FATHERS & SONS & PIZZA
Jeff Dzamko is opening a 3rd restaurant in honor of his late dad
Father’s Day, for many sons and fathers both young and old, often sparks memories of afternoons spent with dad, playing catch in the backyard or throwing a line into a local stream or river. For Jeff Dzamko, the man he and all his friends on the North Side affectionately called “father” — and the day that honors fatherhood and paternal bonds — will always be associated with pizza, perhaps this year more than ever.
That’s because on Father’s Day this Sunday, the Spring Garden resident will open Mr. Dzamko’s third food-related business as a tribute to his father, Tom: Father & Son Pizzeria on Babcock Boulevard in Ross.
In a way, the 47-year-old, who grew up in Perry South, is coming full circle, as the new shop is on the same block where the family’s pizza odyssey started nearly 30 years ago.
Jeff Dzamko was 10 when he started working alongside his father on Saturday mornings at the old Mandy’s Pizza across from Perry High School on Pittsburgh’s North Side. It was pretty low-key at first: He folded boxes and shredded blocks of mozzarella cheese to the grand tune of $10 a day before graduating in his teens to making sauce and throwing pies.
Yet talk about two peas in a pod. The father-son team had such a great time making pizza together that in 1995, just a few days shy of Jeff’s 20th birthday, the pair took over Russano’s Pizza in the North Hills and rechristened it Father & Son Pizzeria. They would eventually go on to open two more pizza shops, in Millvale and the North Side, with the same name.
Tom Dzamko, his son says, was a hard worker who taught his kids the value of an honest day’s work. Or as he puts it, “I didn’t realize all dads didn’t work seven days a week.”
Even after the men eventually sold the business in 2007, due to his father’s health problems, the senior Dzamko kept at it, delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut with the fervor of a teenager. At one point, he had a record 100-day delivery streak.
“He couldn’t sit still,” Jeff Dzamko recalls with a chuckle, despite heart and other issues that eventually took his life in 2016 at age 67.
Six years later, “father” still looms large, not just in his son’s memory but also as the namesake of all three of his businesses, in addition to a fourth that’s still in the works.
In April 2020, Mr. Dzamko took over the former Mullin’s Diner just up the river from the 16th Street Bridge on the North Shore, renaming it Father’s Diner. His second venture, Father & Son Bakery, opened the week before Thanksgiving the following November. It’s a few doors down from his old high school on Perrysville Avenue, in the site of
the former Schorr Family Bakery. It features all of the beloved bakery’s original recipes, including their dough nuts and butter cream frosted cakes.
Just days before the pandemic shut everything down on March 15, 2020, Mr. Dzamko also took over the lease for the old Mandy’s pizzeria space on Perrysville Avenue. But due to ongoing obstacles posed by COVID, it’s still under major renovations.
“Never sign a lease on a Friday,” he jokes.
Mr. Dzamko was working in construction management when he heard that Mullin’s Diner — a no-frills, neighborhood place for breakfast and lunch on Progress Street — was available for lease. Having been a regular for years, he was immediately intrigued, especially since it was basically ready to go, and soon had worked out a deal with Buncher Co., which had purchased it in 2017.
“Diners are fun,” he says and, at the time, he kind of missed being in the food business.
He initially considered calling it Swallie’s, after his father’s high school nickname, but decided it would require too much explaining. It was his high school buddy Tony DeCarlo, who he swam and played soccer with at Perry High School, and is now a city firefighter, who suggested “Father.”
“And it just clicked,” says Mr. Dzamko, “because so many people called him that.”
A throwback to diners of old, Father’s Diner features concrete floors, an industrial ceiling and daily specials written on a chalkboard. Old family photos a friend found in a box in the closet during the pandemic decorate the walls and windowsills, including one from 1991 documenting Tom Dzamko’s 50,000th pizza delivery. Another, taken sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s, shows him sleeping on the counter at Mandy’s, exhausted after a long day of pizza making and deliveries.
“He really taught me to appreciate things, and to work hard for what you wanted, and to set goals,” Jeff Dzamko says.
He acknowledges the pancakes and eggs served there aren’t “high end,” but food, he says, brings people together.
The bakery also leans heavily on nostalgia. Every birthday cake in his life was made there until Schorr’s closed in 2019 after 45 years as a neighborhood institution. Once owner Jim Schorr told him he was thinking of retiring, “My head couldn’t stop spinning,” Mr. Dzamko says. After working out a deal, he and his staff spent two weeks training on all the equipment, using all of the family’s famous recipes, before opening.
The tradition of bringing Schorr’s back to the neighborhood under the Father & Son banner “was just so exciting,” Mr. Dzamko says.
The new pizza space, conversely, was an example of how the world sometimes works in mysterious ways. About a month ago, he was slowing down to see if a Nappie’s food truck driving on Babcock Boulevard was delivering one of his orders when he saw the Large Plain space up for rent. “It literally fell in my lap, with all the equipment and everything else,” he says.
When Father & Son Pizzeria opens on Sunday — the first 50 customers will get a large pizza for $4.99, pickup only — the menu will boast the same block lettering and bright green and red color scheme as the Dzamkos’ original shop so many years ago. Along with pizza, customers also will be able to enjoy the steak hoagies and meatball subs that made it famous, featuring meats from Tom Friday’s in Brighton Heights.
Because of its name, Mr. Dzamko knows people are bound to ask: Are you the father or the son? The answer, he says, is bittersweet.
“I tell them I’m the son and that father is no longer with us,” he says. “But I’m excited to be making pizzas again, and my dad would be excited too.”