Every time Denny Lee has trained an employee of his on how to make the daily dough for one of his DeFelice pizza shops, part of the lesson includes what he refers to as the “Goodie Bag.”
“There are basic ingredients that go into pizza dough,” explained Lee, who, along with his wife, Colleen, has owned and operated the DeFelice Bros. pizza shops in Wheeling and Bethlehem for the past 21 years. “But the most important ingredient is the one I know nothing about. I don’t know what’s in it, and if you want to know, you’ll have to ask Dom yourself. … Good luck.”
Luck? OK, fine, but how hard could it be? Dominic DeFelice is a very nice man who funded the opening of the very first DeFelice pizza shop in Shadyside nearly 40 years ago. Since that first store opened in 1982, eight more franchise locations are now in operation with owners who follow very detailed product specifications to ensure consistency from shop to shop.
Including the “Goodie Bag.”
“So, Dominic, the dough at DeFelice is really different than any dough at any other place in the valley, and it’s probably because of what’s in that packet that you send to your franchise owners, right? So, ‘What’s in that packet exactly?’”
“Well, I could tell ya, but then I’d have to …”
Click or Crunch?
Pizza was supposed to pave a path to a profession but not create a culinary career.
That’s because DeFelice had plans – BIG plans – to be the next most famous photographer who would snap the celebrities for magazines like Rolling Stone, People, Playboy, Seventeen Magazine, and Vogue.
“I was going to be a professional photographer. That’s what I really wanted to do, and I was going to use the money I made from the pizza shop to go to photography school,” DeFelice said. “I was taking some classes already from Jay Stock from up in Martins Ferry. He was a world-renowned photographer at the time, and at the same time I was working with Boyd Nelson from the Times Leader.
“I had worked for my sister and her husband in their pizza shop, and that building is now a hair salon next to the DeFelice shop in Shadyside,” he recalled. “I also worked in the (Eastern Plating) mill to save money for photography school, but that was in the late 1970s, and the country had hit a pretty good recession. A lot of the plants and mills started closing down, so I had to look at different options to save that money, and that’s when the pizza came into play.”
So, in September 1982, Dominic DeFelice used the $5,000 he had saved, and he and his brother, T.J., opened the very first DeFelice Bros. pizza shop in Shadyside, Ohio.
“After I had decided to go into the pizza business, I told my parents, and my dad said, ‘Well, you can’t go into business without your brother (T.J.). Ya know, we were an Italian family,” DeFelice said with a chuckle. “OK, so my thought was to open a pizza business, do well and build it up, and then sell it and use that money for photography school. Little did I know how much work is involved with the pizza business. I’ll never forget one night when a guy came into the shop to sell me a billboard, and he asked me, ‘What do you do in your spare time?’ I replied, ‘Spare time?’”
“Sleep! That’s what I did in my spare time back then,” I said to him. “He then asked me what I would do if I failed at the pizza business, and I explained to him that, at the time, I was only 21 years old and that I would get up, dust myself off, and go find something else to do. And, ya know, we had some pretty bad nights, and those thoughts entered my mind from time to time.”
Worth Going After
Not long after the first anniversary, DeFelice Bros. Pizza began offering more than just pizza.
Blame the Taco Pizza.
“No, blame my brother,” DeFelice said with a chuckle. “He’s the one who wanted to offer the Taco Pizza, and If you want to sell that product then you have to have lettuce, tomato, and onion, and when we started having those things, we figured we might as well start making sandwiches. And then a lot of our customers started asking us to start making salads.
“Little by little, we just kept adding things,” he said. “But that’s what it takes. You have to grow over time, and you can do that as long as your original product is popular and you have the customer base.”
The second DeFelice shop opened in Bridgeport in 1985, and then DeFelice invested in a large commissary that operated until the chain reached five stores.
“The whole idea was to keep the products as fresh as possible and to keep the food as consistent as possible,” the co-founder explained. “The commissary worked really well for us for a while, but then some folks from the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Transportation came to visit me. Two federal agencies in one week. That was interesting, to say the least.
“But all they wanted to tell me was that regulations were about to change and that operating a commissary was about to get really, really expensive because of things like refrigerated trucks. Those guys did me a big favor,” DeFelice admitted. “That’s when we, as a pizza family, started reaching out to the manufacturers to find the best of the best for our products, and that’s exactly what we found.”
By the mid-1980s, the national chain, Domino’s Pizza had arrived in Wheeling, and the corporation at the time offered guaranteed 30-minute delivery or a customer’s pizza was free. That promotion lasted only until 1986 before it was scaled back to a $3 discount.
But initially, DeFelice heard plenty about it.
“I was at Abbey’s Merrymint one evening, and I met up with this guy, and he said to me, ‘Well, now Domino’s Pizza delivers, and those drivers have to be quick,’” he recalled. “But I looked right back at him, and I said, ‘Domino’s may deliver, but DeFelice Bros. has the pizza that’s worth going after.’ And that guy looked at me, and his jaw dropped open. That’s when he said, ‘You’re right. I would go pick it up.’
“And that’s when I started to use that slogan on billboards and on the radio, and it stuck because it was true, and that’s why it worked,” DeFelice added. “I believe we didn’t start delivering until we had been business for about 10 years, but a lot of people still went to the shops to pick it up, and I believe they still do.”
