When I saw the words “Joe & John’s,” embossed below busy pedestrian traffic around the Fresh Pond Road M station and appearing in that familiar lightbulb font, I knew who I had to call. Neither Joe, nor John.
“It’s kind of like East Ridgewood in a way. Or North Ridgewood,” mused Sal Pinto, a native of Flushing and one of the two lifetime pizza guys who have run Joe & John’s (59-10 Myrtle Ave.) for the last decade. For the last year, Pinto says he’s been eying a second location, just a little further east.
“I’ve been hearing it called ‘Upper East Side of Ridgewood,’” he told me, adding “You didn’t hear it from me.”
At any rate, there’s going to be a second Joe & John’s over there, a few blocks up and east from the original, and right next to the new Starbucks (66-79 Fresh Pond Rd.) that replaced a grocery store that replaced a Payless. The Starbucks turned out to be smaller than either of those businesses, so there appears to be room for a new slice shop to take up the adjoining space.
“We’re opening soon. Sometime this summer,” said Pinto, though he admits he’s “changed the month three times.”
But “sometime this summer,” he insisted. “Our goal is to execute these slice shops in the high-traffic areas. It did take a little longer than we expected. And it was a huge learning experience.”
He already has plans for the new place when it does open. Two exclusive slices, available only at the Fresh Pond Road location and “new sandwiches weekly.”
He and his pal James have been running the original Myrtle Avenue location since 2015, shortly after the late John (of the original Joe & …) strolled into a pizzeria in Glendale where Pinto was working.
Pinto was 25, but the age didn’t seem slight to the aging John, who offered Pinto and James the run of his old joint if they would take it. They hadn’t known each other much, but shared a certain connection. “My father and Mr. John are from the same town in Italy. Closest thing to family without being family,” Pinto told me.
To Ridgewood they went. Within a few years, the pair had knocked out the laundromat next door and nearly doubled the size of the place. Pinto welcomed the role as ambassador of the area’s authentic past. “Good dude, young, hardworking,” noted short king Dave Portnoy in 2023. “A good football pizza,” Portnoy declared on camera at least three times. “In the long, bright parlor, the phone rings off the hook, and the crunchy sicilian hits the spot every time,” observed the verbose Bryan Kim in the JPMorgan Chase-run food blog The Infatuation. We were all singing its praises. When an editor at Eater asked if I had any names to add to its neighborhood listicle, I wrote in that Pinto had created “a slice shop that outpaces every other on Myrtle Avenue.”
In divinity student Stiven Peter’s long broadside against the area (“How socialist transplants ruined my New York”), he calls Joe & John’s “a slice shop that serves as a staple of the neighborhood” and positively approved of the “giant watch parties for the whole neighborhood” Sal held during the Knicks finals run, a light in the area compared to the darkness of Topos (7-88 Woodward Ave.), “a Left-wing café and bookstore that locals studiously avoid.” Perhaps, pizza is only for patriots.
I didn’t ask Sal Pinto how studiously his customers avoid Topos, which opened its second location (59-22 Myrtle Ave.) less than half a block from the historic home of Joe & John’s. I wondered, instead, if he liked watching the area change.
“We love it. The improvements are great. I think we’re getting a lot more attention from everybody in the city,” he said. He remembers the weekend when Time Out declared Ridgewood one of the coolest neighborhoods in America.
“That was the most traffic I ever saw on Myrtle Avenue that weekend. I felt like we were almost like a tourist attraction for a couple weeks.”
For some time, he plotted on taking over a different store, Minitalia Pizzeria (66-25 Fresh Pond Rd.), but “it didn’t work out.” Minitalia still persists and Joe & John’s II remains under construction.
He’s excited to be next to the new Starbucks instead. “Listen, I’ll take an espresso over ice anytime,” he told me.
“Yeah, it’s been a blessing. It was something I feel like we manifested it,” said Pinto. “I always thought it would be really cool if we were able to expand our pizza shop one day.”
Photos by Andrew Karpan.
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