Pushkin.
My friend Katie made business cards for me because she knew that I was, you know, trying to figure out the next step, and she wanted to make sure that whatever was written on the business card as my job, as my career, was something that was true and honest. And so the card says Scott Wiener, pizza enthusiast.
Scott Wiener enjoys pizza more than anyone I've ever met. For a long time, his love of pizza was just a hobby until he created his dream job, taking people on tours of pizza rhas across New York City.
I had never run even a practice pizza tour. I'd never run any tour. I'd never been a tour guide. I had a license, and I knew I like to talk about pizza.
On today's episode, what happens when you follow your passion to extraordinary lengths, and that passion is pizza. Quick disclaimer, this episode may make you very hungry. I'm maya shunker and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. On a recent trip to New York City, my friends suggested that instead of going out to dinner at a restaurant, we should take a pizza tasting tour instead. I didn't even know that was
a thing. That any tour that involves food is clear yes in my books. Scott was our tour guide and he ushered us onto a bus that took us to three pizzerias across Manhattan. He taught us about the history of the restaurants and the origin stories of different types of pizzas, all as we scarfed down slice after slice. Scott also introduced us to the team of pizza makers
behind the scenes. They're called pizza yolos. When I casually mentioned that I enjoy shredded mozzarella on my pizza more than the fancier fresh mozzarella slices, one of them made me a special pie on the spot and then lightly judged me for my preference. Scott called it the Maya Pia. I found Scott's passion for pizza so inspiring. I was watching someone in their element doing something they really really loved and they had found a way to make it
their career. Many of our conversations on the show are about people face unexpected change. Today, I wanted to hear from someone who wasn't thrown a giant curveball, but who decided to throw one himself. Scott's enthusiasm for crust, sauce, and cheese goes way back in college when he was touring with his band. He was eating pizza in cities across the country, and he wanted a way to keep track of his reviews so that he could share them with his friends back home.
I would report back, oh yeah, we went to this great pizzeria, or oh yeah, I was in North Carolina. We actually found this really cool New York style pizzeria. So it really became a joke that, oh, I should keep a pizza journal. And my friend Michelle took one of those empty journal books, like a sketchbook, and she took paint pens, and she wrote Scott's Pizza Journal, and then on the first page she wrote like a rubric
for scoring the pizza. And then on every single page she wrote by hand, date, name of pizzeria, who was I with cost, you know, like by hand, every single one of them.
Oh my gosh. Okay, So for folks who can't see it has adorable little drawings of pizzas on the cover.
Yeah, these are all like stickers. She had a little I think it fell apart, but she created a little sticker satchel in the back of the notebook.
So you can put like five stars four stars.
Yeah, so it's funny that you say that because it wasn't a number of stars. And that's actually really significant because I'm far less interested in ranking pizzerias. I'm way more interested in the philosophy that all pizza has its place and that it really just turns into, well, what's
the right situation for that pizza. So Michelle took that into account when she wrote the score sheet, which the lowest score is a little yellow smiley face, and the description she wrote is all pizza can at least make you smile, even when it's nothing special. That's the lowest rating.
What are the other ones?
And then we get a large happy face, which is some pizza makes you very happy than a gold star, which is the standard to which most pizza should be held. And then there's hearts, and that's some pizza you can fall in love with. So these are just different elements.
That's kind of beautiful.
I love it, Yeah, and it really I think this was a reflection on my personal philosophy. But it also really helped shape my philosophy even more because I was more interested in writing a commentary about what I was doing in my life that day at that moment. Who was I with? Oh, we're in Kansas City. We got a flat tire. Oh, I had this great milkshake, and we got this great pizza, which was good enough for today, but it wouldn't have been good if the sun was up.
It was good as an after dark pizza. You know, Like the reviews are not so much qualitative reviews. They're really contextual stories.
So you're revisiting parts of your life, like it's bringing you back, yeah, to things, the things you were going through. Can you, I mean, since you have the Pizza Journal with you, do you mind reading an excerpt for us? Can you give us a taste? Sorry, this whole interview will be peppered, peppered with lots of puns. Sorry slight change listeners.
Look, if you don't like pizza puns, you don't have to listen.
Actually, please still listen.
O'm kidding. So I don't remember when this happened, but a while back I did go through the books, or a friend of mine did and kind of dog eared some of the best entries. So I have some from volume two because I have I think six or seven of these books.
Does it have a pizza stain on it? Or is that coffee? Okay, there's something on there.
This is definitely tomato sauce.
Tomato sauce, Okay, no doubt.
Okay, So let me read you this one. We'll see how it goes. This is Tuesday, August twenty. First, it looks like it was two thousand and six. Okay, So it's ten pm. It's in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and it's at a place called Gino's. I had a cheese pizza and I've given it a red star, and next to it it says a go to pie, especially at two am. Okay, So I just saw the first line.
Dramatic reading, Scott, dramatic reading.
Listen. I don't know if I've said it out loud recently, but I love pizza. This place reminds me of why I love quote average pizza reas ouch harsh. Gino's is pretty standard in that it's big, floppy, consistent across the pie. But it's a great example of a standard pie because it's so darn tasty. The sauce is just fruity enough to notice, and the cheese is sweet and tasty. As for the crust, it's nice and snappy in the center, but dobe and puffy at the cornichone. That's the edge crust.
I was delighted to discover a good deal of my slice's sweetness in the crust. Between the texture, flavor, and location of Gino's, I would be delighted to happen upon it when in search of a slice. This isn't a delicate flavor blast, but it is just the right thing to satiate yourself when hunger strikes.
That's great.
This is more of like a hard review.
Yeah, so after your time with these bands comes to an end, you did try your footing in a few other jobs. Do you mind setting the scene for me at this point in your life, like, what were you up to, where were you living, what were you craving that you weren't getting from the day job that you were in at the time.
So I had a couple of different jobs at the same time. The main job was that I was the assistant Cultural Affairs coordinator for the City of Hoboken, New Jersey, and that town is this really cute one square mile town, super walkable, super flat. And we had a lot of cultural events happening in the city, so parades, concerts, a lot of concerts for little kids, because there were a lot of young families in that town. But I hated the atmosphere of working in a building where I'll never forget.
It was on the anniversary of my first year working there that somebody came up from HR and they said, oh, hey, congratulations, it's your first anniversary here, only twenty four more years to go, and you can retire with your full pension. It was the most depressing thing I've ever heard, because I was twenty five, twenty six maybe, and while that was the first and only job I've ever had that had a steady paycheck and health benefits, it was the
most depressing just because everybody in the building. I'll never forget. It's like on the office there's all these characters, you know, they all hate working there, and they all are getting up walking toward the door, so that exactly at five o'clock they're stepping across the threshold. Anyway, So I think it might have been the day or two after that first anniversary that I put in my two weeks notice. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I just knew I didn't want to do those things that I
was currently doing. This is where I mean luck really brings it up here is I had the luxury of quitting that job because I was in a living situation that was rent free. And that living situation was that I was living aboard an old, decommissioned Ellis Island ferry boat where I was working part time as their caretaker, which meant that I could live on board for free in exchange for doing about twenty hours of work every
week like scraping, painting, cleaning. And I had taken that job because I wanted to live close to where I worked, but I could not afford to live in Hoboken even though I worked for the city, so I was living sort of off grid. We didn't really have electricity, we definitely didn't have internet. And I just knew that I had a free place to live, so I could quit the job because I had a little bit of a cushion. So I quit the job and I told myself, I said,
you got six months. I'll give you six months before you have to start applying for more jobs. But I figured with six months of letting my mind not concentrate on a career, I knew I would find some kind of a path that I'd go on.
And so how did the Pizza's a tour company idea come into being?
Yeah, So during that six months that I gave myself to just go on my mental quest to find my next career, I didn't know what job I wanted to do, but I knew that I loved visiting pizzerias and writing about them in my pizza journal. So I started taking my friends on little adventures to go to the Bronx to visit six pizzerias in a day, or go to Brooklyn and visit those L and B Spomoni Gardens and Totono's.
So I started going on these little adventures, and maybe two or three months into that break from work was my birthday. It was my twenty sixth birthday. Every year, to celebrate my birthday, which is by the way, in October, which is National Pizza Month, we always celebrate my birthday aka scott Toberfest by doing very important. We always celebrate it by doing an educational experience. So one year, we did a brewery tour in Pennsylvania. Like museum, it's always educational.
I'm not in the going to bars really.
Yeah, but this was even before the pizza thing. Like you always made your birthday an educational experience.
Scott Toberfest is to be celebrated by learning. So that's why for the birthday, I said, oh, well, everybody wants to go on these pizza crawls with me. Let's just rent a school bus. We'll pack all my friends and family who want to go. I'll give the driver a map of where I want them to take us, and we'll just hit up cool spots. I'll bring my megaphone and I'll give everybody a little pizza lecture on the bus. Still have the megaphone, you do?
I love the megaphone.
It's funny. I found there's a video on YouTube of that birthday crawl and you can see me like making announcements in the megaphone, just saying stuff about, oh, this place uses a coal fired oven.
There with beautiful glows, with delicious fresh mazilla.
They import all their ingredients from Italy.
I want you to taste it. You'll know what the deli is and I gave everybody a little goodie bag with a notebook, a pen, some care and pallet cleansers. You know, I wanted it to feel like a real fun adventure. And it was so fun this pizza crawl that at the end of the day, my friends all knew that I had just quit the job. They knew that I was on my vision quest. They were like, this was so fun. You got to do this for random strangers. You're going to sell tickets. This is your new career.
My friend Katie made business cards for me because she wanted to make sure that whatever was written on the business card as my job, as my career, was something that was true and honest. She knew that whatever I ended up doing, I would always at my heart be a pizza enthusiast. And so the card says my name on top, it says Scott Wiener, pizza Enthusiast, and it had my hotmail email address, and it had my phone number. And that was her birthday present to me. And she
didn't write pizza expert, pizza connoisseur. She knew that I wasn't into that sort of elevated talk that a pizza enthusias you can never take that away from somebody.
We'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans, and if you feel the need to order a pizza at this point, you've got at least a minute to make that happen. After months of weighing his options, Scott eventually pulled together a business plan to start a pizza tour company. His first step was to find an actual pizza place that he could partner with and bring
people to on his tour. He managed to convince the owners of Lombardi's, a classic New York City pizza joint that's also one of the oldest in the country, and he's still not sure why they said yes.
I have no idea, because I never would have said yes to myself. I was living on a boat. I probably hadn't showered. I'm sure I was wearing a sweater with holes in it. I bet I hadn't shaven in months. You know, when you're going to pitch a business to somebody, you clean up and dress nice. I was not in that mode. So I think maybe because nobody ever approached them about that sort of thing. You know, like you're a restaurant, you're there to sell food, that's your business.
But you also have a great story. But you can't waste too much time in your business telling that story because it could get in the way of selling the food and paying your rent. So I pitched to them this idea of filling in the blanks. I'm gonna bring people in maybe thirty minutes before you open to the public. I'm just gonna show them around and point out what's so special that a normal customer would never see. And
then we're gonna sit down and eat. And it's going to be a way of shepherding people through an experience that doesn't start and end with the food. It takes into account the entire context, the story, the family, the people behind the food, and the equipment behind the food. Where at the end of the day, you're not going to be able to just say, oh, that pizza was
a five out of ten or something. You're gonna have a better appreciation for what the place represents more than just selling a disk of dough, sauce and cheese.
Yeah. And then when it's said with the infectious energy of Scott Wiener, I guess it gets the job done because I've met you in first and I've done your pizza tour, and I fell more in love with pizza throughout the evening, So I understand. So Scott, can you bring me back to the first day in which you opened your business? So what's it called? What's the scene? How many people have signed up for your bus tour? I want to know all the details. Just bring me back to that morning.
April twenty seventh, two thousand and eight.
Okay, what's your business called?
Scott's Pizza Tours. Let me just start by saying the reason that I picked that name was a I was the only person who is running the tours.
So that's a fine way, Scott or bust everyone.
Yeah and b I wanted people to understand that it was my perspective. So this is not something called famous Original New York Pizza Tours Incorporated. I didn't want it to have this generic thing that assumed itself to have any kind of expertise. I wanted to be clear that this is a perspective. This is my perspective, Scott's Pizza Tours.
So there's a humility in that title, like that's what you're trying to convey. I'm not trying to be an expert here. I'm not trying to tell I'm not trying to prescribe to people what they should like. It's just my point of view, is that right?
Yeah, And it's funny because I actually think when you name a business after yourself, it feels like the opposite of humility. But my intention was to let people know, hey, hey, hey, this is just my you know, because I knew people were going to come at me on it. Hey, I've been eating pizza longer than you've been alive. Hey, you're not even Italian, you know. I knew I would get that, and I knew that I had to maintain that. Okay, this is just my perspective. I want to make sure
you know that. So that's on day one. That was what it was called Scott's Pizza Tours. The whole plan was to use a yellow school bus and to go out on Sundays. So this is where I'm not a good business person. A school bus has a lot of overhead. You've got to rent the buzz okay, the driver. If it started as a normal tour operator, I would have done a walking tour, which has almost no overhead. So I said yellow school bus because when I was a
kid I always walked to school. I never got to ride the bus, but I would see that on TV shows. So whenever we had the bus, the yellow school bus, it was to go on a field trip. So I have this association with a yellow school bus and escape from school building but still like learning something kind of cool, so yellow school bus. Nice. Twenty five people signed.
Up, and that was just word of mouth or were you doing any marketing emails?
I sent emails to all my friends and family. Everybody who signed up was somebody I knew, or who knew somebody I knew. Also from being in bands, I knew that, oh, you got to send out press releases. See if somebody's going to review your record or preview your show or whatever.
Interesting, so you leverage the skill that you had built as a musician.
Exactly, I sent out press releases. I remember waking up on the boat and I got a call from somebody from New York Daily News and they said, we got your press release and we want to show up and cover the tour today.
Wow.
I was horrified, and my initial response was, no, this is your.
First day open that the New York dealis wanted to come and be on the Okay, Wow, so.
Okay, Maya, I have to just make sure that the picture is very clear. I had never run even a practice pizza tour. I had done the birthday thing with my friends, but I'd never run a pizza tour. I'd never run any tour. I'd never been a tour guide. I had a license, and I knew I like to talk about pizza. But I knew that on that day I was a fool.
My gosh, Scott, I love it. Actually, I could talk about living on the edge. This is great.
Yeah, I think I said no right away. I know what was going on in my head, which was, I don't know, it's my first time doing this, I've never done it. If it's awful, it's gonna be awful forever, and it's gonna get this coverage. I just thought, no, don't do it. Let me get better. But then I realized that it was kind of the same thing that held me back for a few months after my friends told me, oh, you should do a pizza tour as a business, and I just figured in that moment, wait,
this is the opportunity. I'm just going to make a rule for myself that I'm not going to say no to anything that, just say yes and then make it happen, just make it work. So I said yes. They showed up with a photographer and the journalist, and I remember I set up the tables inside. Lombardi's was our first stop.
And the way the tour worked is I had all the tables set up because I made everybody a goodie bag, just like at my birthday party, and I put them out on the tables and I went outside to meet everybody and I said, Hey, everybody, welcome, and I just the second before I stepped out, I remember I reminded myself that I've never done this before. I don't know what the heck I'm I about to talk about. And I kind of said to myself, like, I'll see you
in four and a half hours. Good luck, you know, just switch the brand and go into the tour mode and see what that even means. And I remember I went out, and I don't remember any detail about that tour. I just remember that when it ended, it was the same adrenaline rush that I would have after playing a
great show with my band. The daily news piece. I learned this early that the way that the press works is they see it in the daily news, and then the local Fox affiliate wants to cover it, and the local the PIX and NBC, and so I started getting calls from other news outlets who want to do a shoot with a camera crew on a tour. So then I was calling up everybody I knew, can you pretend like you're on a pizza tour with me tomorrow, you know, because they wanted to cover it, and I said, well,
I'm not doing a tour until next Sunday. So I just remember drumming up all these like press tours because I was getting feedback from press agencies.
Is there a moment you remember from those early days or early months where you thought, damn this this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Like the puzzle pieces are fitting together, things are lining up, I'm hitting my stride. This is the right job for me. Yeah.
I remember maybe three or four months in. By that point, we were doing a tour on Sunday and then a walking tour on Wednesday, and I might have even added a walking tour on Friday by then. But I remember my mom would call me every Sunday at four o'clock. My tours ended at three point thirty, and she knew that at four o'clock I would be walking toward the path train and go back to the boat. And I would always give her the recap. And I remember a few months in saying I was in a groove today,
I was in a trance. Like it all worked. It all made sense because I never sat down and wrote a script like tour companies usually they write scripts, they have beats that they hit, it's sort of wrote, but our concept is to not do any of that. I wanted to be really on the fly. So sometimes that means it's not great. It's like going to see a comedy show, you know, like sometimes it just like doesn't work.
But then there's some times where the magic is just there. Yeah, And I would have those moments, and once it started to happen a few times in a row, I remember saying to my mom, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm going to increase doing this. Which the more that I would do of the pizza tour, the further away I
got from applying for a quote real job. And then I don't remember the no. I do remember the moment that I really like put all my chips in that one number was when I moved off the boat when I realized it's time to start paying rent, and like, can I pay my bills using revenue from this business? And I remember going to sleep at first night in that room and just like looking in this what I would now consider to be like a problematic situation of
like a gross apartment. But I remember being so giddy that like, Wow, this pizza thing is paying for this palace which is on dry land and has electricity on internet. That was the moment that I was like, Okay, this is the career.
Wow, tell me how things are today? So what is Scott's pizza tour?
Like?
How many employees do you have? How many years have you been around now? Scott?
So on April twenty seventh, twenty twenty three, it will be fifteen years old. Wow? So wowow as we talk right now, I'm up against the fifteenth anniversary.
Amazing.
And now I have actually I have seven other tour guides, one director of operations who deals with all the scheduling and private tours and all that. There's a tour out right now that I'm not running, which is still bizarre to me. We run about fifteen tours per week. We've had one hundred and ten thousand people on our tours, lectures or online pizza classes. Over the past fifteen years. We've been featured in TV shows and morning programs The Tonight Show All Right to.
Decide the winning pizza. We have a special guest serving as our master Pizza Judge. He's the founder of Scott's Pizza. The tours runs a pizza theme nonprofit Slice Out Hunger. Please welcome Scott Pletter.
You've had a documentary made about you. Scott.
The documentary, Yeah, that was wild. That was a friend of a friend was a filmmaker and we met at dinner at some point and he said, Hey, can we follow you around for a little bit and just see what happens? And then the next thing I know, they were coming to Italy with me the Pizza Expo in Las Vegas.
And yeah, Scott, what have you found over the years? Makes for a really great pizza tour.
I really love it when I'll get a call or a text. I got a text from my friend Felix and we were on a tour and he said, Hey, I'm making pizza at the Puppy Cafe today, bring your group by. And I was like, the puppy Cafe in the East Village where you can go and pet puppies and drink coffee and you're gonna make pizza there.
Sorry, a puppy cafe, like a cafe that has puppies in it.
That you can pet the puppies while you're drinking the coffee.
Oh my gosh.
Okay, so maya, I know that it sounded too good to be true.
Yeah it did.
Yeah, I know it's true. So we rerouted the tour and we went there, and I have the bus vote on uh, do you want to go to a puppy cafe and eat pizza there? That's like a pop up, a limited edition pop up that doesn't always happen, where we could talk to the guy about the pizza he makes one on one like when we talk to the person who's making the pizza and get some real deep experience. That's the best. But over the years, I've realized that the thing that people enjoy most about the tour is
the sense of discovery and not the facts. And once they look at something like pizza that's so simple and so universal, and once they realize that there's more to it than what's on the surface, that moment of discovery
is the thing that resonates the most with me. And when I see that look in their face that they say, oh, never look at pizza again, same way, That's what I love because and I've only really developed this thought in more recent years, which is that I see the Pizza Tour as this sort of subversive way to teach people about the fact that everything is layered and every person is layered, and that they might think they know a person or a thing or a sport or music or whatever,
but that everything is way more complex and has a way deeper history. So if you can understand that things are complex, multi layered and have a deeper history through pizza, then I think you can take an easy step to apply that to everything else, like other people, other cultures, like literally everything. So the Pizza Tour is not just about pizza. It uses pizza as a way to hopefully let people know that their mind can expand that there's way more going on than what you see.
Okay, so we have a special treat for Slight Change listeners. We've never done this before, so we're piloting something totally new for those of you who listened to a slight change of plans. You might know that at the end of the credits, I always say, and a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. Well, now you get to hear from the man himself as the closet door closes. My husband,
Jimmy is a trivia buff. So he's been on Jeopardy and he's going to just conduct a lightning round a piece of trivia with you, just like a couple questions.
My palms are sweating.
Okay, Scott, We're going to do some pizza trivia. Okay, great, bring it all right, We're gonna start with this one. Rafae la Esposito is considered by many people to be the father of modern pizza. In what city did he make his pizza.
It was June of the d eighteen eighty nine, in the city of Naples, Italy.
Okay, that is absolutely correct. Okay, next question. So I am a proud Midwesterner, so I got to represent the Midwest a little bit here. What kind of I would say? Delicious? Gouey processed cheese is used on a Saint Louis style pizza.
It's technically not a cheese, It's a dairy product called provel, but technically not a cheese according to the FDA. Yeah that's fair.
Okay.
Next question, sold in an orange colored box? What brand sells frozen pizza that's made from chickpeas? Aha?
We got a pause here, Yeah, we got a pause here. I've never I don't think I know the answer to this question. It's a frozen pizza, orange box, chickpea bass that's right, I don't know the answer. Okay.
I'm very pleased to have stumped to you on this. Maybe listeners will recognize the brand Bonza, and Bonza is not affiliated with this podcast. I think we're just fans at home. I'm not a fan, okay, I'm more a fan. Yeah, okay, So the answer there was Bonza pretty tasty given that it's made out of chickpeas. Okay, I have one final question for you, guys.
Is a real tough thing.
This could be tough. I think it's gonna be tough for a lot of people. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, what person holds the record for the largest collection of pizza boxes? Extra points if you can tell me how many boxes are cited in the official record.
So the official record on I want to say was October twenty thirteen, is five hundred and ninety five boxes held by the young gentleman Scott Wiener, a very impressive record, although the record currently the actual number of boxes that have broken is north of eighteen hundred. I mean, I just got a ton in the other room, like I just got him this past week.
Well, Scott, you've done an amazing job. I'm surprised as nobody. This is a lot of fun.
Thank Scotting, Thanks Scott, Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed my conversation with Scott, I'd recommend you check out another conversation I had with Christine ha. Christine went permanently blind when she was twenty four because of an autoimmune disease, and then went on to become a world renowned chef. We'll link to that episode in the
show notes and enjoin me next week. When I talked to David Lindon, a neuroscientist who is diagnosed with a rare form of heart cancer and given just eighteen months to live it's now been more than two years. I talked to him about how his diagnosis has changed some of his most deeply held views. More on that next week. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive
produced by me Maya Shunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Tyler Green, our senior editor Kate Parkinson Morgan, our producer Tricia Bovida, and our sound engineer Andrew Vastola. Louis Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Waite. You can follow A Slight Change of Plans on Instagram
at doctor Maya Shunker. See you next week.
Do you will