When this year’s James Beard Awards finalists were announced, memories of my old friend, Chris Bianco, got me reliving his story. Chris and I — along with a third, long-lost musketeer named John — lived in the same Scottsdale apartment complex as virtual adolescents for a time back in the mid-’80s, when we three were doing little more than getting our feet wet in food service while treating ourselves to a steady diet of bong hits for breakfast and endless hours of basketball-playing afterwards. While neither Chris nor I know what became of John since those days, the two of us made goes of it in the restaurant business. I’m not suggesting that we became professional peers over the years, mind you. That wouldn’t be fair to say at all. While I stayed on the pipe too long and amounted to just another lifer at work in the industry, Chris lit a far more ambitious flame and became larger than life; a rare, Beard Award-winning virtuoso of pizza-centric purism, who went on to earn an otherworldly reputation for his craft, along with endless accolades and applause from the world’s culinary cognoscenti.
During our salad days together, I laughed at Chris’s circumstances as he toiled in anonymity, making homemade mozzarella in his apartment bathtub, much to the chagrin of a girlfriend who gave him ne’er-do-well grief for his fledgling, perfectionist efforts to make a way for himself in the food world. When I heard he’d secured a small corner space in a busy Phoenix marketplace in the late ’80s, I was happy to hear he’d made some headway. By the early ’90s, Bianco’s burgeoning pizza enterprise had become a big success in a tonier, uptown location. When that strip mall location proved insufficient to serve his needs and crowds, Chris moved to downtown digs that have long-since become holy ground for a who’s who of Pizzeria Bianco worshippers (Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Fallon, Jerry Seinfeld, Jesus, et al.).
Not surprisingly, major awards followed. In 2003, Bianco turned the till-then fine dining-focused face of the Beard Foundation on its ear by winning in the Best Chef Southwest category, becoming the first pure pizzaiolo to garner such an honor. Then he doubled-down on his laurels nearly two decades later, taking home the 2022 Beard blue ribbon for Outstanding Restaurateur which, by then, also amounted to a lifetime achievement recognition for his long, intentional work as a proprietary advocate of cultivated partnerships between food producers, food hospitality professionals, and local epicurean populations and consumers. Between those bookend trophies, Bianco found himself becoming a Rushmore-esque founding father of the slow food movement, a warrior for the causes of fellow culinary artisans, and in 2010, ultimately, a casualty of his own tireless efforts to feed as much of the world as he could according to his convictions, after he suffered a severe asthma attack complicated by pneumonia and years of airborne flour that found its way into his lungs as he stood manning his pizza oven. The bad news from Arizona about his hard work-affected health made headlines in The New York Times. Turning in his paddle, Chris cleared his throat, picked up a pen and wrote his eponymously-titled 2017 tome, Bianco: Pizza, Pasta, and Other Food I like. I hope he found an address for that nagging, old girlfriend to send a signed copy to. As recently as 2022, Chris was busying himself with something you may have been treated to yourselves, perchance you’ve Netflix’d and chilled over episodes of Chef’s Table, in which he preaches parts of his good gospel sermon on gastronomic virtue like Tom Waits talking us through his truths in song writing.
“He’s the Coltrane of pizza,” his episode narrator punctuates my own analogy.
It’s been a minute since Chris and I last caught up. Still, he stands as a monument to me of what someone sincere, intentional, ambitious, and committed can accomplish through their life’s work. Never have I told him how much I admire him for that. Instead, I’ve always teased him about back in the day, when he wasn’t able to do a damn thing to stop my once fairly lethal outside shot from the baseline. But I only do that because I’ve always been a little envious of the slam dunk he made of his career. So, there’s the moral here, I suppose. In any story shared by friends who were just having a little fun when young are typical tales of misspent youth, told in hindsight from different perspectives by those who went on to work a little harder than they played and those who didn’t.
Take it from me; a guy with gray whiskers who took way too long to grow up, talking about his old buddy with two Beards to his credit, and trying to make myself feel a little better by association. Over time, reunions become less fun when you’re the one whose big baller days ended when adulthood was just getting started.
And I had another chef friend: Delmar Jensen was a character I’ll also never forget, who cooked in a restaurant I once mismanaged. After one of his notoriously long lunch breaks, he returned to work the dinner end of a double high as a kite on something. As I stood across a chest-high kitchen pass questioning whether or not he was capable of getting the job done that night, I noticed the two other line cooks typically stationed next to him were keeping their distance and looking wide-eyed at me. When one pointed down toward Delmar, I approached the rail to see him standing naked from the waist-down.
“You can’t do that,” I whispered within earshot of seated customers. He grinned big, laughed maniacally for a moment, covered himself with an apron, and cooked through the rest of the rush that way. Half in the bag myself, I let that happen. True story.
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