The Surgeon of Sauce, The Gangster of Gluten

Derrick Tung is probably the only master Neapolitan-style pizza maker in the world who has also been published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. Tung, owner of Paulie Gee’s Logan Square, would probably argue that part of that statement is a myth, but it’s not the part you’re thinking, i.e. a former medical school student who holds a master’s degree in health administration, Tung WAS an author on a scientific paper titled “Retained Surgical Sponges: Findings from Incident Reports and a Cost-Benefit Analysis of Radiofrequency Technology”. It’s the “master” tag that Tung would like take exception to, because he’s one of those guys that believes mastery is a fool’s errand, that the only truth is that learning never ends.

That’s fine. Call Tung whatever you will.

Smartypants. Primo pizzaiolo. Gluten gangster.

One thing’s for sure: Tung, and his team, put out leopard-spotted, puffy-edged, wood-fired Neapolitan-style beauties, as well as the best Detroit-style square pizza, aka Logan Squares, in Chicago. Heck, they might be the best Detroit-style pies in the nation, if you consider that one of Tung’s gluten-free square pies won the 2018 U.S. Pizza Cup (yes, this is a real thing), earning him a spot in the World Competition in Parma, Italy.

Tung’s also a generous guy. A few years ago, as I was eating, praying, and loving on my own pizza journey, I reached out to him for advice on buying a portable high temp oven. He had no idea who I was. He wasn’t doing it to curry favor with a food writer, but he talked to me for an hour about tradeoffs between Breville, Ooni, Blackstone, and Roccbox models.

While it all looks like rainbows now, Tung’s story is the perfect example of how incredibly hard, long, and smart you really have to work to succeed in the restaurant industry.

The story begins over 30 years ago with Tung’s aunt hoisting him on her lap so he could play the tabletop Ms. PAC-MAN at the local pizza chain Barnaby’s.

Tung grew up in a Chinese family that valued communal dining experiences. They also valued eating in general, making sure Tung got his meat fix. “When I was a kid, my family used to say if you eat chicken legs, you’ll run faster, or if you eat chicken wings you’ll learn how to fly,” said Tung.

Inspired by those visits to Barnaby’s, Tung believed that gathering for pizza was the ultimate communal experience. He also inherently understood the value of giving back and combined those two ideas to treat his whole extended family to dinner. In elementary school, there was a Pizza Hut reading program called “Book It” that rewarded kids for reading with coupons for personal pan pizzas. Tung saved up enough coupons so everyone in his family could get a personal pan pizza with their choice of toppings. Tung’s preferred topping combo then was sausage and pepperoni.

He eventually went to a boarding high school (none of this is true, but I like to imagine it was like Dead Poet’s Society, but with discursive discussions about Domino’s Noid mascot and Little Caesar’s pizza pizza deals) with with a middling cafeteria. “The first time we realized how bad the café was, my classmates and I saved up all our quarters and dimes and loose change so we could order delivery pizza as often as possible,” said Tung.

Fast forward to a career in health administration and a marriage to an optometrist. One night after helping his wife build out her new practice, they didn’t want to cook, so they went for dinner at a now defunct modern Neapolitan-style pizza place called Pizzeria Neo in Naperville. Tung flipped for the airy bubbles, the charred underside or as he likes to call it the “booty”, and the polka dotted puffy lip. He spent the next couple of days going down a YouTube and pizza website rabbit-hole. He spent hours on pizzamaking.com, a site that looks a minor step away from 1990s dial-up BBS, one of the deepest pizza resources on the internet.

Before Blaze and Mod and their ilk became popular, Tung dreamed of opening a Chipotle-style pick-your-own-toppings wood-fired pizza joint. He tried all kinds of flours, hydration points (the amount of water in a dough), and topping combinations, making Peking duck and Filipino breakfast pizzas in early experiments.

He eventually asked his wife if he could build a pizza oven in the backyard of their new house. “My wife was super supportive. She said, no, what the heck are you thinking?” Undaunted, he built a mobile wood-fired oven mounted on a trailer, instead.

While making farmer’s market visits to pick up ingredients for pizza research, Tung started thinking, what if he cooked pizzas at the farmers’ markets?

He ran a Kickstarter campaign and formed a business with friends called Za Pi, the name a low brow/high brow combination of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle screaming, “Cowabung bro, we just ordered ‘Za”, and an homage to the mathematical constant, 3.14. “We went to the Illinois Math and Science Academy. We had the Pi symbol on the logo. We were super nerdy,” said Tung.

The partners hosted a trial run for friends and family and messed up the dough. Pizzas got stuck to peels and flipped over in the oven (they called them calzones). By the end of the night, only four of the eight planned pizzas made it out of the oven as intended.                  

Tung worked his day job in healthcare, but pursued the high life of hybrid entrepreneurship, waking up at 5:30 a.m. on Saturdays to prep and get ready for the markets. The first couple weeks went well, with the business making almost fifty pies a week, and generating return customers. Cash flow and profitability however were tight.

Tung is a process-oriented guy who applies elements of Six Sigma and other continuous improvement systems to his business. He’s also a numbers dude, who manages and minimizes risk well. Za Pi was once asked to make 500 pizzas for the pride parade in Chicago. At first it seemed like a godsend for the cash-strapped and burgeoning business, but Tung rationalized that based on his team’s current throughput at the market, they’d have a tough time pulling off the ask, and they’d risk jeopardizing their reputation if they served substandard product just to make the number. So, he said, no, and instead worked on building the business so he could scale to that level next time a similar opportunity arose.

He also started looking for a mentor. “I wanted someone who changed paths mid-career, someone who didn’t have any restaurant experience before they opened a pizza place, and someone, who wasn’t Italian. That’s nothing against Italians, but I’ve founded that many Italians feel like if you’re not Italian, you can’t make great pizza.” Tung eventually hooked up with Paulie Gee of Brooklyn, New York, who was looking to expand. “Paulie was looking to franchise, and we visited him in New York. He visited us in Chicago. We got the offer to open in Chicago. We hemmed and hawed for three days over the decision. We decided to do it, because we knew we’d kick ourselves if we looked back on it and someone else had grabbed this opportunity,” said Tung.

Tung and his partners decided to close the mobile business in 2014 and sold their trailer. Tung’s journey was far from over. It took another two and a half years, 500 real estate listings, 100 showings, and multiple failed negotiations before he closed on the spot in Logan Square where the current Paulie Gee’s resides.

At one point, as he was closing in on one of the locations, Tung quit his job. When the negotiation fell through, it provided him the time to go on weekend pizza pilgrimages with his wife. He estimates he visited 40 of The Daily Meal’s top 100 rated pizza places in America. 

One of the most pivotal visits was a take-out pie from Buddy’s in Detroit. Sitting on the trunk of his car regarding the fried almost-focaccia-style base and carmelized cheese lip, he knew he needed to bring this variant to Paulie Gee’s Logan Square. Luck would have it that he inherited a Baker’s Pride convection over with his new restaurant space, a good vehicle to make the squares.

Tung opened in 2016. For the first six months the business lost money. Tung eventually had to sell a percentage of his ownership stake to keep the business afloat. He was confident he was on to something, but it took about a year and half before he collected a salary.

Today, Paulie Gee’s is thriving. Tung, who learned the importance of customer relationships, from his time at the farmer’s market and also from watching Paulie Gee interact with his own customers, estimates that when he opened, he could talk with every customer. Now on a Friday and Saturday night, it’s so busy, he’s lucky if he gets to speak with a third.

Before the pandemic hit, Tung estimated he was only a few years from paying back his investors, at which point he wanted to start offering his staff profit sharing and 401K matches. He also wants to start a local reading for pizza program similar to the Pizza Hut promotion that inspired him.

When Tung and I first spoke for this piece, Paulie Gee’s Logan Square was still open. However, a few days ago, he decided to shut the restaurant down temporarily in deference to concerns for his staff’s health and safety.

Watching Tung on Instagram the last few years, I’ve witnessed at least 50 or more experiments with new dough ratios and improved vegan crusts. When we spoke on the phone, Tung told me he was moving away from standard American bleached and bromated flour doughs through experiments with his kitchen manager, Travis, a “bread head”, using sourdough starters.

During the pandemic, Tung has also used his Instagram to promote the still open suburban pizza joints he personally frequents after work. He’s promoted the Chicago restaurant community at large, places like the fabulous Hermosa sandwich shop from Ethan Lim, and Dave Park and Jennifer Tran’s Hanbun pop-up at Jeong. Tung even celebrated his competition giving shout-outs to the still open Coalfire pizza. Though Paulie Gee’s Logan Square is on hiatus, I have no doubts Tung’s tireless work ethic means he’ll come back strong when the COVID-19 crisis is done. If you’ve never been to Paulie Gee’s Logan Square, I believe it’s one of the top five pizza spots in Chicago. When this thing is over, and you’re allowed to freely roam Chicago once more, the first thing you need to do is break bread at Paulie Gee’s Logan Square. You may not learn to fly, but one slice will definitely give you wings.

Paulie Gee’s Logan Square is located at 2451 N. Milwaukee in Chicago, https://pauliegee.com/logan-square/

Q & A with Derrick Tung

Q: What kind of things were you planning before the pandemic hit?

We were working on an expansion spot with a partner in Avondale. We were doing some thin crust testing.  We were ramping up our catering program. We started making these four-foot-long wood fired pizzas and larger Detroit squares. April was gonna be the launch. Now that’s put off for a while.

Q: What kind of impact has there been on the business?

It’s been a good opportunity to focus on the staff. So many of them want to open their own businesses some day, so I always take the time to talk numbers. For example, if we have to spend $20,000 on new garage doors for the front of the restaurant, how many pizzas do we have to sell to make that back? I’ve been thinking a lot about how you take care of people when you don’t have income coming in. My wife I decided to give back a quarter of my salary for the year to our staff, so they’ll be able to pay rent and buy groceries in the short term.

Q: You told me your favorite pizza toppings as kid were sausage and pepperoni? What do you love as an adult?

I really like the US Pizza Cup pizza (whole-milk, low-moisture mozzarella, sharp white cheddar edge, two layers of pepperoni cups, house-made bacon jam, and post-oven ricotta and Mike's Hot Honey). That has brought some notoriety and earned me a free trip to Italy.

I like the Greenpointer (fresh mozzarella, baby arugula, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and shaved Parmigiano Reggiano) when I want to eat lighter. Also, the So Fresh and So Green Green (seared grape tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh mozzarella, pickled cherry peppers, red onions, baby arugula, shaved Parmiggiano Reggiano, togorashi spice and sesame seeds).

Q: You’re very devoted to making good vegan pies. Tell me about that.

Paulie Gee’s main kitchen manager was vegan/vegetarian and he was one of the first people to take it seriously instead of saying, oh we have dough and sauce and we’ll throw on whatever ingredients you want.

As we continued with Logan Square, veganism has continued to grow. We have a vegan on staff, and we’ve had 3 to 4 at a time at some points. Offering good vegan options is about being committed to my staff as well as to the vegan community, so they’re not just an afterthought.

Pizza is a communal thing, and I want to be able to provide an experience for the family. I’ve had customers say, my son eats meat, but I’m gluten free, or my daughter’s vegan, but we can still come here and have a family meal.

Q: How is it having the famous Dennis Lee, aka Twitter’s @fartsandwich, on staff?

Dennis is by far the most famous person at Paulie Gee’s. I think some people come to see him before they come to eat pizza. We were friends before I started Paulie Gee’s and he was in on some of the earlier tastings. He really helped me out a lot when I was starting out. When I first met him, he was a little quiet, but now he’s grown into this great personality. I love to see the person he’s become.