“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.”

In the ancient world, however, it was a powerful idea that had to do with more than just physical health. Food and mother’s milk were seen as related to character, and would also become symbols of spiritual growth and nourishment among the earliest Christians, according to a new book by a Fordham-educated scholar of religion.

“That you are formed according to the one feeding you is something you would see often in both Roman and early Christian literature,” said John Penniman, Ph.D., GSAS ’15, assistant professor in the religious studies department at Bucknell University.

His book, Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity (Yale University Press, 2017), was released last spring. Penniman spoke with FORDHAM magazine about how the idea emerged as he was earning his doctorate in Fordham’s theology department—and his surprise discovery about how much history you can find behind a common catchphrase.

How did you get the idea for this book?

It began during my doctoral work at Fordham, when I was thinking about how early Christians talked about being formed properly according to their ideals. In ancient and early Christian literature, I began to regularly notice references to food, nurturance, breastfeeding, and maternity, even when that wasn’t literally what was being described. It was being used to talk about how to properly form the soul, in a certain sense, so I began to explore the use of food to talk about formation, and focused on a New Testament passage where the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, “You are not ready for solid food, so I gave you milk to drink instead”—because they are still infants and not fully formed, essentially.

In early Christian literature, this passage gets interpreted in wildly different ways. It seems like Paul is saying the Corinthians are infantile and not ready for advanced teachings. Others in later generations of early Christianity used that passage as a way to think, “Well, in these circumstances it would be good to be infantile because you are being properly fed, you’re being fed by the right source, you’re not getting ‘wrong’ food that’s going to deform you.”

Why was this such a potent metaphor for Paul to use?

The metaphor was widely used to think about growth and character formation in that period. It actually drew upon deep political and social values that were much broader in the Roman empire than just early Christians, and these values looked at mother’s milk as literally a carrier for moral character, for social belonging, for intellectual capacities, even for social legitimacy or ethnic belonging in certain respects. Milk was politicized in really significant ways in the Roman empire, and my argument is that Paul is actually drawing upon this symbolic value when he’s evoking it metaphorically.

Does this mean the Romans believed in nurture rather than nature?

What I discovered, and what was really surprising to me, was that you could be born into a really highly regarded aristocratic family, but it was thought that if you weren’t fed properly, you would become deformed in character and soul, and by that they often meant who nursed you as a child, who minded you as a child. Nurture was shaping nature in that way; your nature wasn’t complete at birth, according to ancient Roman medical and moral thought, and early Christians really picked up on this. It wasn’t that they emphasized nurture more than nature, it’s that the categories themselves were really slippery and didn’t uphold that dichotomy in quite the same way that we think about it today.

Was solid food invested with the same importance that milk was?

In one early Christian text, by Origen of Alexandria, solid food functions as a metaphor for social status. He basically says the rustic folks who work out in the fields don’t have the palate or the stomach for rich foods compared to folks who live in the city, who have more means, so they must be given lighter fare. From this he sort of spins out a way to say not everybody can be taught the same way. And he thinks this is quite natural—the higher-status person in the city is going to eat richer foods, more animal protein, whereas the farmer is going to have blander foods and less animal protein, and for him that becomes a way to ask, what are the “solid foods” to which one could aspire spiritually?

Did these early thinkers give us the cliché “you are what you eat”?

The 19th-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach is the one that really popularized it. And he was mocked for it—people thought he was being reductive and overly materialistic. What’s fascinating is that in defending himself he turned to the ancient world and how ancient people thought about food. So I unexpectedly discovered that this cliché leads us directly into the ancient world, and that food has always been this deeper, more deeply significant symbol that you take into yourself.

Under the guidance of his mentor, John Entelis, Ph.D., professor of political science and director of the Middle East studies program at Fordham, Azari tore up his original thesis and turned to the Iranian Revolution.

“After the revolution, I was active in promoting democracy in Iran,” said Azari, who immigrated to the United states in 1970 and later earned a master’s degree in engineering at Polytechnic University (now part of NYU). “There were times when we came in conflict with the current regime. I devoted my time to learning about the alliance of social forces that caused the revolution and how these forces could possibly lead to a democratic system.”

After earning his doctorate in political science at Fordham in 1988, Azari worked as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He started his own engineering and development firm, which he ran for more than two decades while continuing to study the unfolding events in Iran. And in 1989, he and his wife, Pari, opened Azari Vineyards, a winery in Sonoma County. He produces pinot noir and a secondary crop of cool-climate shiraz, a nod to his Persian heritage.

When he’s not running the vineyard, Azari is working on a book about democracy and government. In it, he and his co-author, a colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology, argue for a return to community government.

“We’re proposing this model of government that may be futuristic,” he said, “but it would be based on the problems that the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen 220 years ago. The country has changed a lot.”

The book fits in nicely with Azari’s lifelong pursuit of figuring out how the world works—whether it’s from an engineering, horticultural, or historical perspective.

“I really enjoy understanding history and social changes,” he said, “and how those changes contribute to the creativity of individuals.”

It also allows him to think deeply about the complicated politics of his native country, analyzing what he calls “the narrow narrative that exists in Iran.”

A proud Fordham alumnus, Azari hosted a 2009 reception at his winery for members of the University’s Northern California Alumni Chapter. And this spring, he returned to Fordham to participate in the 2012 Spring Gannon Lecture with his mentor and friend Entelis, sharing with the Fordham community his thoughts about Iran, the Arab Spring, and the Middle East.

“I’ve been sharing with Fordham like a community, like a family,” he said. “You feel a certain affinity, a certain connection with Fordham graduates.”

“Ooow, there it goes,” said a man to his wife. “Come here and look.”

The wife turned from a refrigerated display case, where she’d been perusing the ingredients of a Genovese walnut sauce, to observe the blur and racket of the action—thoog-thoog-thoog—and the ease with which a pound and a half of squid-ink fettucine was produced.

“Wow,” she said. “That thing means business.”

Cut pasta has meant business for the Raffettos since 1906, when Marcello, the family patriarch, opened the shop in a neighborhood of immigrants from Italy like himself, only four years removed from Ognio, the hill town of his birth near Genoa. He sold dried egg pasta at five cents a pound, which by 1919 earned him enough to buy the four-story walk-up that holds the storefront. He and his wife moved back to Italy four years later with the birth of their second son, Gino. But they kept ownership of the building while handing the shop over to Marcello’s brother.

Gino bought into the business in 1970. The neighborhood was still an ethnic stronghold, so his fluency in Italian and old-country upbringing served him well. But his customer base was changing. Bob Dylan’s wife Sara came in, son Jakob by her side. So did actor Fred Gwynne of The Munsters, and, even weirder, artists from SoHo.

Gino brought his sons, Andrew and Richard, into the business in 1979, when Richard was a student at Fordham and Andrew was applying for admission. The responsibility swamped the brothers’ collegiate experience, especially after New York magazine declared Raffetto’s pasta the best in the city. Richard Raffetto, FCRH ’82, said he chose Fordham partly for its lush Bronx campus, “which I thought I was going to spend time on.” Instead, he and Andrew, FCLC ’84, would rush back from class to meet the demands of what was then the birth of the fresh pasta craze, part of a turn to foods with natural ingredients.

Andrew recalled that by 1982, his sophomore year at Fordham, “the store’s going nuts. We can’t even keep up with the orders, so my brother asked my father, ‘Why does Andrew have to graduate?’ My father said: ‘You finished; he finishes. No one quits without a diploma.’”

Andrew said his degree in sociology came in handy when he and his brother were considering advice some years ago to turn the store into a gourmet food shop that offered items like coffee and bread. He created a survey like he’d learned to do in class and gave it to customers with the promise of a $5 gift certificate for filling it in. “We got 800 answers,” he said. “It was worth it because most of them told us to stick with what we do best: pasta and things that go with pasta.”

But that didn’t mean Raffetto’s couldn’t expand its product line. The store’s seven-page list of offerings includes 16 types of pasta (chestnut, chocolate, saffron) that can be cut eight different ways (angel hair, linguine, pappardelle) and supplemented by 19 types of ravioli (mushroom, smoked mozzarella in a rosemary dough) that beg to be combined with one of 13 sauces (white clam, chestnut cream) created by Andrew and Richard’s mother, Romana, who is 74 and still comes down from her apartment upstairs at 9:30 a.m., Tuesday through Saturday, to open the store. She needs the routine: Her husband, Gino, died last May after 47 years of marriage; working the register keeps her mind off that fact. “It’s my therapy,” she said.

The sauces and ready-made dishes are still prepared in the back of the store—“The customers like the aroma,” Andrew said—but as of last year, the pasta is made in a factory in Moonachie, N.J. For 13 years before that, Raffetto’s fare was cooked up in a converted garage on Leroy Street in Greenwich Village. The site was handy, but the brothers sold the building after seeing certain signs that light manufacturing wasn’t the future of the neighborhood, as when the parking garage across the street was replaced by luxury housing and the Olsen twins moved in.

Richard is happy to live with his family near the Moonachie plant, which he oversees. But there are days he misses the store on Houston Street. He remembers the puzzled look on the faces of the riders of a city bus as they stared down at their driver, who had pulled to the curb before dashing into the store to pay for the ravioli he bought every week. He longs for the coal-oven pizza around the block, and even the guy who came in and created a diversion by spilling a fistful of change on the counter as his partner stuck his hand into the till. “In a way, I miss having to battle the scams,” he said.

Andrew, too, misses playing whiffle ball as a kid in the playground between Sixth Avenue and Sullivan Street, where local don Vincent “The Chin” Gigante came to sit on a bench and pretend he was mentally ill. “We made sure that the ball didn’t hit him in the head,” he said.

These kinds of homely stories are implied when you enter the store and encounter its mix of old and new: roasted garlic goat cheese logs and rare imported olives sharing space with a cash-only register and not a single sign referring to the company website because there isn’t one—all part of the savvy negotiation that is change without loss of soul.

—Jim O’Grady, FCRH ’82

Editor’s note: Since we published this story, Raffetto’s has made at least one concession to modernity: a website, raffettospasta.com, where you can watch a video featuring Sarah Raffetto, a 2013 Fordham graduate and a member of the fourth generation in the family business. “What I look forward to most,” she says, “is maintaining tradition but still pushing the company forward.”