How this woman's pandemic passion could create a unique model for New York pizzerias
It takes Miriam Weiskind five days of preparation and 60 seconds of baking for the aroma of dough -- cooked to golden-brown, bubbled perfection with sweet tomatoes and nutty, salty mozzarella cheese -- to fill the air of her Brooklyn apartment.
But soon -- with the help of her thousands of local and online supporters -- Weiskind told "Good Morning America" she hopes to bring her unique Sicilian and Neapolitan-style pies from pop-up to pizzeria, and flip the script on pizza shops and women-owned restaurants.
"My goal is to is to open a brick-and-mortar where I can continue to bake pies in honor of my mom's memory and to continue doing good for my community," she said of her mother, Hyla, who inspired her to bake for neighbors during the pandemic and later died of COVID-19 in August 2020. "To continue to inspire people to be good, and to do good for others because we don't know where we're headed, but the best we can do is be kind."
The creative director turned pizza baker spent the last nearly two years honing her craft, perfecting her two-day cold ferment dough and helping feed those in need -- an unwritten lesson from her mom, who was a social worker and hospice volunteer.
"My mom has always been a huge inspiration in life," Weiskind said. "She used to drive around bottles of honey for the Jewish New Year, just to make sure everyone would have a sweet new year."
Beyond eating pizza at their family's favorite shop in Dayton, Ohio, Weiskind's entry into the pizza world began in 2011 at the NYC Pizza Run. After completing four loops around a small Manhattan park, and eating three slices of pizza along the course, she scored tickets to Scott's Pizza Tours -- where she met Scott Weiner. He went on to hire Weiskind to lead some of his famed tours that retrace the evolution of pizza covering every aspect from history to the science of pies.
"I fell so in love with the connection I made with people through talking about pizza and having the opportunity to teach people how it's made," Weiskind said of her eight-year run with the company.
She dabbled in dough-making, learning different techniques for the best bake and recipe tested for friends with a pop-up in her apartment to sample the homemade pizzas. In 2020, she tapped into her creative director skills and made an imageboard about pizza on New Year’s Day to set her sights on a new goal -- pizza-making.
"I went around to a bunch of pizza bakers in the city and I got [dismissed] by a lot of people. The one person who didn’t even hesitate was Paulie Gee," she said of the man behind his eponymous dine-in pie shop in Greenpoint, who offered her a paid apprenticeship. There, Weiskind learned how to properly use the peel with a roaring wood-fired oven. "It was love at first bake -- I can’t describe the joy it brought me," she said.
As the COVID-19 pandemic loomed and upended life as people knew it, jobs dried up and for awhile so did her time in the kitchen. Weiskind kept her hands busy and practiced her pizza in her small apartment kitchen while launching a small local-level effort to help her community.
"Like all other New Yorkers stuck inside, isolated, I started baking, and it became a lot of pizza," she said. "So my mom was like, 'Why don't you give it to other people to help them out? You have too much, always give back to others.' So I wrote a menu on a pizza box and put it up above the mailboxes and [wrote], 'Anyone who can't afford a meal or anyone that's needing a reason to smile, if you're a first responder, order free pizza from me.'"
Four pies quickly tripled to 12 as neighbors began to order and donate more money to pay pies forward to neighbors in need. Weiskind said that as the community caught word on Instagram "all of a sudden my inbox was flooded with DMs to place an order."
"I went from eight to 20 pies a night. I was trading pizza with a butcher shop two blocks down -- they would put my flour, cheese and tomatoes on their shipment so I could get more ingredients and the waitlist went from a week to a month for a pizza."
"My mom had told me to help others out, so the rule of the pizza was if anyone lost her job, was a first responder, low income, essential worker or needed a reason to smile -- the pizza was free for them," she explained.
In July 2020, Weiskind's mother and father were both diagnosed with COVID-19 and "by the time we realized what was going on, it was pretty far along and within 24 hours of us telling them they needed to get tested to confirm that it was COVID, my mom had to be rushed to the hospital and she was put on a ventilator."
Weiskind worked prep at Paulie Gee's again to keep busy, but after five weeks her mom died from COVID.
"It was hard. The night that she passed away, I still baked 20 pizzas for the people, because I know that my mom would have said, 'You need to make sure you get the pizza to the people that are relying on it.'"
"In my box, you always see the 'For Mom' stamp -- I say that every pizza I bake is a beat of my mother's heart," she said. "She knew I was on my way to something but I don't think she would have ever imagined that I would have baked over 5,000 pizzas in this tiny apartment -- and inspire others."
New York food creator and TV personality Jaymee Sire has been fortunate enough to taste some of Weiskind's pies in person and watch her craft in action.
"Watching her transform her tiny apartment into a full-blown pizza-making operation was nothing short of magical," Sire told "GMA." "But of course, her story means nothing if the pizza isn't up to par. And when I tell you her Baby Butter MJ lives up to its namesake (Michael Jordan) -- I'm not exaggerating. Between the 72-hour fermented dough, the springy, spongey crust, the curling 'roni cups, and that buttery, cheesy crunch with every bite -- it is pizza perfection."
Weiskind said she only knows of seven other women-run pizzerias in New York City, a minuscule number in the scheme of hundreds of slice shops in the city.
"I'm sure there are more, but not many," Weiner, the pizza expert, added listing less than 10 that he knows.
"There are so many women that are in pizza that we don't know about. In New York City, it's a much smaller pool," Weiskind said.
"One thing that's unique with women and pizza is that we are a community and it's about lifting one another up, it's about supporting each other; it's about creating something that's going to resonate with your customer and bring them happiness."
With the use of fundraising platform Kickstarter, Weiskind has raised $80,000 of her $500,000 stretch goal after she surpassed the initial $50,000 goal within the first five days.
"What that means is it's an all or nothing fundraising platform," she explained. "What i've managed to do on Kickstarter is a huge anomaly for a restaurant to raise that amount of capital, so i'm excited that I've sort of broken this barrier and shown other would-be restaurateurs that they too can fundraise."
Her $500,000 goal would enable Weiskind to get the physical space needed, "but also to invest in my contractor to build a space out, to buy my equipment, to be able to pay my employees -- legal fees, licensing permits, there's a lot that's entailed."
Her hope is to avoid taking on partners "so that the 20% of equity that I would normally sell to an investor, I'd be able to take that equity -- meaning the profits -- and reinvest it into my employee wages and then give them a bonus at the end of the year in order to incentivize them to stay."
"One of the systemic problems in the restaurant industry are the wages that people are being paid -- employees will have two or three jobs to make ends meet," she explained. "What if instead of selling equity in my company, [I] take those profits and reinvest them into my staff so that they feel like they are part of my family, that they want to invest in working with me and look at it as long term."
Even if she had to take on investors, Weiskind is committed to her vision of making a "thriving business that becomes a pillar for my community."
"I still would take a percentage of my own profits and reinvest back in employees, because I know what I need to operate my business. I know what I need to be able to pay my own bills and I know what I need to be happy," she said.
Even after the Kickstarter ends, her loyal local support system like Sire have faith "she will somehow figure this out and we will all be better for it."
"Miriam is not the type of person to give up easily," Sire said. "Not only will we all be able to enjoy her pizza, but I know she will continue to give back to her neighbors, just as she did when she started baking them pizza for free at the beginning of all this. I can't wait to see what's next for her."
