The Bay Area’s most recognizable pizza has never veered from the concept established in December of 1987: serve an authentic East Coast style pizza in an upscale, efficiently run restaurant, combined with a carefully managed growth plan to maintain the quality of the food and service. Years before the term became a marketing buzzword of the new millennium, its founder delineated a textbook case of “building a brand”, representing one of Northern California’s most successful low-tech business stories of the past two decades.

Based in San Mateo, Amici’s East Coast Pizzeria is slated to open its 10th Bay Area restaurant in Danville in March of 2008 and recently received the highest praise among patrons in a survey conducted by the San Francisco Chronicle.  “We developed this concept with the intention of ‘building a brand’ within the community of transplanted East Coasters,” said Amici’s President and co-founder Peter Cooperstein. “The signature item was a thin crust pizza cooked in 700-degree open flame ovens. In our early years we featured few variations and declined to even offer a ‘combo’ pizza.”

The popular eatery’s blueprint was developed by Cooperstein, a Boston, MA native spiced with a bachelor’s degree in economics from Cornell University , an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and an insatiable craving for a fine New York-style pizza. The early stages of the computer industry revolution drew Cooperstein to the Silicon Valley in 1981, but a market shift re-focused his efforts on providing East Coast refugees with a product they missed.  After researching successful pizza establishments in Boston and New York City he returned to his new home, and armed with the MIT diploma, commenced a career in the pizza industry….as a dishwasher. 

For the next 18 months Cooperstein apprenticed through the industry with turns as a waiter, bus boy, deliveryman, prep cook and pizza cook. His first waiter job was at the original Village Pizzeria on Steiner St. in  San Francisco, which was managed at the time by New York native Mike Forter. The two became business partners and 20 years and nine openings later, Cooperstein and Forter remain good friends and partners in one of the Bay Area’s most successful food enterprises.

Various locations in the Bay Area.  Check out http://www.amicis.com for details.