Uncle Joe's Famous Pizzeria of Hampton Bays plans expansion

Scott Gerber has been involved, as an investor and consultant, in a number of hospitality businesses over the years — among them Taylor’s Sushi Suite in Westhampton Beach. But he’d always kept them at arm's length.

That changed last year when he and his wife, Tana Leigh Gerber, bought Uncle Joe’s Famous  Pizzeria in Hampton Bays with the idea of turning it into a local chain.

The Gerbers, Manhattanites with a second home in Hampton Bays, moved full time to their East End house during the pandemic and, one rainy night in 2021, they wandered into Uncle Joe’s in the King Kullen shopping center. “Joe welcomed us in and, by the end of the night, he knew all our kids’ names,” Scott recalled. “A couple of weeks later,” Tana added, “he was giving our oldest son pizza lessons.”

Shortly after the family “fell in love” with Uncle Joe’s, Gerber put on his investment hat and began a survey of the Long Island pizza scene. He made three observations: The product is of generally high quality; people have a strong emotional attachment to their local pizzeria; and many pizzeria owners may be reaching retirement age with no succession plan. He sensed an opportunity.

Gerber set out to increase individual store profitability by streamlining operations, upgrading technology and purchasing goods in batches. But he did not want to sacrifice the specific appeal of the local pizzeria. That’s where Uncle Joe came in.

Founder Joseph Sciara, aka “Uncle Joe,” he said, was “the personification of the neighborhood spot.” Sciara emigrated from Sicily and opened his first pizzeria in Bay Shore in 1968, relocating to Hampton Bays in 1985. The shop was originally called Blue Jay’s but, according to Gerber, “he had a nephew apprenticing with him and every time he had a question, he started it with ‘Hey, Uncle…’ ” Customers adopted this locution, and pretty soon everyone was calling Sciara Uncle Joe.

In 2008, Uncle Joe’s, as it was now known, moved to its present spot. Over the next few years, it opened short-lived satellites in Riverhead and Mattituck. Now in his mid-80s, Sciara was looking to sell, and the Gerbers had a plan that involved both preserving and capitalizing on his legacy.

They did very little to the menu that was, and is, composed of standards found at virtually every Long Island pizzeria, from fried calamari to pastas and Parms and pizzas that range from Margherita and alla vodka to signatures such as the Hampton Bays Hawaiian (ham, pineapple and Calabrian chilies) and La Carne Suda (meatballs, sausage, pepperoni, ham and bacon). You’ll also find sweet “doughknots,” knotted doughnuts that come dusted with cinnamon sugar or served with gelato or dipping sauce. Large pies are $20 to $32; starters, $9 to $17; pastas, $20 to $25; Parms, $22.

But they gave the restaurant a gut renovation, turning the front room into a retro-chic pizzeria with a tin ceiling, black-and-white hex floor tiles, checkered tablecloths and framed photos of Uncle Joe’s storied history. The back room became an intimate brick-lined wine cellar.

Yes, they were aware that the new Uncle Joe’s looked nothing like the old one they were “preserving,” but, Scott said, the renovation got at something deeper than décor: “We are trying to connect to the emotional history and the ties people have to pizzerias.”

That emotional history, he believes, is what’s going to carry Uncle Joe’s beyond Hampton Bays. In the last six weeks, Wading River Pizza, Papa Nick’s Pizza (Bellport) and Fusilli (Miller Place) became Uncle Joe’s, and there are a half-dozen other pizzerias in the process of “Joe-fiying.”

And here’s another tension: Will a pizzeria’s customers react to the rebranding as an act of preservation or replacement? Scott said that Uncle Joe’s would not force individual stores into identical menus. In Wading River, for example, “the salad pizza is huge. We are keeping it.” Likewise, the “nonna pizza” (a square pie with hand-crushed tomatoes and fresh mozzarella) in Bellport isn’t going anywhere. But staples such as sauce, cheese and dough will be standardized and, if the Gerbers come across a pizzeria for sale “whose sauce is really sweet or whose crust is very thick or very thin,” that place is not going to work. “We taste the food at the beginning to make sure it aligns with what we do,” Gerber said.

One unusual element of Uncle Joe’s pizza is the use of panko (Japanese-style breadcrumbs) rather than semolina (coarse flour) to roll out the dough. “All the stores offer the panko as well as regular,” Scott said, “but we are finding that our new customers are being converted to the Uncle Joe’s style.”

Uncle Joe's Famous Pizzeria, 42 E. Montauk Hwy., Hampton Bays, 631-728-1234, unclejoes.com. Open Sunday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.