The Outsized Impact of a Pie: How Pizza Joints Stepped Up During the LA Wildfires

Several local pizza makers jumped into action and continue to support the community with slices and donations

Chef Daniel Holzman of Danny Boy's Pizza, one of the Los Angeles pizza joints that helped out during the recent wildfires

"Pizza really has an outsized impact," says Daniel Holzman of Danny Boy's Pizza. "It’s a comfort food, and it’s logistically convenient."

By Caitlin White

If you live in Los Angeles long enough, you’ll learn the hallmarks of fire season. The warm, eerie Santa Ana winds. Weeks, often months, without rain. Tinder-dry underbrush. Fires tend to break out regularly during these conditions, but never before on the scale of the Palisades and Eaton fires, where thousands lost their homes, many more were displaced and the casualties reached 28. Sitting at home, glued to the news of devastating wildfires in early January, many Angelenos were paralyzed with fear and grief. That’s about the time Daniel Holzman decided to start giving away pizzas.

“Everybody wants to do the right thing, but it’s hard for people to just take action and know how to help,” Holzman said. “There’s this lag. But pizza really has an outsized impact. It’s a comfort food, and it’s logistically convenient. We just put [out] a message that said, ‘Hey, if anyone needs food, let us know.’”

Holzman is the chef and owner of Danny Boy’s Pizza, with shops in Westwood, very near the Palisades fire, and in relatively unscathed downtown L.A. Spurred to action by the crisis, he began dispatching food to evacuation centers and other zones where hot, fresh pizza was more than a welcome relief — it was healing.

“Joe Biden said something in an interview with Howard Stern that stuck with me,” Holzman remembered. “He was talking about a disaster and how his brother came through in this amazing way. Biden said, ‘In my family we have a saying: If you’ve gotta ask, it’s too late.’ You don’t have to ask, you don’t have to wait. Just start doing. And then figure out the logistics on the back end.”

Cobbling together a crew of volunteer drivers, Danny Boy’s sent out pizzas and other hot food all over the city, feeding exhausted firefighters, other frontline workers and volunteers, and people who had just witnessed everything they own go up in smoke. They also welcomed any displaced residents to come in “for pizza on us” at either location.

“When something like this affects a community, it’s completely arbitrary whether you’re devastated or it hasn’t even touched you at all,” Holzman said. “And when that happens, it’s all of our responsibility. We band together to support each other.” Luckily for Los Angeles, Holzman wasn’t the only pizza maker to jump in with both feet. 

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In West Hollywood, where the city was dangerously close to being engulfed in another, separate fire, Rob Gentile just started making pizza dough. Gentile is the head chef at Stella West Hollywood, an Italian restaurant renowned in the fine dining world, where patrons unaffected by the blazes were coming in for comfort — and, of course, for his otherworldly Roman-style pizza. “The pizza initiative for us started with our supplier, Cairnspring, which is a beautiful family brand and flour mill out of Washington,” he said. “Two days into the fires, they sent an email saying ‘We can’t believe what you guys are going through, let us know how we can help.’ That turned into getting all the ingredients for the pizza donated.” 

One of the restaurant’s best-selling pies, the Carbonara, was the starting point for all sales going to fire-relief initiatives. “That one is our signature pizza,” he said. “It’s the first one we threw out to start with — pecorino, guanciale, and we use taleggio cheese and egg yolk. But when guests learned we were donating all the pizza sales to fire relief, people started buying multiple pies and taking them home.” The venture was so popular, Gentile has now started coming up with creative new pizzas every day, including a prosciutto pizza and a pizza bianca.

“I’m angling the menu to be nostalgically comforting,” he said. “When people find themselves in times of tragedy, they want to eat things that make them feel comfort, like lasagna and pasta, and simple pizzas.” Additionally, Gentile volunteers that since his restaurant very recently replaced their POS system, he has $25,000 of necessary software for operating a restaurant, available to anyone who is in need and lost their business in the fires. Anyone on the market for this offer can DM Rob Gentile or Stella on Instagram and he’ll take it from there. 

One restaurant who did lose their entire business to the Eaton Fire was Side Pie in Altadena. Community efforts to rebuild the beloved pizzeria are already continuing apace. But watching the tragedy unfold from up north in Montecito, Bettina owners Rachel Greenspan and Brendan Smith decided to start supporting L.A. through pizza too. Smith was formerly the head baker at Roberta’s in Brooklyn, until he and Greenspan decided to move to Santa Barbara in 2018 and open Bettina, where their naturally leavened crust quickly earned a Bib Gourmand from the Michelin Guide.

“Side Pie losing their restaurant felt especially close to home for us because they’re a similar business to ours in so many ways,” Greenspan said. “The loss of their restaurant is a major blow to their community, who need their food for comfort and their space to build memories. But also, it’s a major loss to their entire team who have now lost their jobs, income and routine. We wanted to support their team as they figure out next steps.”

While the fires were still raging, Bettina opted to donate 10% of all sales directly to Side Pie, and continued to support fire efforts with various fundraisers over the next few days as well. “We get so many visitors from L.A. that we feel like a little extension of the city,” Greenspan said. “Pizza is an innately communal food that you’re most likely sharing with others. It’s also extremely comforting, crowd-pleasing and approachable. I wonder if all the pizza places helping are all just mirroring back that constant love we receive from our customers every day.”

That sentiment is echoed by Michael Fiorelli and Liz Gutierrez of Fiorelli Pizza in Venice. After realizing corporate hospitality was wearing them down, the two become partners in the venture, which is a mobile pizza oven located at the Cook’s Garden on Abbot Kinney that’s been operating for about a year. “The community has been so supportive of us, that it took no thought to just jump into action,” Fiorelli said. “For us, pizza was a no-brainer because it’s pretty much all we do. We knew we wanted to be of service. So we just did what we know — that’s hospitality. We’re just taking care of our community as they have us from day one.”

Due to the restaurant’s close relationship with the Venice fire station, which is less than a mile from the restaurant, other fire chiefs and police stations began reaching out to Fiorelli with requests for support to feed tired and hungry Angelenos who were either fighting the fires or devastated by them. When I noted that a big wave of initial support came from pizza makers who were out in the streets feeding people on their own dime, he thought it made sense, in a way.

“People who make pizza are more often than not people who want to spread love, joy and embrace community,” Fiorelli said. “It’s only natural that these are the people who would step up in a time of need. Pizza makes people happy. We as pizza makers are lucky that we get to share that.”

For all of the restaurants on this list and across the city, efforts will continue throughout January and into the longer recovery period. But if you’re in Venice in January, stop by Fiorelli Pizza and grab a pie — for every pizza purchased, they’ll be donating two pizzas to first responders and people in need.

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