When Instagram Suggested ‘@pizza_jew’ for a New Account Name, He Went With It
A by-the-numbers account of the rise of New Jersey pizzaiolo Michael Fitzick
New and old burns flow down Michael Fitzick’s forearms. Pick one and follow it like a river to the deltas of his hands, half-sunk into a pan of pizza dough, glowing with oil, stretching into fingers with short, rounded nails and the wide, reddish knuckles of someone who recently punched a wall. (The only thing Fitzick has recently punched is the dough after its first bulk fermentation.)
As any baker will tell you, when you spend your time shuttling bread into and out of a fire-breathing oven, you’re going to get burned. And Fitzick, a 15-year veteran of the Jersey Shore’s pizzeria circuit who only recently struck out on his own with Linwood’s 6-month-old Bakeria 1010, has accumulated plenty of scars. But of late, he’s accumulating followers — 27,000 and counting — on the @pizza_jew Instagram account, which turned him into a minor celebrity in dough circles. But the baker’s burns don’t tell his story. The numbers do.
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Years at Glassboro’s Rowan University before 19-year-old Fitzick dropped out and started delivering pizzas in and around Linwood, New Jersey, his well-heeled hometown 10 minutes from the beach. He was a ’90s teen-movie archetype, the college dropout-turned-pizza deliveryman, but it was the first stop on a chaotic 15-year journey to becoming the best pizzaiolo in the south side of the state.
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After delivering for a year, he started making pies at 20 years old at Mack & Manco, the pizzeria chain in Ocean City and Somers Point, island and mainland towns with a bridge strung between them like a hammock. The place is so iconic for its thin-crusted pies, assembled with the sputtering (and hashtagged) sauce hose and fearsome rotating ovens, everyone still calls it Mack & Manco, even though the name changed to Manco & Manco after the Manco family bought out the Mack family in 2011. For someone getting into the slice-slinging business at the Shore, there was no better place to start a career. From there, “I became a pizza mercenary,” Fitzick says, taking up posts at 10 pizzerias and restaurants along the lower Shore from about 2005…
