Pizza’s Future: Still Delicious, and now Mobile
Max Crespo welcomes me into the headquarters of his growing pizza truck business, Neapolitan Express, on 111th street in East Harlem. “Take a seat, man,” he says, inviting me to sit across from him at one of the many 4-seater tables in the airy converted warehouse his enterprise calls home. “Still not up on Trump?”
Crespo is a New Yorker, born and bred. He’s lived in East Harlem his whole life, and made his name (as well as business acumen) working alongside Ian Schrager, the hotel and nightclub magnate. He met Schrager after deciding he was going to get into business with Schrager. At this time, Crespo had no prior experience in the business world. After trying for months to find Schrager, he one day saw him on the street, approached him, and soon started to work for him.
Crespo has come a long way from those humble beginnings. He started Neapolitan Express in 2012, with support from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the businessman T. Boone Pickens. But Neapolitan was, in a way, an accident. Neapolitan sprang from him working in the nightclub business, as he realized he could “sell lots of pizza to drunk people.” He originally intended to sell pizza in such nightclubs, but couldn’t find any takers. So he went outside the box — literally.
Neapolitan’s trucks are run off natural gas, not oil or electricity. Crespo says this is mostly for safety and efficiency reasons. Natural gas also happens to be environmentally friendly, making it the perfect solution to the problem of how to make his three food trucks sanitary, cost-efficient, and have the food taste good.
Neapolitan also has two non-mobile locations — the East Harlem headquarters, and in a Trump building on Wall Street. Crespo communicates with Trump, and from the beginning of the primary season predicted a general election victory for Trump, which, while ridiculed by most at the time, proved a visionary prognostication. “Trump won because the differences between the coasts and the midwest are growing more and more, and half of the country is being left behind, and they’re pissed about it. I knew he was gonna win.”
As the election season wore on reporters badgered Crespo for a story about Trump, as he is a tenant in his Wall Street building, but he turned them down. Crespo sees Trump as fantastic for business, and looks forward to the Trump presidency. Might Trump be bad for foreign policy? Sure, he concedes, but “America is strong enough of a country to withstand four years of anybody.” For Mr. Crespo, those four years could portend a meteoric rise.
