And now folks are writing to tell me that the Joe's Pizza in Los Angeles is not connected to the Joe's Pizza in New York at Bleecker and Carmine.
The Joe's Pizza on Bleecker was founded by Joe Pozzuoli in 1975 as you can read on their website…which, I see, announced their first expansion — not to Los Angeles but to a new outlet on East 14th Street in New York.
The Joe's Pizza chain we have in L.A. was founded by Giuseppe (Joe) Vitale, who did operate a place called Joe's Pizza in New York…in Park Slope Brooklyn, not at Bleecker and Carmine. Different Joe.
I was confused because I was sure I remembered the L.A. Times saying the local chain was connected to the Bleecker one. I did some internetting and found this from 3/25/09…
Moving back to L.A. from Brooklyn can leave a (pizza-size) hole in one's heart, but an influx of Big Apple pizza has gained some momentum since Joe Vitale of Joe's Pizza in New York decided to open a Santa Monica outpost (no, despite what seems to have become urban legend, the dough isn't made with water from New York).
The link in that paragraph to Joe's Pizza links to "http://theguide.latimes.com/santa-monica/restaurants/joes-pizza-of-bleecker-street-venue" so as you can see, it was written to point to a piece on the Bleecker Street Joe's. But it no longer points to anything, perhaps because they discovered their error. You can't trust anything you read these days. Thanks to Tony Tower and others who wrote about this.