Man Bites Pizza 2,450 Days In A Row! (almost)
Jim Stoecker and his antique cash register
(Courtesy of Alex’s Washington Gardens)
During this endless winter, Jim Stoecker had to get away from the quaint Italian restaurant he runs in north suburban Highwood. In late January Stoecker drove to New Orleans, hopped on a cruise ship and went to Mexico for five days. He ate pizza on the ship. Every day. It wasn’t good pizza but it maintained his streak that never seems to end.
Stoecker claims to have eaten pizza for 2,450 days in a row.
He is the Lou Gehrig of garlic.
“I don’t get tired of eating pizza,” Stoecker said during a conversation over four 12-inch pizza pies at his Alex’s Washington Gardens in Highwood.
“I get tired of there not being good pizza.”
About two years ago Stoecker sent an e-mail to his customers explaining his unique slice of life. “I realized I had owned this place 775 days and I had pizza 1,774 times,” he said. “ I try pizza wherever I go. Even if I’m driving around Chicagoland and I see a place that says ‘Slices’ and I’ve never been there, I’ll pull in. I know how to make almost every kind of pizza. Even before I bought this place I was collecting pizza cook books. I’m like a pizza anthropologist.”
Every March Stoecker attends the pizza convention in Las Vegas, sponsored by Pizza Today magazine. “The pizza industry is like $40 billion,” he says.
Stoecker, 56, is 6’1” and weighs about 235 pounds.
He looks like actor and fellow man of action Chuck Norris.
On his New Orleans trip Stoecker stopped in his home town of Peoria to have a thin crust pizza at Agatucci’s.
“It was the pizza I grew up with,” he said. “Their pizza morphs between Chicago thin crust and St. Louis thin crust. St. Louis uses a (white) provel cheese blend. Chicago uses mozzarella with parmesan. I took Agatucci’s pizza with me for the drive. On the way back I came through Champaign and went to Papa Del’s, my favorite thick crust place.”
When pressed like cheese to a pan, Stoecker admitted he has missed one day in the streak. That’s okay.
It was on the January trip home from New Orleans.
“I drove from New Orleans to Champaign with a muffuletta sandwich from Central Grocery on the seat next to me,” he said. “So on that day I probably didn’t have pizza.”
Alex’s pizza and the Stoecker’s dog Mandy in their home kitchen.
Stoceker has chosen from 62,044,840,173,323,943,936,000,000 combinations. “I’ve checked this this with two math majors who said we calcuated it right,” he explained. “Here we have 25 toppings and two crusts. And we’ll put anything else on it if you ask. So 25 toppings factorial is that number, it is like 62 quintillion.”
Stoecker stared at his 12-inch Italian beef, hot giardiniera , green olives, garlic, onions and mushroom pizza. It is sort of like a muffuletta.
He smiled.
“This isn’t my pizza,” he said. “This is a Scornavaccao family pizza. I haven’t changed it. I added ingredients like Italian beef. This recipe was invented in 1944. Pizzeria Uno (in Chicago) started in 1943. Pizza was a fad.”
Tony and Ellen Scornavacco, the parents of Alex.
Alex’s Washington Gardens’ began in 1932 when Angelina Scornavaccao sold sandwiches and beverages out of her yard to people who got off the train. “There was an inter urban line that ran along the North Shore,” Stoecker says. “The stop was at Washington and Railroad (now Green Bay Road). Her yard eventually became known as a beer garden, thus ‘Washington Gardens.’ Her sons Tony and Armando built that into a restaurant called Scornavaccao’s Washington Gardens.”
Grandson Alex split away in 1982. He opened his 85-seat restaurant in the current location, which is a 1920s bank building. Stoecker’s basement office is in the former vault.
Stoecker is former CEO of Lufthansa Technik North America Holding Company, Inc., an independent provider of maintenance and repair services for civil aircraft.
He saved the family restaurant.
“My wife and I were customers,” he said. “We’d come her for date nights. We’d split a pizza because I’m a pizza guy. I retired from corporate life about 10 years ago and was looking for a small hands on business. Alex wanted to retire. There was no next generation of the Scornavaccao family stepping up. He was going to let the lease run out and shut it down. I was like, ‘Cannot let that happen to my favorite thin crust pizza’.”
Date night at Alex’s with Jim and Michele often features pizza.
Stoecker took over the restaurant on May 1, 2007. He didn’t have a deep background in the restaurant business.
“In college (Illinois State), I made pizzas and was a bartender,” he said. “The great thing about this place is that we open at 5 o’ clock seven days a week and we close at 9 Sunday through Thursday and 10 Friday and Saturday.”
The restaurant has about 75 items on the menu and everything is made from scratch. Stoecker’s wife Michele created a breezy gluten free pizza crust with cauliflower. She is a fitness instructor. The rich cheese is purveyed from a small dairy co-op in far northwest Wisconsin.
Stoecker stopped and suddenly pointed at the crust of his pizza. He was a a happy man.
“See the little brown specks?,” he asked. “Most places put corn meal on the pizza paddle. The Scornavaccos used Italian bread crumbs. What we don’t use in our bread baskets we dry out and grind. We put the bread on the bottom where it sits on the stone and roasts up into the crust. It gives it a nutty character. The other is thing is it is drier than corn meal so it makes the crust crispier. Being a pizza anthropologist I had never seen that before.”
Of course this was before Stoecker had the world by his fingertips.
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