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Sammy Mandell refuses to buy anything less than fresh, jumbo-sized chicken wings for his beloved offering at Greenville Avenue Pizza Company (aka GAPCO). They’re not a cheap buy for the average restaurateur — especially in Dallas, one of the biggest football towns in America (chicken wings are one of the most popular foods during football season, according to the National Chicken Council’s not-made-up Chicken Wing Report) and especially when said restaurant primarily traffics in pizza. In fact, the market for wholesale wings has been on a needs-maintenance rollercoaster since the pandemic: The average cost, at the height of our takeout-bound lives in 2021, was $2.82 per pound — for reference, in 2017, 85 cents was the previous record high. Still, Mandell simply will not settle for the frozen stuff like many of his competitors.
“A fresh wing and a clean fryer,” says Mandell. “I don’t know why people don’t believe in those two things.”
His commitment to quality shines through in the final product. Each basket of Greenville Avenue Pizza Company’s wings is zippy and crackling. The charred edges of the wing lock in the good juices, and the sauces are smack-to-the-head fresh. All GAPCO sauces and rubs, the best being the buffalo and lemon pepper, are made in-house. The lemon pepper rub uses real blasts of lemon juice, not squirt bottles. Buffalo sauce, velvety with plenty of butter, is made hotter with cayenne and sweeter with brown sugar. Parmesan-dusted wings get plenty of fresh chopped garlic.
It’s no wonder that Mandell’s pizza joint recently reached its 17th year on Greenville Avenue, a popular East Dallas neighborhood for new restaurants and bars. On weekends, you can find people lining up until they close at 3 a.m.
“I’m always happy to see people out late,” Mandell says. “If I drive by and see a line, it puts a big smile on my face.”
Pizza FTW
We’ve mentioned their popular wings, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t shout out GAPCO’s namesake dish, which ranks as some of the best pizza in Dallas. The pizzas here go big on flavor — think crumbles of chorizo and dashes of hot green peppers, corn, and crema — bold, loud, and sometimes even funny. Every year on 4/20, GAPCO sells “The Doobie.” That’s a crust folded into a giant blunt stuffed with fried chicken (seasoned in a blend called “pizza crack”), latticed with ranch dressing, and showered with hot Cheetos.
GAPCO loves a good novelty pie. Around the Super Bowl, they do a Pig Skin Pepperoni special. It’s a pizza in the shape of a football. Yes, the pepperoni is placed in the shape of the laces and there is a coincidental correlation between Dallas team wins and late-night orders.
This isn’t to say that one should overlook their classics. A slice of their Supreme pie is an old-school joy (especially by the slice) — the crust is thin and shattery, cheese all the way to the cliff’s edge. It leaves your hands greasy — the kind of pizza you imagine the Ninja Turtles got delivered down the sewer drain.
Rough Start
It was, however, a struggle to get GAPCO off the ground. Mandell remembers everything about the hell-or-high-water year he got started: Final notices on bills, no rest, and unpredictable storms. The city had puréed the roads and sidewalk on the restaurant’s block for construction (at one point, he laid down pizza boxes for a makeshift walkway).
As if that weren’t enough, that same year, Mandell’s car got repossessed and he nearly lost his home — all while he gave 90 hours a week to his new venture. Family came to the rescue: His mom did restaurant laundry; his brother, a chef, taught him some ways of the force.
Now, a decade-and-change later, the payoff is clear as day. In 2018, GAPCO opened its second location, and the very next year, Mandell was selected as Pizza Today’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year for his creativity in branding GAPCO. Both locations of Greenville Avenue Pizza Company are beloved, local neighborhood restaurants. True blue, always-there-when-you-need-it neighborhood spots that keep their shoulders up in the hard years.
“There are just so many twists and turns that we are still dealing with — we can deal with it all with the support of the neighborhood,” Mandell says. There’s one way that he knows will help GAPCO gain support: Make food that directly appeals to the pizza-craving center of your brain (last month’s special was a lattice of hatch chiles and chorizo; the next will be one with ranch dressing and crumbles of salty bacon). He knows his audience – we’re not looking for subtleties at GAPCO.
“We talk a lot about what it means to be a neighborhood restaurant,” Mandell says. “I really want to keep this as a local concept. I want to keep it based in Dallas. I really do love my city.”
