They lived on the boat while they restored it. “Which I would not recommend.”
“The interior had actually turned into a giant termite nest,” Sasha said with a shudder. “It took a lot of shoveling to get it all out.”
But it was the perfect size and shape for installing a commercial-grade pizza kitchen. Restoring the boat took about two years because they did all the work themselves. Sasha is a mechanical engineer by trade. What they didn’t already know, they taught themselves from YouTube.
The couple financed the entire operation themselves with the money they’d saved from years of working on boat charters. “No one—including us—had any idea if it would work,” Sasha said. “So we weren’t comfortable trying to get investors because we didn’t know if we’d be able to pay them back.”
He designed a hood ventilation system to funnel the heat out of the galley. Knowing they’d need plenty of water for washing dishes, they installed a do-it-yourself water maker that produces 40 gallons per hour. To power the appliances, like a a 260-pound Hobart dough mixer, they outfitted the boat with solar panels. The electric oven—a double brick-lined Baker’s Pride oven that can produce four pies in 15 minutes—is powered by a diesel generator. Instead of a regular weight scale, they opted for a hanging basket scale that’s suspended from the ceiling so that measurements aren’t thrown off by the rocking waves.
“When cooking on boats, you have to be really careful about where you set things,” Tara said, “The last thing you want is to have a really big wave and have a knife go flying.” Every kitchen tool is strapped down and the pizza oven is modified with heavy duty latches to prevent the heaving boat from ejecting scalding pies at their unsuspecting creators.
They named the boat Pizza π, using the Greek symbol for Pi. The name was a nod to Sasha’s New York roots, where people refer to pizzas as “pies” as well as his passion for math. “Pi is a really special number,” said Sasha, a self-proclaimed numbers nerd. “I like that it’s irrational and transcendental and never repeats. It has infinite possibilities.”
The ship’s interior has a quaint lounge and bedroom area. A plaque on the wall next to the bed on the boat reads: “Kissing a man without a mustache is like eating an egg without salt.” It was a wedding gift from Tara’s mother. (Another placard on the boat reads: “Ass, Grass, or Gas. Nobody rides for free.” This was not a wedding gift from Tara’s mother.)
The couple lived aboard the boat until Pizza Pi opened for business in November 2014, but Health Department requirements prevent them from living on the boat, so they later moved ashore.
There was just one thing left to do: learn to make pizza.