‘Pepperoni bread? What’s that?’
How this delicious dish became a unique Filipino tradition in Virginia Beach
At his Norfolk Filipino restaurant, Auntie’s, Doddie Braza was busy rattling off the essentials — all the things he knew he needed to include at his new grab-and-go market devoted to Filipino flavors. There would be sweet and traditional pandesal yeast breads served warm, he said. Maybe some steamedbun siopao, and some treats made with the neon-purple ube yams of the Philippines.
“And then of course we would have pepperoni bread,” Braza said. “You’ve got to.”
But... does anyone eat that in the Philippines?
Braza paused, and then laughed: “Maybe not. I guess it’s just something we do here.”
Walk into a decades-old Filipino bakery in Virginia Beach, at Angie’s or Glory’s or Laguna, and the most thunderingly popular item will be something you’ll never see in Manila: a football of lightly sweet and airy bread, its insides blooming with gooey mozzarella cheese and the fire-engine red of thin-sliced pepperoni.
You won’t find pepperoni bread in the Filipino enclaves of California or New Jersey. And until Auntie’s starts serving it, it’s even a little bit hard to find in Norfolk. The bread appears to be a Filipino American tradition unique to Virginia Beach — an unlikely blend of Italian and Spanish and Southeast Asian cultures formed in the cultural whirl of the Mid-Atlantic.
“I talk to people I know in Los Angeles about what’s trending, and they say ‘Pepperoni bread? What’s that?’”
said Ken Garcia Olaes, owner of Angie’s Bakery on Holland Road. “People come down from New Jersey and they stock up on pandesal and pepperoni bread, and they’ll tell me, ‘We don’t have this there.’ And I say, ‘Why not?’ ”
For multiple generations in Virginia Beach, pepperoni bread devotion can border on obsession, among Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike.
Hundreds of pepperoni breads leave the door each day, said Luz Esteban, of Glory’s Bakery. Filipinos who’ve moved to other states stock up by the tens before driving to Florida or New Jersey, she said. On Superbowl Sunday, at both locations of Glory’s on Aragona Boulevard and Centerville Turnpike, the line for pepperoni bread stretched out the bakeries’ doors and into the parking lot.
“People mail it overnight across the country,” she said. “Do you know how expensive that is?”
No two bakeries serve quite the same version. But they all share a singular deliciousness, not to mention a working-class caloric decadence and an all-American emphasis on portability — a heart-walloping brick of a meal that never crests $4 and can be eaten while riding a bicycle.
At Roela’s on Holland Road, the bread arrives as a rounded bun the shape of a dinner roll. At Glory’s, the hulking zeppelins come with marinara on the side, and can also be stuffed with sausage instead of pepperoni. At Angie’s, it is a pumped-up balloon of soft and sugar-doughed pandesal. At Laguna, the mozzarella arrives mixed with the sharpness and resolute orange of American cheddar.
And yet despite its popularity, and relatively recent invention, pepperoni bread’s origins are sometimes mysterious even to those who bake it.
“I had never seen pepperoni bread before coming here. And for while I thought my uncle was the only one who made it,” said Olaes, who spent his childhood in Germany, but took over his family’s bakery two years ago after coming to Virginia Beach.
“But then I’ve seen other bakeries making it as well.”
A multiplicity of pepperoni traditions
Filipino is not the only pepperoni bread, of course. America boasts another, much more famous tradition.
In West Virginia, the pepperoni roll is revered as the state food, invented by Italian immigrants who wanted a hearty lunch that could be easily ported into coal mines. The broadly acknowledged original, made by Giuseppe “Joseph” Argiro at Fairmont’s Country Club Bakery in 1927, consists of splendidly greasy stick pepperoni rammed roughly into Italian bread. But more modern versions also involve sliced pepperoni and mozzarella, much like what’s served in Virginia Beach.
“A guy from West Virginia came in to our bakery and was talking about pepperoni rolls there,” Olaes said. “He was very interested that we were selling this.”
When he tried the pepperoni bread from Glory’s, my West Virginia-born colleague, Gary Harki, heartily accepted the Filipino-made bread as the food of his people.
“Different lineage maybe, but there’s a gas station in Fairmont, West Virginia, that makes a close facsimile to this version,” he said. “Down to the sweetness of the bread. It’s close enough that it makes me miss home a little.”
But it’s not just West Virginia. Wherever Italian Americans needed low-cost sustenance for long days at a mine or a factory, meaty breads like this can be found.
In gas stations along the state routes binding Kentucky and West Virginia, the front counters may contain unmarked plastic bags filled with homemade breads that are locally called pizza rolls. Throughout Rust Belt Ohio and Pennsylvania, Italian bakeries serve variants on pepperoni bread that may range from rolled-up stromboli to a cheese-and-meat-stuffed Italian stirato.
But in Virginia Beach, it turns out, pepperoni bread appears to be a separate and parallel Filipino innovation.
As with all food traditions, the history is somewhat contested. Therese Lee, of Laguna Bakery, said she had always believed the pepperoni bread served at her family’s 32-year-old business came from Italian cousins, or second-generation Filipinos born here into a life of pepperoni. Lee took over the family business in 2005 from a different branch of her family, the Aragons.
The one thing she knows for sure is that the bread didn’t come from the Philippines.
“It was not available in the Philippines back then — you know, we didn’t have pepperoni at that time,” she said. “Of course, everything now in the Philippines is available. But at the time, in the ‘80s, it was not available to the first generation.”
At Angie’s, Olaes found a clue as to how his family began serving pepperoni bread 30 years ago. In his shop, he saw an old business license at his same Holland Road address, with a different name on the certificate: Glory’s Bakery.
And it is Glory’s Bakery, it turns out, who has the oldest and most documented claim to pepperoni bread’s invention.
The Road from Glory’s
Neither Luz nor Alfonso Esteban had set out to be bakers. After leaving the Philippines, Luz, now 79, had been first a teacher in Canada, and then an insurance broker in Virginia Beach. Alfonso, meanwhile, was in the Navy.
But in 1986, while Alfonso was in the living room watching TV, Luz heard from a friend that a bakery called Glory’s was for sale. She acted fast. She asked her friend to contact the owners, and said that she and her husband would be there at once. Alfonso
was not as enthused, it turned out.
“He said, ‘You don’t know how to bake!” she said. “And I said, ‘The bakers will stay and train us, and we will learn.’ ”
They did. And while the Estebans were still getting their legs under them in the new shop, Luz said, a friend of hers took a fateful trip out of town — she can’t remember where.
“She brought different kinds of food — delicacies,” Luz remembered. “And we got interested in the stromboli.”
She wondered: Could she make her own version of something so wonderful? She began to experiment, she said, using a variety of bread recipes she already had available at the shop. She went back and forth for months, she said, to get the proportions and the textures right.
“You have to have a certain amount of pepperoni and cheese to balance it. If not, it will be salty, you know — greasy,” she said. “The saltiness, the amount of cheese, you know, so they have to work together.”
Far from the rolled-up pizza dough used to make a stromboli, Esteban’s bread is fluffier, and contains a bit more sugar. This mix of airiness and sweetness has become a hallmark of the Filipino take on pepperoni bread in
Virginia Beach, though Glory’s is perhaps the least sweet of them all.
At Glory’s, the pepperoni and thickly stuffed mozzarella are packed into a single pocket within the dough, which is left for hours to rise and spread out on its trays. The pepperoni breads are then baked freshly in the morning and throughout the day, so that it can always be served hot. The dough recipe she came up with is used nowhere else in the bakery.
The bread debuted, she said, maybe a year after she opened at the original location of Glory’s in 1986 — before any of the other spots currently serving it were open.
Pepperoni bread’s first mention in The Virginian-Pilot came in June 1989, six months after the Estebans moved from Holland Road to Centerville Turnpike. Already, the bread had become local legend.
“Our tipster says it’s pepperoni bread that’s wowing the customers, to the tune of nearly 6,000 a month,” wrote food editor Ann Hoffman at the time, “A perfect hand-held meal, it consists of an 8-inch yeast roll stuffed with pepperoni and mozzarella, all for $1.25. You can eat it in the car and not make a mess,” she said.
By the next year, the bread was listed on the Glory’s menu with a
new word in front of it: “Famous.”
It remains so, locally — though by now it has been joined by many more renditions across the city. The one at Laguna, with a recent cheddar addition suggested by Therese Lee’s American husband, has moved perhaps more toward local-grown palates.
Meanwhile, the one at Angie’s has become more resolutely Filipino, made with the same sweet pandesal yeast bread that Olaes uses for other Filipino pastries.
But while Glory’s has added more options — marinara sauce, or sausage and meatball and “supreme” fillings — the original pepperoni bread recipe has remained not only unchanged, but heavily policed. Each item must be weighed or counted by bakers who prep the breads at the Aragona location.
“They have to count the pepperoni. And they measure the cheese,” Luz said. “If you put in too much cheese, when you bake it it will come out (of the bread). And then you won’t have enough cheese inside.”
The results, delivered fresh and gooily cheesy from the oven, are achingly self-evident — a pound or more of pure comfort that is neither Filipino nor Italian but near-dangerously universal. The tantalizing smells wafting up from the Glory’s pepperoni bread were enough to make a Pilot photographer briefly backslide from otherwise rigid vegetarianism. Our photographer has, she attested, no regrets.
It should be noted that there remains a light family dispute, even among the Estebans, as to the origins of the pepperoni bread at Glory’s. Luz’s oldest son, Oliver, remembers making something similar for lunch before the bakery served its first bread. He wonders, still, whether he was the one who caused lightning to strike.
“I will say that I made a rudimentary version of it for lunch one day during break,” Oliver wrote when we aksed. “But they don’t remember that ever happening. Hahaha the world will never know. ... I can already see her eyes rolling.”
Luz didn’t even bother rolling her eyes. “No,” she said, batting away the notion without even a flutter of her lashes. “It was the stromboli.”