From Giovinazzo To North Broadway
In 1972, Mike Fiorentino chased a dream into a 400-square-foot storefront on North Broadway. An Italian immigrant from Giovinazzo who came up through Mount Vernon and served in the U.S. Army, he had landed a steady job at IBM. But what he really wanted was a pizzeria of his own. So he opened Broadway Pizza and, for years, worked both jobs at once.
The early days were rough. "He was at the point, in the first year or two, where he was actually going to close the shop," his son Michael remembers. He never did. Broadway became one of the first pizzerias in Westchester to deliver, the space more than tripled, and the line started stretching around the block.
More than 50 years later, Broadway Pizza is a White Plains institution and a member of the Pizza Hall of Fame. Michael now co-owns it with Rudy Sainovic, who worked the shop for 25 years before becoming a partner, and like his dad, Michael still holds a second job as a full-time firefighter. Wife Gina, brother Ralph, and daughters Monica and Daniela all had a hand in building it.
Around here, customers become family, sometimes literally. Michael met his wife working the counter, and both of his sisters met their husbands there too. Three generations of local families keep coming back, and plenty of the neighborhood kids got their first job behind this counter. "My dad told me to always treat customers like family and be patient," Michael says. That, and a stubborn commitment to quality, is still the whole recipe.