Regular customers of Fierro’s Pizza in East Hampton Village will surely have noticed by now that there are new faces behind the counter this week, and that those new faces are actually familiar ones from the pizzeria’s earlier days.
Randy Kendall and Joe Page, who worked on and off at Fierro’s for decades — Mr. Kendall for some 18 years, Mr. Page for 12 or 13 — took over as its new owners on March 14. With them behind the counter when they opened for business the next day was one of the longtime faces of the pizzeria, John Fierro, a former owner who has been called out of retirement to lend a hand and will start working with his old friends after Easter.
“He’s like an older brother to me,” Mr. Kendall said of John Fierro on Tuesday, as he and Mr. Page prepared for the lunch crowd.
Not only had Mr. Kendall and Mr. Page worked together at the pizzeria before, but they both graduated from high school in Sachem with the Fierro brothers, John and Al, who together took over the business from their father, Albert. “We know each other from first grade,” Mr. Kendall said. “They’re like family to us.”
So much so that a portrait of Albert Fierro that had hung for years on the wall in Fierro’s is now back in its old place of prominence, the late patriarch of the pizzeria seeming to offer his blessing to the new owners.
Fierro’s has undergone several permutations in ownership in recent years. John Fierro had stepped away as a co-owner but continued to work there in the busy season while spending the colder months in Arizona. Al Fierro co-owned it with Steve Hickey for nearly a decade until last year, when Al retired and sold his part of the business to Emma Beudert and Joe Kastrati. Not long after that, Mr. Hickey sold his interest to the new partners. A few months ago, Mr. Kendall heard from Ms. Beudert that they were looking to sell. His old friend Joe Page “was my first phone call.”
“This was my dream since I was 15 years old, to own this place,” Mr. Kendall said. “We are the perfect two people to come in here and take over.”
Mr. Page started out in the world of work at age 9 or 10 putting together boxes for Albert Fierro at his pizzeria in Farmingville. That first Fierro’s opened in 1978. In 1981, a second Fierro’s was added in Shirley, and in 1983 the East Hampton spot opened. By the late 1980s, the East Hampton Fierro’s was the only one remaining.
Mr. Kendall began working there in 1988, alongside John and Al. “This is my sixth time being back,” he said. In between, he left the area for North Carolina, where he worked for about 10 years as an assistant store manager at Lowe’s Home Improvement, then returned and worked for the East Hampton Town Highway Department. He lives in Springs with his girlfriend, Jennifer King, who is now Fierro’s business manager, their 4-year-old son, and her two daughters.
Mr. Page’s journey back to Fierro’s took him even farther afield. After his last stint there in the mid-1990s, he ran Pepperoni’s on Springs-Fireplace Road for a few years. He was hired as a sous-chef at P.F. Chang’s and was then tapped to help launch the brand in the Middle East as an executive chef. He opened and trained staff for a dozen or so P.F. Chang’s outposts in places like Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. His now-9-year-old son was born in Kuwait, and about a year after that, he and his wife returned to the United States, and Mr. Page took a job with another large corporate restaurant chain, the Cheesecake Factory.
He and his family live in Connecticut, but he’ll be staying with his mother in Patchogue four days a week and commuting from there to East Hampton.
“The boys are back in town!” Mr. Kendall wrote last week on the Fierro’s Pizza Instagram account.
At Fierro’s, Mr. Kendall will be the primary pizza maker; Mr. Page will be both executive chef and pizza maker and will add some new dinner and grab-and-go items to the menu. Under Ms. Beudert and Mr. Kastrati’s ownership, the pizzeria got a subtle remodel. Instead of booths, there’s now a high counter along the window with a row of seats facing out. The former owners also brought in Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash to do deliveries, and the new owners will continue to offer delivery through those apps.
Some of the old staff remain, and there are also new faces, but “the recipes, everything is Fierro’s,” Mr. Kendall promised. “Nothing will change, except for some of the dishes that Joe will be integrating into the menu. . . . We’re going to continue the tradition that Mr. Fierro started.”
Another longstanding tradition that the new owners will keep alive: “Kids always know this is a place they can come to, and if they don’t have money, they can pay us back later.”
Fierro’s is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.