved a good slice.
DiNardo has shipped pizzas to a range of other locales, from Texas to Pennsylvania, and hopes to branch out even further.
“He called with the order, so I went out and got the styrofoam box,” he said. “We’ll send them all over the world.”
Reach reporter Connor Adams Sheets by e-mail at csheets@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4538.
