Making Pizza with TinyBrickOven Owner, And Barstool Grant Recipient, Will Fagg

After working music festivals and pop-ups for few years, Will Fagg, a former Hopkins operating room nurse turned self-professed pizza nerd, opened TinyBrickOven in 2019. He had a bunch of loyal regulars, but it still wasn’t enough to sustain the business. And it didn’t help that he was having issues acquiring a liquor license in bar-hopping Federal Hill. So, last December, Fagg decided to call it quits.

“I had tried everything possible but still was not making any money,” he says. “I was going to close on Christmas Day and tell my regulars, ‘Please come in for free pizza,’ so I could give a sweet goodbye.”

That is, until social media celebrity and Barstool Sports One Bite Pizza reviewer, Dave Portnoy, wandered in for a cheese pizza just 12 days before closing.

“I had been wanting this guy to show up for four years,” says Fagg, who actively encouraged customers to recruit Portnoy on social media. And with good reason. Portnoy is essentially the fairy godfather of pizza joints. A single visit from him can turn around the fortunes of any struggling business. “His timing was incredible and all these emotions were running though my head. I started  thanking him for all the grants he gave to local businesses to help them stay open during the pandemic—we just connected.”

As per One Bite Pizza tradition, Fagg made Portnoy a cheese pizza to-go. Portnoy stepped outside the Light Street shop to record his reaction. After taking a few bites, he turned straight to the camera and said, “There’s no way this place should be going out of business.”

On the spot, he offered Fagg $60,000 to help him get through another year (donations later poured in, including $10,000 from New York hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman).

“This is wild,” said Fagg when the moment was captured on camera. “I am going to cry.”

(To date, the video of Portnoy’s visit to TinyBrickOven has nearly 600,000 views on YouTube.)

Now that Fagg has had time to dry his tears and is back in business (and busier than ever), we caught up with him one morning as he taught us how to make pizza.

Why did you decide to make pizza your specialty?
I was an Airbnb host long ago and had bartended at the Washington Hilton. I got the idea from working there—food and beverage were an important part of the hotel. And since I was running my own hotel with Airbnb, in my limited-budget way, I tried to have my own little Hilton.

In the beginning, I had cookouts with burgers and dogs from Sam’s Club. But as Airbnb became more mainstream, we started getting hosts who were more affluent. By then I was a “super host” and had hundreds of five-star ratings. When that happened, I realized my little Hilton was not keeping up with the food and beverage options. For a year, I thought about what kind of food I could make that would be more upscale, so I started cooking pizza in my backyard on an oven I built myself.

How did you become such an expert?
My first foray into making pizza started with this high-temperature oven, which is what you need for making great Neapolitan crusts. I had this book, The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani, I checked out of the library, because I was so broke at that point—it was like $26 on Amazon. At the beginning of that book, he mentions a three-day dough master class that he offers. But if you want to go take the master class at his studio kitchen in California, it’s like $9,000. Being broke, but having access to YouTube, I figured I’d do the master class on my own.

So, what is the secret to making a great pizza?
You add the right amount of sauce using fresh-packed canned tomatoes that have been canned within four hours of being harvested, plus Jersey tomatoes with extra garlic and spices, and cheese—we use a part-skim and whole-milk mozzarella blend and you bake it for the right amount of time using a deck oven with a pizza stone on the bottom so it’s really crispy. When you do it that way, using the right ingredients, you are following the traditions and recipes that Italians have been using for hundreds of years. It’s going to come out like a New York slice.

Tell me about the cheese you use.
We use what’s called an “East Coast blend.” When you bake the cheese at 550 degrees for six minutes, there’s a little bit of separation and you get this orange oil on top like most New York pizza. That’s from the beta carotene that’s in the grass the cows eat—it gets expressed from the oil in the cheese when you bake it. But if you look at Papa Johns’ cheese, they’ve added sugar cane fiber into the cheese mix—the wood pulp in the cheese absorbs the grease so the cheese stays white.

How did you perfect the oven that you first built?
I saw this propane-powered pizza oven at Home Depot. It was not that expensive, it just looked kind of pathetic, so I went home and did research and read Amazon reviews. People were saying that it didn’t get hot enough to make the crust.

I decided to build my own version of it. I took apart an old Weber grill, put fire bricks in the lid, a pizza stone below, and used this weed burner, so you could basically turn it into a blacksmithing tool to melt steel. It was way more powerful than we needed for a pizza oven but I got it up to 900 degrees—that’s a great temperature for making Neapolitan pizza.

You were a nurse long before becoming a pizza maker. Is there a connection between nursing and making pizza?
Nursing and pizza share this great history—things get passed down through tradition.

What has your comeback story taught you?
I was excited we could shine a positive light on Baltimore and be a story of resilience—there are a lot of resilient people in this city.