How a Second-Hand Pizza Joint Launched an Accidental Juggernaut
Food, like love, doesn’t speak the language of borders. Instead, it’s fluent in family, desire, memory and hunger—in all its forms.
When Mario Cardenas left Guatemala with his mother, Susana, and his little sister, Jennifer, in 1999 for a better life in the U.S., he never imagined that his home cuisine would follow him here, and in many ways, provide a touchstone not just for his family but for members of the Latinx diaspora across the Northeast.
“My mother paid for our passage to L.A. by selling pupusas on the street outside of our home in Guatemala City,” Cardenas recalls. “Then when we moved to L.A., she made them for us at home, along with taquitos and enchiladas.”
Throughout his life, from childhood through those first hard months in L.A. to his family’s move to Schenectady when he was 14 and his sister 13, the food was a direct line from his stomach to his heart.
“Guatemalan street food tastes like home to me,” Cardenas says.
But for many years—decades, really—luxuriating in the sense of belonging that those flavors engendered fell fairly low on his hierarchy of needs.
“We came to Schenectady because my mom had a friend there who told us to come here,” he recalls. “She said that upstate New York had a lot of jobs in restaurants, and that it wasn’t nearly as expensive as L.A., so we came here.”
Getting Schooled in Pizza
Cardenas joined his mother in the workforce immediately and dropped out of school in the 10th grade to help pay the bills.
“I just happened to land at Marino’s Flying Pizza in Schenectady,” he says. “In retrospect, that was so lucky. It is consistently at the top of the list of best pizza places in the Capital Region, and the owner, whose name is also Mario, really showed me the ropes. He taught me how to make dough, how to add toppings. He had a very particular way of doing things.”
A few years later, Cardenas moved on to work for the Isopo family, who owned a handful of pizza restaurants, and got his first taste of American-style entrepreneurism.
“I worked at Prima’s initially, but they also had Mario’s in Niskayuna and the first wood-fired pizza in the area aside from DeFazio’s,” he says. “I was saving money, my sister was saving money.”
The duo, who spent two decades working in a range of restaurants and settings across the Capital District, wanted a place of their own. Their mother, Susana, who died in 2018, always hoped the pair would be able to create a space for themselves here in the U.S.—both literally and metaphorically—and Cardenas says he felt her guiding and blessing the next phase of their family’s journey.
“We’d been saving money like crazy, but we didn’t have enough to build out a restaurant from scratch,” Cardenas explains. “I started looking for restaurants that were for sale, and I found West Avenue Pizzeria in Saratoga Springs.”
Having a restaurant that was ready to go upon signing the purchase rights was both a blessing and a challenge, Cardenas learned.
“We had all of the equipment we needed for cooking and serving customers, and a presence in the community,” he says. “But how can I say this? Their reputation wasn’t amazing. So we inherited the negative reviews, too.”
“Seven months after buying West Avenue Pizzeria, we launched West Ave. Chicken,” he says.
But this time around, Cardenas just inherited the kitchen and front of house, not the reputation.
“We started serving wings, fried and roasted chicken, the usual stuff,” Cardenas says. “But then all of these Spanish people started coming in, and they knew we were from Guatemala. The Spanish-speaking community in the Capital District is huge, and we have so many people here from all over Mexico, South America and Central America working in restaurants and working on the racetrack.”
Trial by Pandemic
A bad reputation + the pandemic = insurmountable challenges … for someone without Cardenas’s work ethic, talent and incredible team.
“It was 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, and business was so slow,” Cardenas recalls. “But having my sister and my brother-in-law and the rest of our team, I knew we could make it work.”
Cardenas did what he’d spent 20 years training to do: He made the best pizza he could, with fresh, authentic ingredients, in classic Italian-American style. He uses imported 00 flour, along with wild yeast and a 24-hour fermentation process for his dough.
“I like to say our pizza is authentically Italian, but our food is not,” he explains. “I make the dough the way I was taught to, and we bring in many of our ingredients from Italy. But we put American twists on everything. I mean, we serve chicken Parm. That is not authentic Italian. But it’s delicious!”
West Avenue Pizzeria, or West Ave., also offers zany, freewheeling almost conceptual pizzas, like the Square Lasagna Pizza (loaded with sweet Italian sausage, meatballs, mozz and ricotta), Square Tie Die Pizza (mozz, pesto, vodka and marinara) and Belize Pizza (grilled chicken, roasted reds, Parm, Romano and mozz), alongside more-American-than-Italian comfort fare like Chicken Bacon Ranch Calzones and Southwest Steak Hot Subs.
Word spread, seemingly faster than COVID. Business perked up, until one day, when the power went out.
“It was the summer of 2021, August,” Cardenas recalls. “We’d only been open for about a month, and business was picking up, but without power we knew had to shut down.”
As Cardenas and his sister prepared to close up shop for the day, she happened to plug their computer into the one wall that worked.
“An order from ‘Dan’ comes in,” Cardenas recalls. “We decided to fill it, and we figured out how to make that last pizza with one working wall of power.”
When Dan came in to pick up the order, Cardenas was there.
“I freaked out because I instantly knew who he was,” Cardenas recalls.
It wasn’t “Dan.”
It was Dave “El Presidente” Portnoy, of Barstool Sports. Love him or, as some do, have more complex feelings about him, El Presidente has made and slayed many a pizza rep. (He made the reservation under the name Dan to protect his anonymity, but Cardenas, a self-described “baseball freak” says he knew who he was the second he walked in.)
The Barstool Sports founder is known, these days, as much by sports and poker fanatics as by the general public for his controversial (critics would say racist and misogynistic) commentaries and, yes folks, viral pizza reviews. He’s done thousands of “one-bite” reviews, and a good or even goodish one (6.5 or above) will instantly boost their presence in their local community and among the global pizzarati.
“I was really nervous,” Cardenas says. “I know how he likes his pizza, and it’s not exactly our style. He prefers crispy, blistered, Neapolitan style. And he just ordered a cheese. I introduced myself and gave him my pizza, and just hoped for the best.”
In his review, Portnoy first slammed the “clip art” style menu, and mentioned that—as Cardenas knew—West Ave.’s pizza wasn’t his preferred style.
But. He went on to praise Cardenas as an “awesome dude” (pretty much the highest praise available in Portnoy’s brocabulary) and touted West Ave.’s “delightful and fluffy crust,” “super fresh” ingredients and the overall pizza, dubbing it the ideal style if you’re “drunk,” a state that longtime observers of Portnoy’s work might suspect is not infrequent.
The review, a 7.3 overall, “blew up” West Ave.’s business overnight.
“We just skyrocketed,” Cardenas says.
Enough to fund the purchase of the wings shop next door when it went belly up.
“Seven months after buying West Avenue Pizzeria, we launched West Ave. Chicken,” he says.
But this time around, Cardenas just inherited the kitchen and front of house, not the reputation.
“We started serving wings, fried and roasted chicken, the usual stuff,” Cardenas says. “But then all of these Spanish people started coming in, and they knew we were from Guatemala. The Spanish-speaking community in the Capital District is huge, and we have so many people here from all over Mexico, South America and Central America working in restaurants and working on the racetrack.”
A Taste of Home
Before long, the requests for Spanish flavor came flooding in.
“I started serving a secret menu inspired by my mother,” Cardenas says. “It was nothing official. But word spread. We were serving taquitas, enchiladas, tamales, churrasco, the Guatemalan arancini and pupusas my mom made us as kids. There are so many Mexican restaurants in the area, but there wasn’t anything really authentically Guatemalan.”
The rumors of deliciousness couldn’t stay contained within the Latinx diaspora. Before long, Times Union food critic Susie Davidson Powell caught wind of the development and penned a glowing review of the secret menu.
“That was it,” Cardenas says. “Before long, we had people coming from Vermont, Massachusetts, all over the Northeast for a taste. And because we have my sister, her husband, Santos, and his sister, Rubia, both of whom are from El Salvador making the food, along with line cooks from Guatemala and Mexico, it is as authentic as it comes.”
The response has been so enthusiastic—and the joy of serving food from his homeland so profound—he is drawing up plans for a third restaurant concept dubbed Maiz.
“Maiz is for our mother,” Cardenas says. “We are going to completely transform the two spaces and knock down the wall between West Ave. Chicken and Pizza for Maiz. I am in the process of applying for a liquor license, and we’re going to bring in an old van and serve Guatemalan street food and drinks right out of the van, food-truck style, in the middle of the two concepts.”
It will, he says, be the first Guatemalan street food restaurant in the Capital District. Look for it in the spring of 2024, and gird yourself for the kind of lines and wait times currently swamping the West Aves. (Pro tip: Call way ahead to schedule pickup, and you’ll be fine.)
West Avenue Pizzeria and West Ave. Chicken are at 99 West Avenue in Saratoga Springs. | WestAvenuePizzeria.com | WestAveChicken.com
“I started serving a secret menu inspired by my mother,” Cardenas says. “It was nothing official. But word spread. We were serving taquitas, enchiladas, tamales, churrasco, the Guatemalan arancini and pupusas my mom made us as kids. There are so many Mexican restaurants in the area, but there wasn’t anything really authentically Guatemalan.”
