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Jeff Varasano in the 'Atlanta Journal-Constitution'

Posted by Adam Kuban, July 2, 2008 at 12:41 PM

One of Jeff Varasano's homemade pizzas. "One of my best-tasting pies ever," he writes on Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe.

When it rains, it pours. Jeff Varasano's hometown paper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, runs a profile on him today. This, in addition to the one the New York Times ran as well.

The AJC's piece has further insight into Jeff's character, painting him as a bit of a wonky engineer and pizza visionary:

To understand the Varasano mind and its approach to problem solving, it helps to know a couple of things:

> One: At the age of 14, he set the U.S. Rubik's Cube record with a time of 24.67 seconds and then published "Jeff Conquers the Cube in 45 Seconds: And You Can Too!" This achievement was noted during an assembly of his freshman class at Yale.

> Two: He is prone to saying things like, "I can watch two ducks fight over a piece of bread and go home and apply that. I see connections that other people can't."

I've met Jeff, and he's not as geeky (in the traditional sense) as this profile would make him out to be. He is, however, pizza-obsessed—a true pizza geek.

I like that this profile has more info on Jeff's upcoming Atlanta pizzeria:

Investors have approached Varasano about setting him up in the pizza business, but he and Stokley are planning on going it alone when they open this fall in the new Mezzo Atlanta building on Peachtree. Disagreements with partners, he claims, doomed his software business.

Isn't he nervous about the pressure of running and cooking in a restaurant?

"No," Varasano says. "Once I learn the brick oven, it won't be too different from what I do here."

Our own Ed Levine is quoted in the story, too, calling Jeff's voluminous pizza page the War and Peace of pizza blog posts."

10 Comments | Tagged: Atlanta, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia, Jeff Varasano

Jeff Varasano, of Patsy's Reverse-Engineer Fame, Profiled in the 'New York Times'

Posted by Adam Kuban, July 2, 2008 at 1:48 AM

How cool is this? In September 2006, Jeff Varasano's Pizza Page blew up like mad when Boing Boing and all the other biggies linked to it. You see, Varasano announced on his page that he was finally satisfied with his at-home Patsy's clone. Well, the New York Times finally noticed—took 'em two years—and runs a great profile on Jeff. It's full of charming anecdotes about his travails while cooking with an oven modified to bake pizza during the self-clean cycle:

In the steel floor of the lower oven, there is a jagged, dime-size hole, made when an errant piece of superheated topping melted through. One window pane in that oven’s door is shattered, destroyed after a drop of sauce fell onto it at high heat. There is a long list of wrecked equipment — two more oven windows, three mixers and food processors, one internal fan. The oven has been shorting fuses lately. It’s getting harder, Mr. Varasano said, to make up stories for the oven repair guys.

The story also mentions that Varasano is thinking of opening his own pizzeria in Atlanta, where he now lives, this fall.

1 Comment | Tagged: Atlanta, Georgia, Jeff Varasano, pizza madness