TASTE 2025 miaminewtimes.com 88 A n unexpected romance sparked what would become Miami’s most enduring Valentine’s Day gift: its first pizzeria. More than 70 years ago, Frankie’s Pizza cofounders Frank and Doreen Pasquarella met at a small-town dance in Ohio: he, a charming baker’s son from Steubenville, showing off his new car; she, from the neighboring town, defying family warnings about “those Steubenville boys.” Their honeymoon trip to Miami in 1954 changed everything, when they noticed the city had plenty of Italian restaurants but was missing one key item: pizza. A few months after that honeymoon, on Valentine’s Day, 1955, they opened Frankie’s Pizza. They used a Veterans Administration loan to start the business, with Frank load- ing his brother’s bakery pans into the car trunk for the drive south. Using Frank’s mother’s recipes for sauce and dough, they opened their first location near the University of Miami. “They came down here with nothing and created Frankie’s,” says their daughter, Roxanne Pasquarella, who now runs the pizzeria with her sister, Renee. From the aforementioned spur-of-the-moment observa- tion 70 years ago, the small family operation went on to help shape Miami’s pizza culture for generations. In 1957, when the Pasquarellas moved their two-year-old piz- zeria to a former grocery store on Bird Road (where it stands to this very day), they weren’t setting up shop in the busy commercial corridor we know now. “Every- thing out here was just open land, with orange groves, horses, some cows, and not much else,” Roxanne says of the site, a mile and a half west of the Palmetto Expressway. “That little grocery store, which later became this pizza shop, serviced this area and the people who lived out here.” Those original baker’s pans from Steubenville, Ohio, became the signature square shape that defines a Frankie’s pie. Remarkably, some of those original pans still cook pizzas today, seven decades later. The city grew up around the Pasquarellas’ rectangular pies. Frank delivered pizzas through dormitory windows to University of Miami students under curfew, becoming so beloved he even became an honorary member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. Locals learned to look for the blink- ing neon sign — now the last of its kind on Bird Road after the Pasquarellas fought to preserve it following Hurricane Andrew. Step into Frankie’s today and you’ll find a pizza shop that seems frozen in time. Nothing’s moved since 1957: same counter, same ovens, same spot where the order tickets hang. The sisters maintain their parents’ exacting standards, teaching new employees the Frankie’s way through hands-on training rather than written manuals. Most workers start as teen- agers from Southwest High School, learning the intricate ballet of ducking hot pans and swiveling pizzas in the tight galley-style kitchen. Even the free slice on top of every box, Frank’s old marketing trick, remains standard practice. “Walking into Frankie’s puts you in another dimension,” says South Florida historian Cesar Becerra. “It’s a time machine.” Becerra, who documented Frankie’s history in book form 20 years ago, has released an up- dated version to coincide Frankie’s, Miami’s oldest pizzeria, marks 70 years of square slices. Don’t Think Slice BY OLEE FOWLER Photos by Burger Beast Frankie’s has been serving Miami pizza aficionados since 1955 >> p8
