Pizza Owner Delivers 500 Pies to First Responders in Blizzard

Dino Redzic, the operator of Uncle Paul’s Pizza, is a veteran storm buster who didn’t think twice before driving straight from his home in New Jersey into the blizzard that was slamming Manhattan in the wee hours of Feb. 23.

Essential workers who were keeping the city running needed warm food to sustain them, after all, and he was going to see to it that he personally helped deliver them pizza pies.

Specifically, the perennially good-natured Redzic told Our Town, he dug his car out of the snow and crossed the Hudson at around 2 a.m. A roadway travel ban issued by NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani remained in full effect, and would be so until noon. Redzic said he was conducting essential work, however, and was thus exempt.

“I was the only one on the road,” he said. “There were a couple of cop cars on the road, but nobody pulled me over. My guys showed up to work, which was amazing, cheers to them—hopefully they didn’t have to drive like I did.”

“Then people woke up, they realized that there was no other food than Uncle Paul’s Pizza, so you had orders,” he added.

When all was said and done, he had overseen the delivery of 500 pizzas to various local hospitality and healthcare personnel. Uncle Paul’s is located in the Roosevelt Hotel on E 46th St. and Lexington Ave. but Redzic also oversees a restaurant known as Paul’s on Times Square at a Hilton Hotel on E. 42nd St.

“These hotel workers, they don’t have kitchens of their own. We had to be open for breakfast,” he said.

As for why Redzic didn’t hesitate on the morning of the big storm, it’s at least partly because he had long since developed a ready-made playbook.

During Hurricane Sandy back in 2012, he said, “we delivered 700 meals in Staten Island...then we delivered 5,000 meals in Coney Island, and about 1,300 meals in Far Rockaway.”

Redzic quickly realized that his strength in such a situation came from flexibility, namely the fact that he didn’t need to spend extra time setting up a kitchen, much the way FEMA did. Uncle Paul’s is a veritable pizza-making machine; it currently possesses a stack of six double-decker ovens, which can crank out dozens of pizzas in minutes.

Redzic continued his work when another era-defining crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, hit the city. “Instead of all of this pizza becoming expired and getting thrown away,” he said, he made the decision with his partner Nick Krkuti to feed essential workers across the city.

The cause went viral, and Americans of all stripes donated—allowing the pandemic delivery service to continue for far longer than originally anticipated. “We continued the mission,” he said.

Redzic also delivered pizzas to asylum-seekers who ended up sleeping outside the now-shuttered Roosevelt Hotel, back when it served as an intake center during a historic surge of new immigrant arrivals during the Adams administration (the building, long-owned by a Pakistani airline, is now set to be jointly redeveloped with the U.S. government).

“I’m an immigrant myself, so why not help others,” he points out. Redzic came to the United States from Montenegro more than 30 years ago, and he chuckled as he reminisced about the intense blizzards he weathered there as a child, adding that he understood how New York City isn’t used to such heavy storms.

“I hate to say it, but where I come from this would not be a state of an emergency,” he said with a grin.