L ifestyles /C ulture
Philly Faces: Ben Berman
P H I LLY FACES
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
IN 2021, the most exclusive
pizzas in Philadelphia aren’t
being baked at Tacconelli’s,
Pizzeria Beddia or any of the
other usual suspects.

The hottest pies in town
are coming from Good Pizza,
a nonprofit endeavor run by
27-year-old Wharton student
Ben Berman, who’s baking
pizzas and delivering them to
hungry locals by lowering them
via a box and some string out
of his Center City apartment
window. Good Pizza routinely
holds lotteries with hundreds
of entrants vying for one of 40
monthly pies.

Requesting that all pizza
recipients consider making a
donation as the only condition for
receiving a pie, Berman has raised
$30,000 for local organizations
like Philabundance and Project
HOME. Berman, a native of Portland,
Maine, has long melded his love
for cooking with an entrepre-
neurial spirit — he ran a food
truck company in high school,
slinging burgers, sandwiches
and sides. During the pandemic,
a little bored, he started making
pizzas for his friends. Finding
that he could barely keep up
with demand, he realized he had
much more than flour and sauce
on his hands: He had a chance to
help some people when need was
growing every day.

Why do you think baking
has gotten so popular during
the pandemic? Is it just the
extra time people have, or is
there something about baking
that is more attractive in the
pandemic context?
It’s more of the latter. Baking
and, for me, pizza, was this fun
challenge to solve. And there’s
so many variables that go into it.

Whether or not you’re
thinking about it as a scientific
endeavor, there are all these
different levers that you can pull
to change the thing that you’re
creating, and there’s something so
fantastic about putting together
just a few ingredients, and then
giving it some sort of time. And
so pizza, from the beginning, was
this really fun challenge to try to
figure out how to take very few
ingredients and make something
really delicious out of it.

And the spirit of baking for
the last year is actually fairly
similar. It is extremely approach-
able, and yet never something
that you will be able to master.

And even the bad versions of it
turn out pretty good.

One, my family gatherings
that I talk about, so many of
those are Jewish holidays with
my family and food being a
central piece of that. That’s
a story for so many Jewish
American families in partic-
ular, for food to be a central
piece of gathering and family
and love and fond memories.

And so that’s a big piece of it.

My Jewish heritage made me
more conscious of the power
that food can have in gathering
people, telling a story, showing
your love, et cetera.

The other piece of it is that
my Jewish upbringing taught
me a lot about giving back
to the community. And, you
know, when I think about, like,
level of tzedakah, I am cogni-
zant of the fact that, in some
ways, this endeavor has to be
Is there a connection between slightly self-serving because
the work you’re doing now I have to get the word out.

So I’m conscious of the fact
and being Jewish?
that I’m slightly comfortable
with being at the center of all
this. But it also felt natural for
me, for my upbringing, from
a faith perspective, from what
my parents have taught me, to,
when I am able, to give back to
the community in some way.

And this was just my form of
being able to do that during a
really hard year.

What’s the next pizza innova-
tion for you in 2021?
For now, I just want to make
as much as much pizza as I can.

My goal is just that everyone
who’s been signing up for these
lotteries — and it blows my
mind to see 900 people sign up
for a pizza lottery every week
— I just want to keep making
pizza until everyone has had a
chance to try it. l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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WHAT IT MEANS TO BE
JEWISH IN PHILADELPHIA
jewishexponent.com/subscribe Ben Berman makes a pizza. 
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Courtesy of Good Pizza
JEWISH EXPONENT
JANUARY 7, 2021
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