Queens pizzeria sells diversity by the slice

FLUSHING, N.Y. —  Most of the businesses in this Queens neighborhood are owned by Korean Americans. The bakeries, phone stores, groceries and boutiques don’t even bother with English on their awnings on Main Street. A few shops in recent years have turned over to Chinese owners, but the Greeks, Germans, Italians, Jews and Irish who once ruled here are all gone. Except for Tony Sala of TJ’s Pizzeria & Restaurant.

He’s still here serving slices and delivering orders to Little League games and high school graduations. Sala has never been a purist about pizza. Personally, he likes it plain, but he’ll throw anything on top of a disk of dough. Taco meat. Buffalo wings. Lasagna innards. Then about a decade ago he turned to soul food -- better known in this neighborhood as Seoul food. And, thus, “kim-chee pizza” was born at TJ’s.

The spicy Korean pickled cabbage, alternately referred to as kimchi or kim-chee, served on top of Sala’s basic Neapolitan pizza, was an instant big seller. With this invention, TJ’s also became something akin to a cultural center, a neutral ground in the most diverse borough in New York City, where opposing ethnic candidates in the last City Council race met after hours to reconcile differences.

This is so New York. Wave after wave of immigrants have come and adapted, bringing their own culture, their own food, their own ethnicity. But those who came before them also have had to adapt. The WASP establishment had to accept the Irish into their politics and into their police force. German bakers had to learn to make bagels for the Jews. And Sala, a child of Italian immigrants, is making pizza with pickled cabbage to please the Koreans all around him.

Something that was strange is now ubiquitous. Sala piles kimchi on top of bowls of spaghetti with red sauce. He’s not averse to stuffing it into calzones or rolls because the Korean customers love it.

And now that they’re regulars at TJ’s, they have branched out. The other day Dennis Yu, who owns a nearby karaoke studio, was digging through a plate of Sala’s baked ziti, with a side order of jalapeno peppers. He is not a fan of pizza but he comes to TJ’s at least twice a day to watch golf on the restaurant TV and for a meal. Every so often he tries something new, like the ziti dish.

“Most American people eat pizza, but it’s too greasy for me,” said Yu. “Kimchi makes it better.”

Sala has spent his whole adult life in pizza shops. He grew up in Manhattan and began throwing dough in a pizza shop in Jackson Heights, another Queens neighborhood transformed by immigrants. Finally in 1989, Sala had saved enough money to buy his own place.

It is nothing special: a long, narrow restaurant with 20 yellow Formica booths, brick walls and a take-out window onto Roosevelt Avenue. Even though the previous owner had gone bust because Korean immigrants, still new to American foods, were flooding Flushing, Sala thought he could make TJ’s a success: “I was young, I was strong, I made a heck of a pizza.”

Flushing’s commercial district, in fact, had been nearly derelict in the early 1980s before Koreans began moving to Queens after a new government came to Korea and military generals became presidents. The Korean influx gave Flushing new life. But non-Korean merchants couldn’t make it on Main Street and despite his confidence Sala was struggling. Then one day his wife’s Korean American obstetrician -- the Salas have six children -- suggested he try putting kimchi on top of his pizza.

“I didn’t even know what he was talking about,” Sala said. But he went around the corner to the grocery store and bought the already fermented nappa cabbage concoction. (Sala knows better than to attempt it from scratch.) To make the pizza look attractive, at first Sala carefully arranged slices of cabbage on top of a regular cheese pie. But the hot cheese would slide off with the big cabbage slices and burn the customers’ chins.

So Sala chopped it up before spreading it across a pie. That worked better and in time the older Korean women in the neighborhood advised him how to doctor the kimchi with secret spices to make it blend better with the cheese and tomato sauce. He refuses to give away their secrets.

Before he knew it, TJ’s had new customers from the neighborhood. Korean teens came in at first just to gawk at Sala’s innovation. Sometimes they’d order a slice; more often they’d go for the pepperoni, still the best seller. But the adults loved the kimchi. And Sala learned that this Korean staple, eaten by many every day with plain rice, appealed as well to non-Koreans, particularly to Central and South Americans who would stop by for a slice at TJ’s after they got off the No. 7 train on their way home to the neighborhoods around Flushing.

“The Mexicans and Colombians love the kimchi because they’ll eat anything spicy,” Sala said. His Indian customers prefer broccoli and spinach topping; the Russians stick to plain. A slice with a “gourmet” topping such as kimchi costs between $2.45 and $4. (Sala proudly points out that, at $1.75, a plain slice still costs a quarter less than the subway fare.)

Working in the melting pot has been more of an education for Sala than this high school graduate had expected. Naturally, he speaks Italian, but he is now better in Spanish than in his parents’ native tongue; he can greet people and make change in Korean, as can most of his kids, ages 16 through 27, who also work in the pizza shop. A few years back, Sala got an offer to build a pizzeria in South Korea. But it seemed too ambitious a project and his health hasn’t been too good. It doesn’t help that he eats on average three or four pizza slices a day and needs to lose 100 pounds. “I love the stuff, but it’s killing me,” he said, chuckling.

TJ’s close friend Jim Wu, a Chinese American political consultant who designed the www.tjspizzeria.com website, is helping Sala develop other products for a broader Asian American market. Koreans are beginning to migrate out of Flushing to more suburban Queens neighborhoods, and a large Chinese population is coming in. A few of the store signs on the colored awnings in Flushing’s downtown are now in Chinese.

Sala and Wu are toying with adding a new seafood topping for the TJ’s menu. They’re also researching where to buy bubble, or boba, tea, a milky drink with tapioca pearls in it that is favored by Asian teenagers.

“You got to keep adapting or you die,” Sala said, looking at a colorful brochure with different varieties of the tea. But there are limits. He’s been experimenting with no-carb pizza dough and no-carb cheese. “People eat it,” he said, shaking his head. “But I gotta tell you -- it smells and, you know, I’m an old-fashioned pizza guy. I’ll only go so far.”