In pizza he trusts: Meet the historian telling Miami’s tales

Bewhiskered, bespectacled and frequently beret-wearing, Miami native Cesar Becerra reeks of “old-world historian.” He talks animatedly about the past with the kind of passion that makes others listen up.

“He's good at collecting people and collecting stuff, and he really knows his history,” says head of FIU Libraries Special Collections Althea Silvera.

“If you want to see him capture people’s attention, when the Everglades National Park does their heritage days, he always plays Henry Flagler,” Silvera explains. “You have got to see him take on the persona of Henry Flagler. The kids just love the stories that he tells.”

The 1995 alumnus has parlayed his bachelor’s degree in history into a career that has taken him around the world in search of stories.

In 1999, he set off from South Florida on a 50-state road trip - during which he met up with members of the Panther diaspora - that led to a documentary that aired on The Travel Channel. He has since written a half dozen history books on topics ranging from the Florida-centric – such as the famed Robert Is Here produce stand in Homestead and the state’s logging industry – to the 1924 Pacific Voyage of the SS Kamiloa. In 2021, in commemoration of the city of Miami’s 100^th birthday, he published a book on “founding mother” Mary Brickell and brought her great-granddaughter to campus along with a new donation of historic materials.

For two weeks this month, Becerra has only one thing on his mind: pizza. Specifically, he aims to proclaim the life and times of the man behind Miami’s oldest pizzeria. The Bird Road institution known as Frankie’s celebrates its 70^th anniversary on Valentine’s Day, and the occasion is being marked with the full Becerra treatment.

Through talks, tours, tastings and even a one-man performance in which he portrays the late Frank Pasquarella – catch some events on FIU's campuses - Becerra pays homage to an eatery he first encountered as a youngster too short to peer over the counter.

“But I could hear a whole bunch of noise and all sorts of stuff going on,” he remembers. “Later, I would call that the ballet at Frankie's. When they have the hot pans coming out of the oven, and they're really busy, and they have very limited space because it's a very tiny place, they swing them around, and some people have to duck, and sometimes they kick open a door with the back of their feet. So it's this whole balancing act.”

A taste that stands the test of time

As he makes clear in his book “A Love Affair with Frankie’s Pizza,” Becerra pities the pizzavores who make due with the ubiquitous national chains.

“The pizza at Frankie’s is super unique,” he says of the famous square pie that regulars cannot get enough of and out-of-staters order on Goldbelly.

“It's very, very gourmet. A lot of people think you just throw a pizza in [the oven]. But the process to prepare the dough and the sauce starts at 3 a.m. They don't take any shortcuts. Even the even the cheese gets grated. There's no bagged cheese.”

And the eating? “Your mouth falls through it like paper,” he says of a thick-looking crust that newbies might mistake for chewy and dense. Instead, he says, “It's just this light, crunchy optical illusion” that “lovingly disintegrates in a crunchy way.”

That “optical illusion” earned Bon Appetit magazine’s blessing as a top 10 gourmet pizza in 1993.

Meeting Frank

Becerra connected personally with Pasquarella in the 1990s. By then, the man’s daughters, Roxanne and Renee, had taken over daily operations due to their father’s ill health.

Becerra quickly recognized the old-timer, still a fixture at the pizzeria, as a link to a rapidly disappearing era. He heard firsthand about the honeymooners from Ohio who fell in love with sunny Miami, quickly returned home to stock up on pizza pans and headed back south again.

A one-time high school football star and World War II draftee, Frank Pasquarella found success through a combination of hard work and clever marketing. The latter included what at the time represented original and, to many folks, positively crazy efforts: painting the exterior of his ’52 Ford Crown Victoria to advertise “The World’s Most Famous Italian Pizza;” a minute-long commercial that ran at the start of drive-in movies and featured his Italian-born mother trotting out her best broken-English to accentuate the authenticity of her son’s fare; the six-foot-tall letters that spelled out “BEST” and trailed a single-engine plane above the Orange Bowl; and, not least of all, the iconic neon sign that has stood stalwart from nearly the beginning.

A time capsule

By telling the Frankie’s Pizza story, Becerra says he hopes to connect people with something too-often missing today.

“To jolt your system into understanding the real,” he says of the real places, real people and real past he brings into focus. “There's a lot of history and heritage.”

In addition to spotlighting Frankie’s, Becerra will highlight a string of nearby vintage locales – Bird Bowl, Arbetter’s Hot Dogs, La Carreta and others - during a walking and culinary tour on Saturday, Feb. 8.

None of the businesses resemble even remotely the “kind of a sheeny, shiny Miami” for which the city is known today, he says. Frankie’s, for example, appears straight out of the 1950s. Save for a flatscreen TV on one wall to entertain customers waiting for their orders (it's all strictly takeout), little of the physical space nods to the 21^st century.

“Everybody wants to change South Florida,” says Roxanne Pasquarella, who with her son and her sister keep Frankie’s going today. “You know, this used to be a sleepy little town. You didn't have everything that you have now. Kendall Drive was all [fruit and vegetable] picking fields.”

Frankie’s location actually once stood on the then-far western edge of Miami-Dade County and bordered the Everglades before the swampland was beaten into submission through draining and in-filling to make room for new development.

The excitement of a 70^th anniversary has the Pasquarella family “proud” of Becerra’s project – which includes a documentary he shot decades ago – and they consider him one of the family.

“We're grateful,” Roxanne Pasquarella says of the spotlight Becerra has trained on her parents' legacy, one that has meant a so much to so many people over the years. “Because this business is hard,” she adds of what it takes to keep a small shop going for seven decades straight. “It's not a glamorous business.”