What Happened To Papa Ginos?

Pizza lovers across New England got a shock this week as Papa Ginos filed for bankruptcy. This was accompanied by the closure of dozens of their outlets.

Also caught up in the mix were numerous D'Angelo's outlets, which were acquired by Big Papa in the same sort of business stuff that is presently doing in scores of their franchises.

The closures were part of a sale to Wynnchurch, a private equity firm. The stores that closed were thought to be underperforming. The Sword of Damocles hangs over the remaining outlets like a darkening sky.

This news was poorly received at Cranberry County Magazine. Several of the staff have history with PG. Jessica and Stacey worked at PGs in high school (Stacey's food service career ended at the Hanover Mall Friendly's, when she dumped a Fribble on the head of a customer who read too much into the name of the company and put his hand up her skirt), and- in what can only be viewed as an indictment of both the parent/teacher communication process of the early 1970s and of his parents- Stephen's family first became aware of the fact that he could read when he started reading aloud from the jukebox at the Papa in Marshfield.

Bloggers are made-not-born, folks... Jessica and Stacey worked the PGs in Fairhaven and Kingston, respectively, but that is neither here nor there when discussing today's issue.

What did in Papa Ginos?

I have no head for business, and would be exposed quickly if I tried to front like I did. I suppose that the short answer is that they weren't making enough money.

What I can do is float out some theory blimps and see if one explodes.

1) The food is too good.

The flaws in that one are readily apparent, but hear me out. You can get a pizza for 5 bucks from Dominos or that Pizza Pizza guy. The pizzas suck, but 5 bucks is 5 bucks.

You can also get a $5 sub at Subway (note that we subscribe to Jim Norton's view of Subway... "Rotting meat on stale bread, prepared by savages") until recently.

Pizza and subs are the Papa's bread and butter. Papa is undercut in those realms by mammoth syndicates who have unlimited resources with which to wage war with Papa... much of which was made selling shoddy pizza and bland deli sandwiches on the cheap to Midwesterners who don't have enough Italians or Jews running restaurants to know better.

While Papa Ginos pizza may get thrown at you if you offered some to Gordon Ramsay, it is leaps and bounds better than Dominos. Better pizza costs more money, costs get passed on to the consumer, and that small pizza pictured below cost me $10.15 at the Wareham PG. That would be 2 large pepperoni pizzas at Little Caesars.

Stalin understood this. When purportedly asked if it were better to have 5000 simple tanks opposing 1000 high quality Nazi tanks, he replied that "Quantity has a quality all its own."

Two is more than one, and the types of families who are buying chain pizza aren't the beneficiaries of the recent tax code revisions.

In the end, it is a question of Style, which leads in to Theory #2.

2) Suburban New Englanders prefer Greek Style pizza.

There are 4 main pizza styles. Chicago style involves the thick pizza that you get at Uno's. California style involves putting sushi on it and so forth.

Around here, you get the other styles, New York and Greek. Greek is thick, although not Chicago-thick. Greek is what Dominos sells, and a smaller version is what makes up most of the pub pizzas that you get around these parts.

Papa Ginos is New York style. It is much thinner. Some people might goof on Trump for eating pizza with a knife and fork, but I'm not one of them. The Cheeto Caligula just prefers New York style pizza, and they can be droopy in the center. Perfectly sensible!

This tends to be the pizza of choice for Massachusetts people with Boston roots. You can actually make a fair guess of someone's family history by what kind of pizza they prefer. Papa Ginos rose up out of East Boston, and her presence in the suburbs walked hand in hand with the urban exodus that followed busing in the 1970s.

Papa came, saw but never quite conquered suburbia. Blame the Greeks.

Once free of the Ottoman overlords, poor Greeks fled to America. They ended up in Eastern cities, and spread into suburbia. There are 100,000 Greeks living in the Boston/Worcester/Manchseter corridor, and are often the driving force behind many suburban House Of Pizza establishments.

So, a Boston powerhouse invaded a region that was attuned to Greek HOP joints or Irish Riviera pub pizza styles. Papa Ginos was able to do well enough to open 150 stores, but the Greeks hit back hard enough to just close several dozen Papa Ginos.

3) Papa Gino's has a limited menu.

You can get about 10 different subs at Papa Ginos... Steak, Turkey, Italian, Chicken Parm, Seafood Salad, Tuna, Hamburger, Meatball and a few others.

Here is the menu for Marshfield Famous Pizza. You have about 100 sandwich choices.

A standardized menu kills any chance of individualism as you go from store to store. That can be good, in that you know what you're getting, but it can also be bad.

Papa Gino's has never offered The Rachel, but The Deli in Sandwich does. TDIS is but a single store, but some equity firm didn't just drop out of space yesterday and kill 35% of it, either.

The Rachel is a Reubenesque corned beef, Swiss, Russian dressing and cole slaw sandwich, by the way.

That may be a local reference, or it may be a dig at the girl from Friends played by Jennifer Aniston... who my sources tell me is actually of Greek Orthodox Christian faith, and is the goddaughter of Greek superman Telly Savalas.

But I digress...

4) Big chains eventually fail in New England.

There are exceptions, like McDonald's and Subway and Dunkin'. However, we can make an impressive list.

Hooters failed in Barnstable. IHOP couldn't compete in Bourne. I don't think there is a Red Lobster in all of real New England.

Carl Jr's wants nothing to do with us. Tim Horton's stands about as good a chance as Krispy Kreme did around here. Long John Silver is a literary character in New England.

Golden Corral is an abstract topic. Pizza Hut and Papa John's gain no traction. Sonic is the same way. I defy you to find an Arbys.

Any Patriarca underboss worth his pesto would crack you in the nose for suggesting Olive Garden. You might even get the Whitey Treatment.

Did Papa Gino's get big enough to activate a subconscious algorithm in the New England mindset concerning Big Franchise Distaste? Her roots in Eastie would matter very little in that scenario.

I hope it works out for them. I would miss them if they die off.