Good Tuesday morning and welcome to day three of Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, where we are spending time with Josh Julian, the owner of TuscNY pizzeria.

Each day this week, the Thread and Visit Tuscaloosa will highlight the city’s most in-demand dining locations and the hands that prepare our finest food in features published every morning.

Hungry for more? Over 40 participating eateries are also offering unique items or special discounts on their most popular orders all week long! Learn more and get connected at the Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week website now.

FROM THE STATION TO THE KITCHEN

The typical path to restaurant ownership starts somewhere at the entry-level of the service industry and leads up the ladder to management and, for the luckiest and bravest, on to a shot at your own thing.

Josh Julian, the owner of TuscNY pizzeria, took a less direct route to that status. The Demoplis native has been a firefighter for more than a decade, first in his hometown and now for Tuscaloosa Fire Rescue.

In the unlikely and unforgiving classrooms that are West Alabama fire stations, Julian discovered a love and a knack for cooking great food.

"When you're the low guy on the pole, you're the guy who cooks," he said. "You're the guy, and nobody else is going to help you. If your cooking sucks, then too bad, you're going to keep cooking until you get it right, and they're not going to tell you it's good until it's good. They're gonna hammer you."

Julian said cooking three meals a day for more than a dozen firefighters at once honed his culinary skills and soon enough he developed a reputation as one of the many talented cooks working for TFR.

From there, Julian launched the Cheese Louise food truck, serving elevated grilled cheese sandwiches during days away from the fire station. Five years later, he was looking to either launch a pizza-themed food truck or open a brick-and-mortar pizzeria and restaurateur Dan Robinson was independently looking for help running TuscNY.

Before long, Robinson was out entirely - although he says on social media that he plans to open a new restaurant next year - and since then, Julian and his business partners have been running the pizzeria, trying to establish its identity under their new management.

"If people follow our Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, you're seeing that identity form a little bit," Julian said. "We're a little bit more laid back than the previous ownership. We're fun, we're goofy, we're having a good time. We're laid back but constantly looking at the menu and what sales look like and asking ourselves, what can we do that's cool? What can we do that's different? What can we do that other people in town aren't doing well?"

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MAKING THE BEST PIZZA POSSIBLE

If Julian and the former management have anything in common, it's their nearly religious commitment to quality ingredients and making the best pizza possible.

Robinson toured the US and borrowed ideas from pizzerias all over the country to make TuscNY pizza a uniquely delicious offering, and Julian told the Thread they still don't cut corners.

"We start with a flour that's flown in from Italy. No GMOs, no ultra-heavy processing - it's a very fresh product," he said. "Then the dough for our New York-style pizza is a three-day cold ferment, so any slice you're eating today was made with dough created at least three days ago, which helps in the fermentation process and makes a better pie."

"The thick crust pizza and the Detroit-style, those are four-day cold ferments plus a 16-hour room temperature rise," he continued. "A lot of labor goes into the front end here just to get to our dough, but that process makes this the pizza to come and try because it's not slapped together. "

That dough is then hand-tossed and formed into a base for the pizzas, which is still only the beginning.

"If you know anything about pizzas, Stanislaus tomatoes are top-notch and that's what we're using here. We've got Grande's 100% whole milk mozzarella with no fillers, no additives," Julian said. "Everything you get here's made with what's on the menu. If it says tomatoes, there's tomatoes, if it says cheese, it's cheese. There's nothing else, so that makes it all a very pure process."

"Thanks to the University, we'll have people that come in from New York tell us this is the closest thing that they've found to true New York Pizza," Julian said. "That makes me so excited, as a pizza guy."

"NOTHING WE DO HERE IS HAPHAZARD"

About six months after their grand re-opening under new management, Julian said he and his staff are really hammering out what they want the brand to be.

Part of that is narrowing down the menu to what they do best, but Julian said he's also committed to an open dialogue with both the customers and his staff about what can be better. He said anyone down to the dishwasher can make a suggestion and be heard in good faith.

Good ideas may first be offered on a slice-by-slice basis during lunch and any hits can find their way to the menu.

"We're progressing through a collaboration between everybody that's here," Julian said. "I don't want our kitchen to be a normal one where the chef is a dictator and then everybody else underneath him is just kind of scared to speak up."

Their bar features dozens of beers, wines and spirits to complement the pizza, salads, appetizers and desserts, which include housemade cannolis and tiramisu.

"You come to our bar or order a dessert, look and see what we have here, and you can tell it's not an afterthought," Julian said. "Nothing we do here is haphazard, we put a lot of thought and process into everything we're serving."

Julian said even their appetizers are made with the best possible ingredients - cheese bread is made with the same three-day fermented bread as the pizzas, the toasted ravioli is served with a housemade marinara, and the three-cheese spiced artichoke dip is served with naan and out of this world.

Julian said the future may see him move TuscNY into a bigger space or finally launch that pizza food truck, but for now, he, his partners and his staff just continue to improve and refine what the pizzeria is and offers to customers.

They've expanded hours of operation and are open for lunch and dinner every day but Monday. They've expanded beyond Crimson2Go and TuscNY can be found on most all delivery apps now.

They've added catering, and Julian said they will soon debut wings they've been working on since January which will be a perfect pair for their pies.

"We've been you testing wings, and the best way to cook them, testing sauces, testing everything and we finally landed on something that we feel extremely comfortable putting out," Julian said. "Like everything we do here, it's a process. But like everything we serve, we think that that process comes out to the final product and it makes it the best it can be, so come give us a try.

Whether you're discovering TuscNY for the first time or a return customer seeing how things run under new management, the pizzeria is open for lunch and dinner at 229 McFarland Circle North every day but Monday.

During Tuscaloosa Restaurant Week, TuscNY is offering a three-course pizza dinner featuring an appetizer, a 12-inch 2-topping pizza and a dessert with either two fountain drinks, two cocktails or a bottle of wine.

This profile is the third in a series as part of Visit Tuscaloosa's Restaurant Week 2024, which is presented this year by UA Online.

Stay connected to the Tuscaloosa Thread for more features every morning this week. We'll be back Wednesday morning with Ben Rosario at Ben's Bread about his new bakery on Loop Road.