by Michelle Boudin

You can hear the excitement in Steven DeFalco’s voice when he talks about his baby, Pizza Baby, winning a prestigious global award for the third time. “It gives me chills,” he says.

DeFalco and his partner Trey Wilson own two Pizza Baby locations and The Flour Shop, all under the Art & Commerce Food Group. Wilson was in New York last week accepting The 50 Top Pizza USA award on behalf of Pizza Baby, which was named one of the Best Pizzerias in the country by the Italy-based guide.

“Every year, we’re so proud to be recognized,” DeFalco says. “We’re deeply humbled to be recognized by an Italian guide. Italy is a guiding light for us. We look to Italy for so much that we do in our food and hospitality. The cuisine of Italy being an ingredient driven cuisine, we’re constantly seeking the best fresh and local ingredients. We’re so inspired by Italy and always looking for the freshest ingredients here in Charlotte because of that.”

Last year, more than 7,000 restaurants across the country competed for the prize. Pizza Baby ranked in the 42nd spot this year. The list “does not have ideological principles, it is inspired by the concept of excellence in the broad sense, but favors those who use products from the local territory or seasonal ingredients,” according to Top 50 Pizza. Each restaurant on the list is visited by an anonymous inspector.

“We are so proud to represent Charlotte as the only Charlotte pizzeria on the list and one of two pizzerias in North Carolina,” DeFalco says.

The two men teamed up after literally bumping into each other not long after DeFalco relocated to Charlotte from Miami during Covid in late 2021. DeFalco had been running the popular Sullivan Street Bakery in Florida and Wilson, a native Charlottean, was making pizza out of Flour Shop’s kitchen to help the restaurant survive the pandemic.

“He always wore a Flour Shop shirt and he was also making sour dough bread and I saw the logo on his shirt,” DeFalco recalls. “We started talking and fell in professional love because of our shared love of bread and pizza”

Wilson, who founded Flour Shop in 2017 at Park Road Shopping Center, is a classically trained chef who DeFalco says is obsessed with pizza. Wilson was born and raised in Concord and previously ran the beloved gourmet food market Dean and Deluca’s SouthPark location before the New York City based chain went under. He also opened Customshop in 2007, before selling it to current chef/owner Andres Kaifer in 2022.

DeFalco says the two men are best known as bakers and points out that pizza is a form of bread.

“We get calls every day at the restaurant, people saying, ‘Hey, I heard about your bread!'” he says. “We love to say our pizza is built on a foundation of classic bread-baking techniques and principles.”

You can now find their bread all across Charlotte. The duo have expanded to three dozen food service accounts, including restaurants like Reids’s, Salted Melon and the new PostScript; country clubs; and retail markets. Charcuterie hotspot Babe and Butcher just launched a line of sandwiches using their bread.

“We bake fresh and deliver to our customers six days a week,” DeFalco says. “It’s a beautiful rustic old-world bread. On the business side it diversifies us, which we love, and in terms of a synergy, it’s a similar raw material to what we do since we work with flour all the time, whether it’s our pasta, bread, or, of course, pizza.”

The bread is selling well with new clients coming on regularly, but the restaurants remain their, well, bread and butter. DeFalco says they’re always on the hunt for new Pizza baby locations.

“We are so proud to be independently owned and operated and based in Charlotte and we’re here to cook and bake for Charlotte and serve the community and right now we’re excited to grow and expand here,” he says. “We have plans for a sandwich shop, and a proper retail space for a bakery and café and we’re always going to have more Pizza Babys.”

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