RAW Magazine
May 2006 Issue
Wanna Slice? At Victoria’s new pizza joint, everything’s served hot
By: Jeremy Brown

“Corporate pizza is for suckers!” So proclaims the logo of Fat Tony’s Pizza, the Louisville, Kentucky-bases pizza joint owned by Victoria. The slogan speaks to the mission of Fat Tony’s, which is to bring that taste of fresh, homemade pizza to the heartland and break out of that malaise of franchise restaurants and strip malls.

“There’s not a lot of New York-style pizza in Louisville,” Victoria says. “What we’ve got here speaks for itself, and before long, the place started drawing the customers in.”

The idea for Fat Tony’s came after Victoria spent some time in the Bluegrass State and, charmed by the Southern hospitality, decided to make it home.

Of course, the seeds were planted years before Victoria was growing up in San Bernardino, California, listening to her father’s stories of his Uncle Tony (who gives the restaurant its name).

“My dad would go over to his house and talk about all the different Italian dishes and recipes,” Victoria says, “and when I opened the restaurant, I wanted it to have the same kind of feel.”

“Food is important here,” she says. “We all have an obsession with it!”

After just a few months, word started getting around, and now Fat Tony’s is something of a Louisville institution. During the day, workers stream out of nearby office buildings to fine on Fat Tony’s buffalo chicken-style pizza or meat-stuffed calzones, while at night, families bring orders home while local kids cozy up to a corner table.

Of course, having a WWE Divas as the owner doesn’t hurt when it comes to getting people in the door

. “A lot of fans come in,” Victoria says. “Unfortunately, they come in on the weekends when I’m traveling. But when I’m around, nighttime is my meet-and-greet time.”

In fact, lucky WWE fans who stop in at the right time might catch more than a few of their favorite Superstars stopping in to have a bite.

“We had a Louisville show and Candice, Chavo Guerrero and me had an autograph session,” Victoria says. “We were here until 1:30 in the morning signing autographs.”

So does this mean Victoria spend all her off-hours mingling at Fat Tony’s? Pretty much, but not always.

“It really depends on how beat up I got during the week,” she says. “Sometimes, I have to go to the chiropractor, work out or just reload for the next week. But if I’m here, I’ll definitely come to hang out and sit and eat pizza!”

Of course, Victoria doesn’t just spend all her time sitting around and eating. On an average night, she’s been known to get behind the counter and whip up a dish or two for patrons. In fact, she’s an old hand at the pizza business, having cut her teeth working in a local parlor as a teenager in California.

“On of my favorite things was to toss the dough in the air,” she says. “We’d actually have competitions when we had nothing else going on. Now I’ve got these long nails, so I can’t do that anymore!”

The modest, cozy décor of Fat Tony’s fits in with Victoria’s mindset of creating homestyle food that stands apart from the cookie-cuter style of pizza joints in strip malls across the country. Everything in Fat Tony’s is handmade and topped with hand-picked ingredients. “We don’t hurry up and throw things together,” Victoria says. “It’s more like mom-and-pop style. Like you used to get at home.”