“I made pizza for months on end, to the point where my friends said I was totally crazy. I would have dozens of different types of tomatoes and dough samples and try recipes that affected the flavor profile,” he said.

The pressure was on, because Burke wasn’t planning on opening just any pizza place. He was going to serve deep-dish pizza. From Chicago. In New York.

It had to represent.

“When I got to a taste that reminded me of back home, I thought, ‘People would pay for this,’” said the Windy City native. It was only then that he started looking for a location.

The cozy MacDougal Street spot he opened in 2013 offers diners some serious Chicago eats. In addition to the seven varieties of deep-dish, there are also seven types of Chicago thin crust pizza (yes, it’s a thing), a Chicago-style hot dog, and an Italian beef sandwich.

FORDHAM magazine’s staff stopped in to Emmett’s for lunch on a recent Friday in October. The pies, made to order, can’t be rushed. No matter, though. The sunlight pouring in from the front windows, the fall breeze, and the ladies lingering over wine at the bar with their shopping bags reminded us that we weren’t in a rush, either. We sampled a couple of draft brews from Chicago, though the extensive beer and wine lists offered plenty of domestic and imported options.

The Food

The pizzas arrived on a silver pedestal accompanied by a small hourglass—warning  us to give the thick, substantial pies two minutes to settle. Topped with bold, chunky tomato sauce that was pleasantly tangy, and filled with plenty of oozing-yet-chewy mozzarella, these 10-inch pies were admirably contained by a sturdy, slightly crunchy, two-inch-at-the-edge crust.

The Italian beef sandwich and the Chicago hot dog—totally foreign to us Northeasterners—were both piled with all sorts of flavorful accoutrements. The beef came with giardiniera, a pickled blend of hot peppers and other vegetables, topping the almost pillowy bed of slow-roasted meat, which had a kick of its own. And the dog was covered with (organic) tomatoes, onions, and neon green relish.

It’s easy to tell that Burke takes care with his ingredients; the basil was fresh, the spices robust, and the sausage in our Meat Lovers pie was something worthy of your grandmother’s Sunday sauce. He gets it from Teitel Brothers on Arthur Avenue. “I spent time there in my days at Rose Hill and loved their cheeses, loved their sausage. When you walk in it feels like a real Italian food purveyor. It was fun to revisit the place.”

The Idea

Burke had the idea for Emmett’s while he was a Fordham student. As a newcomer to New York, he was surprised at the city’s lack of authentic deep-dish. “I thought that was crazy, because growing up in Chicago, it’s quite common for people to eat it on a regular basis,” he said. In his sophomore year at the Gabelli School, he was charged with designing a company for a marketing class, and he came up with Emmett’s. “Looking back, the idea hasn’t really changed much,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood-style restaurant that serves foods I grew up with and missed.”

The Rivalry

So does Burke get ribbed about bringing deep-dish to a city that lives and dies by its New York slice? Sure. But it’s all in good fun.

“You have to have fun with it, because it’s a constant thing. You have to play it up and embrace it. I love New York. I’ve spent almost half my life here. … And Chicago is who I am and it is a city I’m very, very proud of. I really don’t feel that the city gets as much respect as it deserves, whether it’s culturally or in the culinary world. … I think a lot has to do with this Chicago-New York rivalry.”

Two years ago, when the Mets played the Cubs in the National League Championships, Burke made a bet with pizza maker Mark Iacono, owner of Lucali in Brooklyn, a favorite of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. If the Cubs lost, Burke would have to make pizza at Lucali, and if the Mets lost, Iacono would have to try his hand at some deep-dish. The Mets won, but Burke has yet to make good on the bet. “We haven’t done that yet. He doesn’t want me to disrespect the oven,” he said, laughing. “But it’ll happen.”

Burke delivered pizzas in high school, but that was about as much culinary experience as he had before his pizza experimenting. At the Gabelli School he studied finance, interning at Merrill Lynch. “I really kind of cut my teeth in New York City at a young age, and that was really fun,” he said. After Fordham, he worked for a hedge fund then a bank in Chicago that transferred him back to New York when the financial crisis hit. They proposed a promotion in San Francisco, and Burke realized his heart wasn’t in that world anymore. So he took some time off and decided to pursue his pizza idea.

“I would say the first thing that really helped me was that I didn’t know anything. It was humbling in the sense that if you want to learn something, you have to start from zero and learn all the steps,” he said.

The Vibe

Burke’s buddy Brett Danahy, a friend from his Fordham days and a fellow restaurateur, has watched Emmett’s progression from endless pizza tinkering to a successful restaurant with up to a two-hour wait on weekend nights. He said he’s impressed with his friend’s execution of his college idea.

“The void in the marketplace, he’s not the first to see that,” said Danahy, a sports agent and an owner of Ledger restaurant in Salem, Massachusetts. “To be able to grow and focus on improvement—that’s the real magic.” Burke was “always pretty good at not being satisfied,” he said.

Danahy gets to Emmett’s about a dozen times a year. “It’s what I miss about New York, the little neighborhood spots,” he said. “Emmett’s is truly a community. People know him and ask for him and Dillon [Burke’s brother who bartends and helps manage the restaurant]. That is the core of that place.”

Burke cultivates a friendly café vibe and decorates the place with charming curiosities. He’s covered the bathroom doors with stickers from ’80s concerts and classic old slogans. And hanging behind the bar are pink, blue, and green bills of foreign currency—some given to him by customers, including travelers from South Korea and India.

And he’s still tinkering with his recipes, trying new ingredients all the time.

“It’s still constantly trial and error, because you are never going to make the perfect pizza or have the perfect golf swing,” said Burke, an avid golfer who played at Fordham, “but it’s a process, which is really fun.” Though he lives just a few blocks from the restaurant, he’s also got a place in Westchester with a garden and a greenhouse. He wants to start canning his own tomatoes and try his hand at an heirloom tomato sauce.

But for as much heart as Burke puts into his pizza, he’ll be the first to say it’s not all about the food. “Some people come in, they won’t even eat pizza,” he said. “They may have a glass of wine or a beer and just chat with their friends. We have really fostered this nice, local, neighborhood gathering.”

The pair often throw spontaneous dinners for large groups. But on this rainy night they were expecting just a few friends. In their off-campus Bronx apartment, Otis Redding and Van Morrison tunes played, candles flickered, and their kitchen radiated warmth and a scent that was just barely sweet. Madsen was prepping the first course.

“I’m just making something to get you guys started,” he says to a guest, straightening up from the oven, where he’d been inspecting his loaf of sourdough. “I got into breadmaking last year. It’s really fun, because sourdough has a science. You have to create lacto-fermentation, you have to harvest your own yeast,” says the son of a chemistry teacher.

After quickly spraying some water into the oven to maintain humidity, he notes, “I’m working on perfecting crust. I remember being a little kid saying I don’t like the crust—now I’m so excited about crust!”

Madsen and Brown lived across the hall from each other freshman year and became fast friends, bonding over, among other things, their love of cooking. They moved in together last year, along with two other Gabelli students. They were excited to find an apartment with a nice kitchen and separate dining space, as well as a sprawling outdoor patio.

“We called this apartment ‘the Dream,’” Madsen says. “Other places were a little closer to campus, but we said, ‘this place has granite countertops!’” They’ve hosted large barbecues with homemade-barbecue-sauce ribs and live bands on their patio, as well as more low-key indoor gatherings. Last year, they had about 40 people over for a “Friendsgiving” feast—which included a 15-pound turkey and 15 pounds of ribs.

While he waits for Brown to come home with the evening’s main ingredients, Madsen gets to work on his spicy carrot soup, which he makes with carrots he picked from St. Rose’s Garden on the Rose Hill campus, where he volunteers. He’s also using some selects from his big batch of red and green peppers—spicy and sweet—which he grew himself. He dices and slices, tossing ingredients into the blender while keeping an eye on his bread. Soon he’ll plate them together—the sourdough ready to soak up the piping hot soup.

Brown arrives laden with packages from Arthur Avenue, where he and Madsen shop “almost exclusively.” He unwraps a thick, bright-red cut of beef from Vincent’s Meat Market (the “best butcher shop in the Bronx,” he says) a large silvery striped bass, and a slippery whole octopus, which he will confidently drop into a pot of boiling water.

Brown says he developed his culinary skills when he was a child. “I’m a really picky eater, so I cooked for myself,” except for when his father made southern food. “I made my own eggs—put stuff in them that I liked.”

Despite being busy college students and gourmet chefs, both young men have significant work responsibilities. Brown’s late father was an artist—a painter known for his portraits of jazz and blues musicians—so Brown works with museums and galleries that show his father’s work. He’s also on the executive board of ASILI—the Black student alliance at Fordham—and is a research assistant with Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project. Madsen works as a bookkeeper in his father’s real estate development firm, which brought him to Australia for the summer to work with a client. Both students are studying entrepreneurship at Gabelli.

With so much going on, one wouldn’t think there’d be time for such epicurean endeavors. But the roommates say that cooking helps them “de-stress.” Also? “We just really love doing it,” says Brown, who, truth be told, is not a total amateur. He worked for a time for a chef in Arizona who’s now working in France. His favorite thing to cook? Coq au vin.

With his creamy peppercorn sauce simmering, the octopus boiling, and the steak in the oven, Brown sits at the dining table with his laptop open. “Sorry, I’m finishing a paper,” he says. It’s midterm time so he must multitask, but he’s not worried that anything will burn or boil over. “At this point, I’ve been cooking so long I have an internal timer.”

Meanwhile, Madsen’s got his mind on his peppers and how they might complement the octopus.

“Can I make the sauce, Bentley? Please, please?”

Brown gives him the OK. “Jake loves sauces,” he tells a guest.

Madsen heads to the stove. “This sauce is new—today,” he declares. He concocts a thick, sweet and spicy sauce using passion fruit juice, pineapple chunks, vinegar, ketchup, and several treasures from St. Rose’s Garden, including tomatillos and cayenne, scorpion, and Tabasco peppers.

Madsen uses his peppers to make batches of hot sauce, which he always keeps on hand. After a friend gave him a Carolina Reaper plant—which yields the hottest pepper in the world—he decided to challenge himself. “I said, ‘I’m gonna make a hot sauce that uses Carolina Reaper that isn’t masochistic.” His finished product uses mango, pineapple, ginger, and lime, and as promised, does not set the mouth on fire. (Though it’s still got plenty of kick.)

Soon friends are trickling into the apartment, and everyone’s sitting down to eat. Eleni Koukoulas, a Gabelli School senior, said she’s been over once or twice before to eat with the Fordham foodies.

“It’s not very conventional college,” she says. “You could just tell it’s something they really love, and that they love to share it with other people.”

As everyone digs in, Brown hears one of his other roommates come in the front door. “Hey, Phil,” he shouts. “Come get you some food!”

They say timing is everything, especially when it comes to relationships. But for Katelyn Scavone, FCRH ’06, and Mike Brady, GABELLI ’06, ’12, it was as much time as timing.

The two met as Fordham freshmen in fall 2002, when they joined the same circle of friends at Rose Hill. But they didn’t go on their first date until 2007.

“I would have pushed the envelope in college, but I kept getting the Dikembe Mutombo finger wag,” jokes Mike, who was a ball boy for the New York Knicks during Mutombo’s brief stint with the team.

“There was always an unspoken attraction, chemistry, and feeling. It was in the air,” Katelyn says, “but we treaded lightly.”

By 2013, six years after their first date, they were still treading lightly, knowing there was something more between them but not wanting to risk ruining their friendship, choosing instead to focus on work and school.

Mike had earned his MBA at Fordham at night and was attending New York Law School. Katelyn lasered in on her career in communications. One evening, they met for a drink in Manhattan during a snowstorm. Leaving the bar seven hours later, “it felt like three minutes had passed,” Mike says. “I was feeling like it was different.”

They began dating seriously, and a year later, Mike felt the timing was right.

He hired a photographer and came up with a ruse to get Katelyn to Rose Hill. He told her he’d been asked to give a lecture at the Gabelli School (something he’s done from time to time), and he enticed her to join him with the promise of dinner afterward on Arthur Avenue. When they arrived, the photographer was up on a ladder, pretending to photograph Fordham students on Edwards Parade. Mike crossed the Keating Hall steps with Katelyn and, heart racing, got down on one knee and proposed. To the applause of gathering Fordham students, she said yes, and the couple went to celebrate at Trattoria Zero Otto Nove, where their families were already waiting.

When they wed in September 2015, they said their Fordham friends—several dozen in attendance—all expressed the same sentiment: Finally!

Nearly 10 years of shared Fordham friends and experiences eventually saved time. “We didn’t have to learn much about each other,” Katelyn says. “We knew each other from our worst days, hanging out at Pugsley’s Pizza.”

The Bradys are looking forward to returning to Fordham this spring to celebrate their 10th reunion during Jubilee weekend, June 3 to 5. While they don’t have any children yet, they would love “to bring our kids to Fordham and say, ‘That’s the White Castle where we ate a lot of burgers,’” Mike jokes.

“The funny thing is, we’re not the typical Fordham couple,” Katelyn says. “But the timing worked out perfectly.”

The Bradys reside in Hoboken, New Jersey. Katelyn is a line producer in the creative services department of Showtime Networks Inc., and Mike is an associate director of licensing for the NBA. He will earn his law degree in a few weeks.

—Maja Tarateta

“This used to be a neighborhood where everyone did what my grandmother did,” Madonia says. “In the morning she went out and she bought whatever they were eating that night: fish or meat, vegetables, bread, whatever else they needed, and then she came home to prepare the meal. And that went on for years here, up through the ’80s.”

Nowadays, the Italian-American population of Belmont is small, but the community’s old-world flavor remains rich and strong as espresso. People flock here for the quality, variety, and value of the food available. And not least for the authenticity and tradition: Belmont is home to a remarkable number of businesses still run by the families who started them, in some cases more than 90 years ago. “It’s all the pieces of it that make it special,” Madonia says. “It’s the neighborhood, it’s the history, it’s the milieu.”

Although he grew up working in the bakery, Madonia didn’t always appreciate the value of the family business. “I hated it when I was kid,” he says. “I wanted to break out.” So after graduating from Fordham University in 1975 with a B.A. in anthropology and political science, he earned an M.A. in urban studies at the University of Chicago.

When he returned to New York in the late 1970s, he went to work as chief of staff for Deputy Mayor Nat Leventhal and before long advanced to deputy commissioner of the New York City Fire Department. In 1988, however, his older brother, Mario, who had been running the family bakery, was killed in a car accident. Amid the grief, Madonia decided to help his father keep the bakery alive. “It was hard,” he says. “It’s not the way you want to wind up in a business.”

The bakery thrived nonetheless, and by the mid-1990s he had taken in a partner. He also kept in touch with his former colleagues in city government and, in 2001, became a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg, who was running for mayor. Following Bloomberg’s election, Madonia was named chief of staff, a position he held till late 2005, when he left City Hall to accept a new job, as chief operating officer of the Rockefeller Foundation.

As gratifying as Madonia finds his work these days, the 13 years he spent running the bakery on a daily basis taught him to recognize “the intrinsic value of a family business and an institution that has history.” He especially relished the daily exchanges with customers. “What a positive thing it is for people to say, ‘Thank you, I love your product. I put this on my dinner table.’ That’s their house,” he says. “You go home with them.”

Time is elastic on Arthur Avenue, and it doesn’t take Madonia long to get back into the old-world rhythm of the place. He meets Frank Franz, FCRH ’75, president of the Belmont Small Business Association. They walk and talk with Gil Teitel, third-generation owner of Teitel Brothers, the gourmet grocery that’s been selling imported olive oil, tomatoes, cheeses, and other goods on the corner of Arthur Avenue and 186th Street since 1915.

Two storefronts down is Coseza’s Fish Market, where imported branzino and orata rest on ice among local bluefish and croakers. “He has to be half an economist in order to buy and price,” Madonia says of John Cosenza, son of the store’s current owner. At Biancardi Meats, Madonia looks in on his friend Sal Biancardi, who, like Madonia, has worked both on and off the avenue. He returned to the family-run butcher shop in 1997, after 11 years as a currency trader for Morgan Stanley.

From Biancardi’s it’s on briefly to Madonia Brothers Bakery. The pungent, savory smell of house-cured sausage and sopressata is replaced by the warm aroma of freshly baked bread and cookies—the traditional pane di casa and the onion and olive breads; the biscotti, pignoli, and cannoli “filled while you wait.”

Next stop is the famed Arthur Avenue Retail Market, a landmark in Belmont since 1940, when Mayor Fiorello Laguardia sprearheaded the construction of the building as a shelter for the pushcart vendors who had been selling their goods out in the street. One door down from the market is Mario’s Restaurant, which started as a pizzeria in 1919 but offers a broad range of classic Neapolitan dishes. Chef and owner Joseph Migliucci greets Madonia. “I’ll make a pizza. You want some pizza?” Ten minutes later, the perfectly cooked pie arrives: The crust is pleasantly chewy, the tangy sauce blending with the fresh mozzarella and basil in a remarkable balance of flavor.

Madonia walks off the late-afternoon snack by heading to the Casa di Mozzarella, on 187th Street, just east of Arthur Avenue. His friend Orazio Carciotto is in the back of the store making the house specialty. He forces a hunk of curd through a sieve into a stainless steel bowl. After a little hand-mixing, he adds several small pots full of boiling water and thrusts his hands back in to knead the mixture until the mozzarella begins to form. Using a wooden paddle, he tears and stretches the cheese till it shines and, in a series of deft movements, folds the product into a ball or braids it into knots. “People ask, ‘How much water?’” he says. “I tell them I know when it’s right.”

The last stop of the afternoon is Borgatti’s Ravioli & Egg Noodles, which has been making fresh pasta cut to order for approximately 75 years. There’s a hand-operated pasta machine behind the counter. “When we opened the store in 1935, it was already used,” says Mario Borgatti, 92. He taps the wheel. “Still works. Even in blackouts.”

Madonia says goodbye and walks across 187th Street toward Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, the spiritual and cultural center of the neighborhood since 1907.

“In a city like New York, there are lots of ethnic neighborhoods, but very few that have kept the heritage even after the people moved to the suburbs. We were able to do it both through the church and the commercial venue.

“People might say, ‘You’re stuck in a time warp,’” he says. “Maybe. I don’t know. Somebody likes it.”