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Call it a diner.
Call it a drive-in.
Call it a dive.
Whatever label you wish to affix to North Tonawanda’s Pizza Junction today, there’s another one the eatery will have earned after Monday night.
Star.
Pizza Junction, which has operated for nearly 40 years, will be one of three eateries featured on Monday’s episode of the Food Network series “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.” Network crews spent several days in mid-August shooting secondary footage for the seven-minute segment, with series host Guy Fieri spending several hours there one day sampling the cuisine and talking to customers.
General manager Ryan Fleckenstein and his crew customized a new dish just for Fieri’s visit — reuben pizza. In addition, dishes to appear on the air include two Pizza Fest winners, beef on weck pizza and barbecue pulled pork pizza, as well as stuffed banana peppers.
Fieri, who usually takes a bite of food and then spits it out off-camera as to avoid overconsumption, had a hard time doing that when he visited NT, Fleckenstein said.
“The producer had to stop rolling and take the food away from him,” Fleckenstein said.
In addition to Pizza Junction, Fieri’s Western New York visit saw him have a bite at Buffalo’s Lake Effect Diner, Sophia’s and Blackthorn Restaurant and Pub, Grovers Bar and Grill in Amherst, and Earl’s Drive-in in Chaffee.
“There’s enough going on here to bring people in here,” Fieri said of Western New York.
Fieri took a few moments prior to an early morning shoot in August at Sophia’s — located on Military Road just south of Kenmore Avenue — for an interview. When he wasn’t trying to pour syrup on a crewmember as retribution for that man’s making Fieri laugh on camera during a TV news interview, Fieri heaped praise upon local cuisine.
“Pizza Junction — wow, talk about a location that everyone in the country’s aware about,” he said. “There’s been a lot of great food here. You guys know your food.”
Food Network executives received some 200 e-mails encouraging a visit to Pizza Junction, which prompted their visit once it was established that local shooting would take place.
“It’s a true honor that out of the thousands of restaurants in Western New York, they chose us,” Fleckenstein said. “Things went great. It was a lot of fun. (Fieri) was an outstanding guy to work with.”
Behind the scenes
Not all of the work involved Fieri, though. Cameramen spent 29 hours in all shooting footage of Pizza Junction, much of it prior to Fieri’s appearance there. That time was spent shooting close-ups of the featured dishes, which Fleckenstein said involved a lot more work than one might think.
“It’s very tedious when they do the shooting,” he said. “They took pictures of every piece of equipment, the side dishes ... when Guy came back the next week, I had to use the exact same gloves, the exact same spoon.”
In whittling 29 hours of footage into a seven-minute segment, Food Network editors stayed in frequent contact with Fleckenstein. He spent an estimated 20 hours exchanging phone calls and e-mails with editors trying to get the final edits and Fieri’s voice-over script just right.
“There’s a lot more to it than people think,” he said.
During the interview at Sophia’s, Fieri and a reporter were surrounded by lights, cameras and crewmen eager to begin rolling. This has become the norm for Fieri, who spends up to half the year on the road filming TV shows, but the restaurateur-turned-star is glad to pay the fame forward.
“As a chef, I have to shine the light on other mom-and-pop joints and help their business,” he said. “If it’s folksy, we’ll find it.”
Fieri has made a big name for himself in the celebrity chef world in little time. He won the Food Network’s reality show “The Next Food Network Star” in 2006 and now hosts “Diners,” “Guy’s Big Bite” and “Guy Off the Hook.” He’s also written several books, toured the nation doing cooking exhibitions and appeared in several commercials as a product spokesman, as well as maintained ownership of multiple restaurants.
Since premiering on the Food Network in April 2007, “Diners” has seen Fieri sample the cuisine at hundreds of locally owned eateries nationwide. Each restaurant is generally allotted one of three segments per 30-minute episode, each of which feature a unifying theme such as “burgers” or “comfort food.” Monday’s episode features old favorites with a twist, with Pizza Junction sharing airtime with a San Francisco diner featuring fresh pork and a Cleveland eatery known for European dishes.
Boost in business
Comforting to featured eateries is the publicity that’s produced after a segment of the show airs. The Lake Effect Diner segment aired in a November episode called “Legacies,” highlighting diners that had been around for at least 50 years, and co-owners Tucker and Erin Curtin were told to expect big things; business at the Main Street eatery has boomed since.
“It is not uncommon to see business increase by 300 percent the day after the show airs,” said Jeremy Greene, a “Diners” producer who was on hand for some of the Western New York shooting.
“We find these places, and the people flock to them,” Fieri said. “The Food Network is setting the bar.”
Fleckenstein has prior experience with this phenomenon. He began working at the Studio Diner in San Diego soon after that restaurant was featured in a “Diners” segment about all-night eating last year.
“They never slowed down,” he said. “They had people from all over the country just coming in to try the food that Guy had eaten. There was a two-hour wait.”
Fleckenstein hopes that boom begins Monday night during a viewing party that Pizza Junction will host. The free event starts at 8 p.m., with Black Widow performing at 9 p.m. and the show airing at 10 p.m.
“The producers said that we’re set up better than most places to accommodate larger crowds,” he said. “That’s what I’m hoping for.”
What’s key, Tucker Curtin said, is to take that 15 minutes of fame and cultivate it into lasting success.
“It is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to hit the national spotlight,” he said. “The trick here is being as efficient and consistent as ever so that the increase in business won’t just be a flash in the pan.”
Old Man Winter’s frosty clutches shouldn’t do anything to damper the enthusiasm, Fieri said.
“The colder it gets, the better the food gets because you spend a lot of time inside,” he said.
A push for ‘real’ food
In addition to boosting business, Fieri hopes his work with “The Triple-D” helps to revive interest in fresh food featuring local farmers and fresh ingredients (such as the Lake Effect’s self-cured meats), as opposed to prepared, store-bought cuisine.
“We had a two-generation gap where people thought we could have processed foods and get away with that,” he said. “I think people are falling (back) in love with food. It’s quality, not quantity.”
While acknowledging Western New York’s reputation for deep-fried poultry, Fieri said that the region has plenty more to offer than just food.
“The architecture and the culture ... the industry and the history and the river and the falls, it’s amazing,” he said.
That, according to Fleckenstein, is what really matters.
“It’s going to do nothing but good for us as a business, but also it’s going to do good things for Western New York,” he said. “It has a lot to offer.”
Contact Paul Laneat 693-1000, ext. 116.
IF YOU WATCH
• WHAT: “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” episode featuring Pizza Junction
• WHEN: Debuts at 10 p.m. Monday; reruns air several times during the week
• CHANNEL: Food Network (cable)
• MORE INFORMATION: Visit foodnetwork.com
IF YOU GO
• WHAT: Viewing party for “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”
• WHERE: Pizza Junction, 1265 Erie Ave., North Tonawanda
• WHEN: 8 p.m. Monday
• MORE INFORMATION: Call 692-6366 or visit thepizzajunction.com
