Why so many Brothers? History of Centre County’s biggest name in pizza
Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa Johns are three of the largest chain restaurants on Earth. Yet in Centre County, Brothers dominates pizza.
Brothers Pizza, however, is not a chain. The 17 or so pizzerias in Centre and neighboring counties are almost entirely independently owned and operated. They have different recipes and menu items. Some spell the name with an apostrophe.
But the pizzerias share their roots. Italian immigrants living in New York took a gamble in central Pennsylvania more than half a century ago. They brought with them a network of immigrant employees who, for their hard work, were allowed to purchase and operate their own Brothers. Those employee-purchased restaurants make up the bulk of the area’s Brothers today.
The name persists because it is a known quantity, today’s Brothers owners argue, even if none are in the pizza business with their actual brothers.
Brothers history starts in Sicily
The brothers of Brothers Pizza are Pietro, Angelo and Antonio Pistone. Pietro, 91, is the only brother still living.
Born in Sicily during Mussolini’s reign, the brothers immigrated to New York with their father, a Carini businessman named Giuseppe, and another brother, Bernardo, in the 1950s.
“They had a general store that was doing very well, but there was also nine kids,” Joe Pistone, Angelo’s son, said last year on a podcast hosted by John Saxton, a local comedian and skate park entrepreneur. “One store to share between the kids was not enough, so he took four of them over to the States to create a fortune.”
After their ship landed in Ellis Island, each of the brothers went out to find work. The goal, according to Joe Pistone, was to save up money to start a business in New York.
Antonio would sell pantyhose and noisemakers, according to his daughter, Josephine Findley. He would also find work in an Italian grocery store, Josephine’s husband, Edward, added.
Angelo washed dishes, worked as a watchman and hauled bananas, Joe Pistone, who could not be reached for comment, said on the podcast. Pietro, the oldest of the three, worked in construction. According to Pietro’s son, Giuseppe, it was Angelo who decided to get into the pizza business.
“My uncle came up with this idea, ‘You know, listen, we should open up a pizza shop,’” Giuseppe Pistone, a real estate broker north of Miami, said in recent a phone interview. “And they opened up their first one.”
The first shop was called Pietrangelo’s, a portmanteau of Pietro and Angelo, or something similar, Giuseppe Pistone said.
Antonio, or Tony as some knew him, would wash dishes at their pizzeria in the evening before becoming a partner in the business. With the three in business together, Brothers Pizza was born.
How did Brothers branch out to PA?
The brothers opened around 40 shops in New York and the surrounding area starting in the mid- to late-1950s, Joe Pistone said on the podcast, so many that, “At one point, my dad could see five of his locations from one spot.” Some of them, such as locations in Staten Island and Flushing, Queens, exist today.
The brothers never owned 40 shops at one time, however.
“They would open up a pizza shop, build it up, and then as they got more successful, they would start selling it, like to my mom’s side of the family,” said Giuseppe Pistone, Pietro’s son. “And then it was to friends of the family, and then it became also to people that worked for them.”
Then, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, a Pennsylvania real estate developer reached out.
Nittany Mall had opened in 1968 amid American malls’ golden age, and its developer, Crown American, was looking for a new tenant in the food court. An employee, in Joe Pistone’s telling, drove the brothers from Queens to College Township to check out the mall.
“My dad and uncles wanted something different for the family,” he said on the podcast.
The brothers opened their first locations outside the New York metropolitan area in the Nittany Mall and two other Crown American malls near Washington and Connelsville, Pennsylvania. Pietro ran the Nittany Mall location, Antonio the Washington location and Angelo the Connelsville location, though the three would help each other out.
“My dad would commute to State College to work at the pizza shop, so he would sleep on bags of flour, sleep in the pizza shop, and then go back home to Washington to relax a few days, and then go back to Nittany Mall,” said Josephine Findley, Antonio’s daughter.
The Pistones abandoned their Western Pennsylvania ventures within a few years, however, to focus on the more successful Nittany Mall location.
The Nittany Mall shop is why Jose Estrada, who would go on to own several Brothers shops, came to Pennsylvania.
The Brothers opportunity
Estrada immigrated to New York from Guatemala in 1972 as his country was in the midst of its 36-year civil war. He was six months into a stint at a hotel when a Colombian friend named Jaime — Estrada said he didn’t remember his last name — reached out about an opportunity in State College.
“The way he came here also was because a friend was working with the Pistones,” Estrada said. So Estrada packed his bags to take a job at Brothers Pizza in the Nittany Mall with Jaime.
Estrada said he and Jaime would sleep in the mall, as they didn’t have apartments. Pietro Pistone, his boss, fixed up cots in a storage room and let them shower in his home.
Jaime left for New York after a few weeks, so Pistone got Estrada a black-and-white television so he wouldn’t leave, too. The television received only one Spanish-language show, which aired on Sundays.
“When I come to State College, you don’t find one speaking Spanish,” Estrada said. “Many times, after work, I sit inside the mall, and then once in a while, I hear somebody speak Spanish, and it was so nice for me to hear the Spanish language.”
Eventually, Estrada would find a place to rent, and Pistone would sponsor his green card. He was the first in a long line of family members from Guatemala to try to make it in Centre County.
Estrada’s cousin, Miguel Sagastume, came up from Florida in 1977 on an invitation from Estrada. Then came Sagastume’s wife, Elvia, the next year.
Estrada’s father came in 1982, and his brother soon afterward. Then there was Elvia Sagastume’s brother, Miguel Cordon, in 1988 and Estrada’s sister, Yesenia Morales, in 1990. Cousin Jose Lopez Sagastume and his children, Mario, Sandra Moran and Claudia Lopez Shaw would also come to the United States around the same time.
“This is where God want us to be,” Yesenia Morales said between taking orders in the Beech Creek Brothers. “So we’re here.”
Estrada, Morales, Cordon, the Sagastumes and the Lopezes would all end up owning their own Brothers locations, starting in the 1980s. Just like decades earlier in New York, the Pistones would open a shop and then sell it to loyal employees, and some of the employees would open their own shops under the same name.
“They wouldn’t sell it to somebody that they didn’t know,” said Giuseppe Pistone, Pietro’s son. “It was always someone who’s going to work hard, has integrity, is going to do the right thing, because obviously one bad apple spoils the whole thing.”
Estrada, his extended family and their associates own the Brothers locations in Kylertown, Beech Creek, Philipsburg, Coalport, Port Matilda, Curwensville, Zion, Howard and Lamar. The Osceola Mills shop, founded by Estrada and owned by his daughter’s ex-husband, closed in September amid a dispute between the divorcees.
Six Brothers in the area are owned by children of the original brothers: Antonio’s daughter, Josephine, and her husband run “The Original Brother’s” shops in Stormstown, Snow Shoe and the Northland Center shopping center outside State College. Angelo’s son, Joe, and his business partner run the Brothers in Wingate, Centre Hall and on Benner Pike, plus Giuseppe’s by Brothers in a former State College Brothers.
Others own the remaining area Brothers: the Altoona shop traces its roots to the Pistones’ mall ventures and Joe Pistone opened the Hamilton Avenue location before selling.
The Hamilton Avenue shop, now owned by Harold Bletz, proclaims on its entrance, “One Owner.”
What sets the Brothers shops apart
The original brothers have been out of the central Pennsylvania pizza game for decades.
Angelo, the youngest of the three, died in 2004, while Antonio died in 2020. Pietro decamped for Florida in the 1980s, and “his memory is not doing as well these days,” his son said.
The Brothers that remain don’t share much except the name, the lineage and the fact that they sell Italian food.
“We have the liberty to adjust recipes to our liking,” said Yancy Sagastume, son of Elvia and owner of Brothers Pizza of Howard. “Because of the common roots, I think, a lot of the things stay broadly similar.”
Longtime customers Ryland and Helen Brower of Julian, sitting at their special table in Howard’s shop as they do every Friday evening, said Yancy Sagastume’s homemade bread and low prices set his shop apart from their local Brothers in Wingate.
Manuel Cordon, Yancy Sagastume’s uncle and owner of Brothers Pizza of Lamar, said the seafood and steak sections of his menu set him apart from other Brothers shops.
“And they love Manuel,” Aleigha Lopez, one of his employees, said of the customers. “The girls of Dunkin’ love him.”
Asked what sets his Original Brother’s shops apart from those of Antonio, Angelo and Pietro, Edward Findley said, “Absolutely nothing.”
“I use the same handwritten recipe that he wrote,” Findley said, referring to Antonio. “We use the same cheese that he bought back in the day. We make things the same way that he did. It worked for his generation; therefore, there’s no reason why it can’t work for us.”
