Track announcer, restaurant owner bringing one of ‘The South’s Best Pizzas’ to Ky.
An Arkansas restaurant owner and a renowned racetrack announcer are opening a pizza place together in Versailles. And that might not even be the most unusual thing about Frankie DeLuca’s.
The new restaurant, just like the popular Hot Springs version Brooklyn-born Anthony Valinoti created, will cook everything except the pasta in the brick oven. Even the hamburgers.
Valinoti, who by his own admission is not a trained chef, opened a small pizza restaurant called Deluca’s Pizza in 2013, just after his parents died. He needed something to occupy his mind, so he started making pizza dough and baking it in a super hot brick oven.
“I opened a crazy little six-table restaurant in Hot Springs,” he said. It served only three kinds of pizza in the beginning, on paper plates. And there were times when the dough, which takes more than a day to make, didn’t come out right so he closed rather than serve bad pies.
But gradually he got it right. And found an audience, including Frank Mirahmadi, the track announcer at Oaklawn Park at the time.
“I eat cheese pizza every day of my life,” Mirahmadi said. “I tried his pizza and it was very good. He was struggling at first, had a tough location, no advertising.”
So Mirahmadi took to social media, and the place took off. It’s now been voted the best pizza and best restaurant in Hot Springs for five years in a row in the Arkansas Times readers’ poll.
The pizzeria also has been written up in Southern Living among “The South’s Best Pizza” and in Food and Wine’s list of the best pizza in every state.
Now they are teaming up to open the first of what they hope will be many restaurants. They chose Versailles and a spot that many in the area will know well, 508 Lexington Rd., the former location of Napa Prime and originally a Pizza Hut, which has certain fond associations for Mirahmadi.
“We decided this market would be a great one, because he has a tremendous following among owners, trainers and jockeys who eat at his restaurant January through April,” Mirahmadi said. “It was natural to come into this market. We have big plans but it all has to start with this.”
Mirahmadi, who is also the track announcer at Monmouth Park in New Jersey and Santa Anita in California, said the response has been overwhelming since racing journalist Steve Byk mentioned the new restaurant on his July 16 pre-Haskell Stakes show, calling it “some of the most exciting news.”
Mirahmadi’s brother, Fred, will be the executive chef at Frankie DeLuca’s, which will have a menu of pizzas, pastas and a burger pared down even from that of Deluca’s Pizza. They hope to open in September ahead of the Keeneland Fall Meet with about 64 seats and have a full bar.
Valinoti said the keys to his pizza are cooking in the special brick oven and using only the best ingredients. He said he plans to use as many local Kentucky farm products as possible in the food, which he called “real Italian grandma food.”
His popular steak burger came about because Valinoti couldn’t find a medium rare burger. So he decided to make one in a cast-iron skillet from aged beef ground in New York and overnighted to Arkansas. Now he’s branched out into meatballs, too.
“I make a mean, mean meatball,” Valinoti said. “Everything is cooked in the pizza oven. I know it’s crazy, it’s just what we do. ... Somehow the insanity has morphed into this thing I’m very very proud of. It’s good. I really hope the people of Kentucky like it.”
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
