The Pig and the Pie pizzeria pops up inside burger joint Brgr Stop
Michael Buchinski’s new over-the-top pizzeria, The Pig and the Pie, came to him as he sat in quarantine, too terrified for months to leave the house or step foot inside his struggling restaurants.
Sales plummeted at Brgr Stop, his hamburger joints in Fort Lauderdale and Coconut Creek, but an eleventh-hour check in May from the federal government’s Personal Paycheck Program kept his restaurants alive. When he realized federal unemployment checks would run out in July, Buchinski sliced up a radical idea: Why not make up lost revenue by putting a pizzeria inside his burger restaurant?
The Pig and the Pie debuted Thursday, sharing its space with Brgr Stop Fort Lauderdale at the Gateway Shopping Center at 1930 E. Sunrise Blvd. Along with New Yorkstyle slices, the pizzeria will boast a menu of 10 eye-popping pies and six hoagies, served alongside Brgr Stop’s usual menu of carnivalesque hamburgers, boozy milkshakes and root-beer-sriracha chicken wings.
“I got decimated when the pandemic hit,” recalls Buchinski, who created the pizzeria with Brgr Stop partners Mark Haig and Devin Cahow. “We basically rushed this thing into existence. These are crazy times and we had to do something, so I thought, ‘Let’s do funky pizzas, some Italian soul food.’”
The Pig and the Pie grand opening on Aug. 6 will feature a limited menu of four pies and three hoagies before rolling out a full menu next week, he says. Opening-day offerings ($18.95-$22.95 per 14-inch pie) will include The Drunken Pig, with Tito’s San Marzano vodka cream sauce, 16-month aged prosciutto, buffalo and wholemilk mozzarella and unfiltered olive oil; and Float Like a Butterfly Sting Like a Bee, with imported soppressata, honey and roasted red Peppadews.
For Buchinski, Brgr Stop Fort Lauderdale’s big kitchen was the key to running a pizzeria out of a hamburger joint. During the summer Buchinski, 47, bought a double-decker gas oven that perfectly fit beneath his ventilation hood without blocking the burger stations. He also wanted to avoid leasing a costly brickand-mortar space.
“It makes sense because burger lovers and pizza lovers are the same people,” says Buchinski, a thyroid cancer survivor who has a compromised immune system. “Honestly, I should’ve done this two months ago but with all these COVID-19 cases I was too scared to go into my stores.”
The Parkland restaurateur and his partners tinkered with the menu with new pizzeria chef Sammy Micheloti. They drew inspiration from Mark Iacono’s famed New York pizza joint Lucali (which has a Miami Beach outpost), which tops its pies with imported buffalo mozzarella.
“These famous New York pizzerias — they use buffalo, not whole-milk mozzarella — and I wanted that taste profile,” Buchinski says.
The Pig and the Pie’s full pizza menu ($11.95-$22.95 for 10-, 12- and 14-inch pies) also includes a vegetarian version, No Meat for Me, along with a square Grandma-style pie. On Tuesdays, Brgr Stop also will sell a discounted 14-inch New York-style plain pizza for $12.
If his pizzeria is successful, a second The Pig and the Pie location will open in two weeks at Brgr Stop Coconut
Creek, Buchinski says. That location’s kitchen is too small for a pizza oven, so pizza orders will be cooked next door at Bella Roma, the Italian restaurant Buchinski has owned for 20 years.
The Pig and the Pie will be open 3-10 p.m. Tuesday, noon-10 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, and 11 a.m.-10 p.m. Friday through Sunday.