The Fremont of Tony Gemignani’s childhood looks a lot different than the Fremont of today. The world-renowned pizza chef and restaurateur remembers a landscape filled with farms and a wide expanse of city. He remembers cruising up and down the boulevard and dirt biking across his neighbor’s land. Mostly he remembers the farms.
“It sounds like it was 100 years ago,” the renowned pizza entrepreneur says. “At one time Fremont was filled with corn and apricots and cherry trees.”
Gemignani grew up helping work his grandfather’s farm until he was about 17 years old. They grew apricots and cherries, naturally, but also fava beans, oranges, lemons, tomatoes and zucchini on about 20 acres of land—a number that seemed like 50 to a young Gemignani. Eventually his grandfather began to sell off the farm piece by piece, like so many others in the area. The dot com boom came for Fremont and its farmers. Gemignani left in his twenties.
That’s when he began to change, too. Over three decades, Gemignani would go on to become a 13-time world pizza champion and the face of a network of restaurants across California and Nevada, including the recent expansion of Slice House, his fast-casual pizza franchise. With more than 140 locations either open or under development, it’s a growing piece of his empire. It’s also the one that could bring him back home.
A Young Gemignani
Gemignani can’t pin down a breakthrough moment that led him to pizza making, though the dish definitely played a role in his upbringing.
“Our spot was Uncle Joe’s,” he says, recalling the place his grandfather would take him and his brother Frank out to eat once a week. “It was always Friday night, it was pizza night. I remember getting my extra cheese pizza that I loved. That was a special time growing up.”
Memories like these are among the formative experiences that shaped how Gemignani would go on to run his restaurants. His grandfather, remembered by Gemignani for his work ethic, was the one who showed a young Tony how to select the best produce. Gemignani’s mother taught him how to cook and was known for bringing friends and family together at lively dinners. She cooked such massive quantities of food that guests left with “more food than they ate,” says Gemignani. And there were always, he remembers, fresh ingredients, plucked straight from the farm.
When Gemignani left home, he didn’t stray too far. In 1991, he went to work for his brother at Pyzano’s Pizzeria in Castro Valley, where Gemignani the showman and pizza master began to emerge. After impressing customers with his dough-throwing skills, he entered competitions around the world for both pizza-making and pizza-throwing. In 2007, he earned the title of World Champion Pizza Maker at the World Pizza Cup in Naples, Italy. Two years later, he opened his first restaurant, Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, in San Francisco. Over the following 15 years, he would follow with Tony’s Coal-Fired Pizza and Slice House, Pizza Rock, Capo’s, Giovanni Italian Specialties and, of course, his lineup of Slice Houses.
Today, residential homes dot the former acres of the family farm. Uncle Joe’s is now a Bronco Billy’s Pizza Palace. A pho restaurant occupies the former space of Pyzano’s Pizzeria. There are Slice House locations in San Francisco, San Leandro, Walnut Creek, Mountain View and Belmont and more in Southern California.
For the last four years, Gemignani and his family have lived in Alamo, on about one and a half acres of land. There Gemignani’s been recreating his childhood for his own young son as best he can.
From Farm to Garden
“I just got done picking my Blenheim [apricots],” he says. “My cherries just passed. Plums are really in right now. Figs are starting to come in.”
I try to keep up as Gemignani lists off what’s in season, as well as the impressive roster of what else is growing in his garden: lemons, limes, tomatoes, persimmons, pomegranates, oranges, nectarines, basil. In total about 24 fruit trees, not to mention the 400 vines of his small vineyard.
“It’s awesome. I have my son totally into it. I wanted him to grow up in that environment,” he says.
At Slice House, 90% of ingredients are scratch-made—from bubbling dough and fresh pasta to green pesto and sweet-spicy hot-house honey. Gemignani also manufactures his own flour and sources his own tomatoes, a concept he started working on a decade earlier and solidified over the years.
“I wanted my pizza to be different. That came down to the foundation,” meaning the dough and the sauce. His cheese of choice has remained unchanged for three decades: Grande.
Yet in all this time, despite the pull toward his former life, he never opened a restaurant in Fremont. As Gemignani’s career took him away, he says he became more unfamiliar with the city and the market. It was never the right time, he says.
The time is now. A new Gemignani property is finally in the works for Fremont in the form of another Slice House outpost. Instead of Gemignani at the helm, it’s another figure from his past: Pritika Rajasanshi, a former high school classmate who owns the Mountain View franchise location and still lives in Fremont.
“I know that’s gonna be a very big opening. It’s got that heritage factor,” says Rajasanshi. The Gemignani name also helps. “He’s like a rockstar. Almost everyone knows of him.”
Rajasanshi is currently in the process of finding the right spot and negotiating the lease for the upcoming location. The formula for this Slice House will follow the others, built around a tightly defined brand. “I love marketing,” Gemignani mentions casually. It shows—from the color palette that carries over from website to doorway to his namesake ingredients that decorate the restaurant walls. Like Gemignani’s other concepts, the menu will also feature pizzas in a range of geographical styles: New York, Detroit, Sicilian, with toppings that are all-American or Italian-inspired.
With his name associated with so many locations — East Bay roots, San Francisco ties, a worldwide title — I had to wonder where Gemignani was meant to be.
“My heart belongs in California. But am I more 415 or 510? I’m kind of in between.” But definitely, he says, “I’m a Cali kid.”
Slice House San Leandro, open Mon-Thur 11am–9pm, Fri-Sat 11am–10pm, Sun 11am–9pm;
135 Parrott St., San Leandro. 510-281-0725. slicehouse.com/sanleandro.
