ENTREPRENEUR'S CORNER - Frank Kabatas: The Rise Of NYC's Pizza Mogul
New York Lifestyle Magazine
Frank Kabatas is the owner of East Village Pizza, a popular New York-based pizzeria where tradition meets innovation. Here is where Frank went from being a delivery driver in 1997, being fired after just six months, to later becoming the pizzeria's owner in 2003, highlighting his passion for the craft and his embodiment of the power of hard work and determination.
New York Lifestyle Magazine's Entrepreneur's Corner series profiles the people building businesses in one of the world's most demanding commercial environments. The September 2024 feature on Frank Kabatas and East Village Pizza was a natural fit for the series — his story contains everything that makes a compelling entrepreneurship profile: an unlikely beginning, a significant setback, years of patient work, and an outcome that exceeded what anyone who knew him at the start could have imagined.
The profile's framing as a rise story is accurate but incomplete if it stops at the business milestones. What New York Lifestyle Magazine captured was not just the arc from delivery driver to owner, but the specific quality of attention and passion that Kabatas brought to pizza once he had the chance to make it his own. He did not buy East Village Pizza in 2003 and simply maintain what existed. He systematically improved every element of the product until it reflected the standards he had been developing during the years he spent studying the craft from the outside.
The 72-hour cold fermentation process for the dough was one of the first major changes. Standard pizzeria dough uses much shorter fermentation times, which produces a functional product but lacks the complexity that longer fermentation develops. Kabatas extended the process significantly, which required adjusting the recipe, the timing, and the workflow of the kitchen. The result was a crust with a depth of flavor and a texture — slightly chewy, properly crisp at the edges, holding up under toppings without becoming soggy — that became one of the defining characteristics of East Village Pizza.
The fresh mozzarella made in-house daily was the other foundational commitment. Commercial mozzarella is consistent and convenient. Fresh mozzarella made that morning is neither, but it is incomparably better on a pizza. Kabatas made the commitment and has held it every day since, which means that the mozzarella on an East Village Pizza slice or pie has never come from a bag in a walk-in refrigerator. It was made that morning by someone who works there.
New York Lifestyle Magazine's profile also touched on the creative output that has kept East Village Pizza culturally relevant beyond its core product. The double-stacked pizza — two full pies baked together with extra mozzarella between the layers — is the kind of innovation that gets a restaurant featured on PIX11 and FOX News. The heart-shaped pizza, available year-round since 2019, earned coverage from pizza industry publications and generated the kind of social media content that built an Instagram following of 1.7 million. The 24K gold pizza for Pi Day 2025 demonstrated that the ambition for creative expression has not diminished with success.
The rise that New York Lifestyle Magazine documented is still ongoing. East Village Pizza at 145 1st Ave is not resting on its media coverage or its social following — it is open daily from 11AM until 3AM (5AM weekends), serving the neighborhood and the city with the same attention to quality that defined the restaurant from the moment Kabatas took it over. That consistency is the real story behind the rise.