Kevin Novellino of Brooklyn Boyz

“Most people ask me, ‘Hey, so what part of New York are you from?’ and then they're surprised to find out I'm not from Brooklyn. I grew up outside of New York City in the West Point area in the Hudson Valley where my dad worked for IBM for 27 years and raised his four boys there by himself.

It was right around 1979 when I worked for my first restaurant as a dishwasher—at a Howard Johnson's of all places. I was on summer break and my dad had remarried. My stepmom came home one day saying, ‘You're not going to be lazy,’ and dragged me to the place that we had been ordering pizza from. She was like, ‘Frank, put him to work!’ And there you go.

How I wound up with the name Brooklyn Boyz starts when I met my wife in 1997. It had been recommended to me to figure out what I wanted to do in life, and in 1992, someone told me to go spend a year bartending and waiting tables in Key West. 

She was waiting tables at the place that I was working at down on Duval Street in Key West. She walked in, and my wife has these crystal blue, beautiful eyes. I went over and made a fool of myself trying to flirt and it just kind of progressed from there. 

We ended up grabbing a drink, but she didn't actually drink because she'd been bitten by a spider. In Key West they have these crazy spiders and lizards and all kinds of other living organisms that can make your life terrible, and she had just been bitten and was on antibiotics and couldn't drink. Then a week or two later, she said, ‘Let's go grab a beer.’ We stayed out in Florida for a few more years and she finally said, ‘I miss my family and I need to complete school.’ 

She’s from Bay City and her dad owned a company here back then called Scheer Bay Pelletizing. At first, I said, ‘Are you crazy? We're not moving from Key West back to Michigan.’ But we ended up moving back, and when I got here, my first thought when I got here was like, ‘Wow, what a cool town.’ I found the Midland Street district charming, because it reminded me of Key West and Duval Street at the time when I visited for the first time back in 1997. You’ve got the infrastructure, the river, it just had this vibe. The more I got to know it, the more I realized Bay City had a potential that had not really been realized at that point. 

I went to work for two guys that have a very long history here in Bay City, Greg Kimbrue and Willis Wells who owned the Kingfish and before that, it was The Lantern, and they owned the River Rock on Midland Street.

They put me to work there at the River Rock doing some nighttime stuff. One night, I was watching all these people get in their cars after the bars closed and head to the Texan to eat. I thought, ‘This is crazy. Where's the late-night grub?’ And there was none.

It’s a long story to get to the name of how we came to be named Brooklyn Boyz, because believe it or not, it has nothing to do with my family being from Brooklyn. While living in Key West, Jen and I used to go and hang out at a place called Brooklyn Boyz Bar and Grill. The proprietor and owner of the place had a few too many bad habits and went out of business not long after we left. 

But, I always thought the name was really cool. It’s got kind of a ring to it and it works. I'm from New York. I'm Italian. My family is from Brooklyn, and I make pizza. So, I thought, ‘I'm going to open a pizza shop.’

And boom—20 years ago, Brooklyn Boyz started in Bay City, Michigan.”

“When we started off, it was pizza by the slice. I'll never forget those first few months, working like 110 hours a week. I brought a pillow to work and slept underneath the table just to keep it and make it through that first year we were in business. Nobody warned me about the Fourth of July in Bay City on Midland Street. The weekends were slightly busy because of the bar business. That’s a weekend business here and in Bay City. But that Fourth of July weekend, it was gangbusters. I didn't realize that and at one point the police came in and said, ‘Hey, we need to talk to the manager. Who's the manager here?’

I said, ‘Did I do something wrong?’ And they go, ‘Well, what are we going to do about this?’

I’m like, ‘Do about what?’ They looked outside and lo and behold, there's a line, literally 50 people deep, out the door and down the street. There's 30 people sitting on the curb with a slice of pizza on a paper plate, and a Styrofoam cup full of pop just like classic New York.

When we started off, it was pizza by the slice.

I looked out there and I said, ‘Well, how is this a problem?’ Then they literally walked me around the corner of that building, and there's the parking lot with kids sitting in their cars eating pizza. There were kids everywhere just eating pizza slices. That was the beginning and I never looked back.

That lasted for like 10 years, as far as the slice business. Then the industry changed. The bar industry and the habits of people going out late at night doing things kind of changed. So, business changed for us. 

Now I'm feeding families, not just the late-night people now. There are whole families coming in from all over to sit down and eat pizza. So, I knocked a few walls down inside of the place and added tables and chairs and hired waitresses. Then it grew some more and it just kept growing. It grew to the point of where we are now, with full liquor, alcohol, and our pizza, entrees and appetizers.

Then we renovated because of the pandemic. That was yet another pivot. Here we are in the midst of a pandemic being told by the powers that be that you can't seat this many people in here any longer. So, we did away with the booths and we added banquette seating to create this gastropub vibe. Because until then, we were really just a formal dining room, which served people well, but he recognized that things were changing.

So, we renovated it and it's been received really, really well. We're seeing a lot of younger people come in than we've ever had and that’s neat. That's the other part of me, the creative part. That basically allowed me to be in the kitchen more. 

That's the cool thing about Bay City—it's been an open canvas. You come in and paint what you're going to paint. My family and I have been blessed, because this region has supported us now for years.”

“A lot of other eateries have opened here since we opened 20 years ago. But now, I'm not so much competing with them. I thought, ‘Wait a second, I need to be better for me. I need to see what I'm capable of here. I'm competing with myself now.’ That's what I'm doing now. We've reinvented and launched a brand-new menu. We're creating things that are a little different.

There's a lot of people doing that now in Bay City and that's what's really cool. All the sudden you have all these people that are reaching for the stars, and it feels cool.

I look at some of the people that are doing incredible things like Avram Golden and his Third Street Project and The Jefferson Project. It’s a phenomenal undertaking and I pray for him.

Then in the let's not forget at a residential level, people like Wayne Hoffman and what he did with his house over there on Van Buren. How many people know the story of that house? Holy smokes.

I'm really excited right now about my chef that I'm working with, David Layup. He is the traveling Executive Chef for the Great Lakes Loons. He's only temporary. No pun intended, but he's only pinch hitting for me right now until April 1, when he has to go back to the Loons. He is an incredible chef and he picked us to work with. He's a good guy and he moved to Bay City. Like me, met his wife in Vermont while cooking for a very high-end restaurant in Manchester, Vermont and then moved here to be with his wife. 

I think that Bay City is really attractive in that sense because tourism has been coming here lately. I cannot tell you how many people we’ve talked to at the restaurant that say, ‘Wow, we had no idea Bay City was here,’ and they're from Ann Arbor, Detroit or Ohio. Recently, my wife, who's just a rocket scientist. She's so smart and she took one of the apartments we have above our place in our old three-story building on Midland Street and turned it into an Airbnb. It stays consistently booked and we get people from all over. We ask them, ‘So what brings you to Bay City?’ They’ll say, ‘Some friends told us about it.’ So, that is cool.”

“We have great stories here on Midland Street right now like Lolobee’s, a coffee shop that stays open late. What a cool vibe and an awesome place.

Then you have Anthony and his indoor skate park, Major Skate. We have something in our neighborhood that is so important for community development—a hardware store, ACE Hardware. We have a library. We have the city's largest park. We have boat launches on Midland Street. We have restaurants. We have lots of professional businesses.

We’ve invested money in our building above us. Other than our Airbnb, we have two long-term rentals as well. We spent a ton of money renovating and bringing them up to a standard that we would want to live in, my wife and I. 

The other wonderful thing is we've gotten a new president of our management board with Matt Nemode, he’s a team leader and a team builder, and we have a lot of women business owners that sit on that board now. Let me tell you what, you put several women on board together, and they will accomplish things. The other thing that I've noticed, that's fantastic and I love that they're showing up is, are people like Mike Bacigalupo and Alan LaFave showing up at our board meetings going, ‘Hey, we like what you’re doing and you're doing this the right way now. We like what we see and let’s make sure that we're collaborating so that we keep bringing that energy so that we would become a city of one.’

We’re doing a lighting project with archways instead of hanging lights. It's going to be archways up and down the street. Now, you’ll have that on both sides of the river. You'll be able to see Third Street Star Bridge from here and Third Street Bridge will be able to see our bridge. That will be seen later this summer, and it’s going to be really cool.

The folks from the new River Rock, just moved there from Saginaw. They were already in the insurance industry and she moved her offices here to the Midland Street District and owns the property that the River Rock is in. She's hedging her money that this is the next big thing. 

I give you Kriss LaRock and Coven with white tablecloths and playing the piano. Then you’ve got Matt Nemode at Mode’s. He's literally traveling to Nashville to meet with musicians to bring them here. Then Mark Owczarzak, with H2O’s. I'm really excited about that. 

On occasion, friends report back to me and say, ’I live in Asheville, North Carolina, you should move here Kevin.’ I'll take a look at the home costs and go, ‘Why would I leave here? I couldn't make it because all I could get was a shack for what I have a beautiful house here for. I have three kids and a wife. Most of all, Bay City has been good to me. It's taken care of me. It's helped me raise my kids. There's a lot of good people here.

If you want to take the easy route and look for the bad, you can always find it. It's easy. But work a little harder and you'll find there are a lot of really cool people in Bay City and it’s a lot of fun.”

– Kevin Novellino, owner of Brooklyn Boyz Pizza