Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart

Hi everyone, I’m Peter Reinhart, your Pizza Quest guide, and this is our first ever webisode. We’re going to leave this opening segment on the front page for all newcomers to the site, but please feel free to navigate over to the Webisode page if you really want to catch up on all the webisode segments. We’ll continue posting additional webisodes that will take us to some of the stops…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Elizabeth Brasch is committed to delivering what she calls, “a higher order of pizza,” at Mellow Mushroom, where she serves as VP of Marketing and Menu Innovation. As anyone who has been to any Mellow Mushroom location knows, the notion of a pizzadelic experience is not at all far-fetched. And, for those who own their brands, this conversation with Elizabeth will be especially enlightening as…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! As you know, our usual focus is on the celebration of artisanship in pizza and anywhere else we find it. But what if the next generation of “artisan” pizza makers are robots? Or is this a non sequitur? Hey, before you shoot the messenger, listen to this revelatory conversation with Nipun Sharma, the CEO of Appetronix, who is about to launch the first fully robotic…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! There’s something special happening in Pukalani, on the island of Maui, where Chef Jeff Scheer and his wife Kaili (along with their trusted friend and restaurant anchor, Chef Chris), are drawing big crowds and James Beard Award attention at their non-touristy, upcountry restaurant, Marlow. It starts with fabulous wood-fired sourdough pizzas (both traditional and inventive) but also, drawing on Jeff’s background as a fine dining chef,  includes duck…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest!  It’s been a while since we’ve caught up with our two most recurring and most popular guests, pizza legends John Arena (Metro Pizza in Las Vegas) and Brian Spangler (Apizza Scholl’s, Portland, OR). Not only have they both been there and done it all, but they are also trusted mentors to many pizza operator newbies and, over these past years on Pizza Quest, have served…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest, Our guests this week are the co-hosts of the popular Pizza Pod Party Podcast, Arthur Bovino and Alfred Schulz. They recently completed their first season of 52 episodes with a star-studded roster of  guests including Mo Rocca, Andrew Zimmern, Tony Dukoupil, Guy Raz (“How I Built This”), Candace Bushnell (yes, who wrote “Sex in the City”), George R.R. Martin (“Game of Thrones,” anyone?), Susan Orlean…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! In this episode, we welcome Brett McKay, the founder of the immensely popular website/newsletter/podcast, The Art of Manliness. For the past fifteen+ years Brett, along with his wife Kate, have been on their own quest to explore every aspect of what it means to be a man — really, a human — at this particular time in history. Their site has clearly struck a chord,…Read More…

Welcome Back to Pizza Quest! This week we welcome fellow podcaster Jimmy Carbone, host of HRN’s Beer Sessions podcast. Jimmy has been hosting his “convivial ale salon” on HRN (Heritage Radio Network) from the network’s earliest days, beginning about 15 years ago.  Peter recently was a guest of Jimmy’s on Beer Sessions, talking about the pizza/beer connection, so this time Jimmy returns the favor and joins us here to share…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest. Mark Todd is a recurring guest here on Pizza Quest because, one, I love cheese (every kind!), and two, he’s so interesting and makes cheese interesting too as he demystifies this magical, fermented, “spoiled” solid milk so that we can enjoy it in all it’s mighty nuances and permutations. In past episodes with Mark, we’ve explored stretched cheeses in the “pasta filata” category, cheddar cheeses,…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Muhammad Abdul-Hadi’s and Michael Carter’s new book, “We the Pizza,” just came out this week. They join us from their restaurant, Down North Pizza, in Philadelphia’s Strawberry Hill Neighborhood, to tell us all about it. The subtitle of the book, “Slangin’ Pies and Saving Lives” is really what makes Down North Pizza unique among the many great pizzerias we feature here. The restaurant represents a…Read More…

Welcome back to Pizza Quest! Joel Kostman helped support his family for over 30 years as a New York City locksmith, but that was just his day job. By night, he was (and still is) a serious writer who channeled his locksmithing adventures into a semi-autobiographical fictional cult classic story collection called, “Keys to the City: Tales of a New York City Locksmith.” The New York Times even called him…Read More…