For Johnny Bojinoff, owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria, working in restaurants has been a life-long, family ordeal.
When he was a child, his great-uncle had a soul food restaurant, Hawkin’s House of Fish, at the corner of Wiesser Park Avenue and Pontiac Street. Bojinoff’s grandma and her sisters all helped run the restaurant. By the age of six, he was also helping out around the family business.
On the other side of his family, Bojinoff’s grandfather was a chef at a church camp in the summer.
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Johnny Bojinoff, owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria.“I always found myself hanging out in the back of the kitchen there,” he recalls.
At 16 years old, Bojinoff’s first job was as a dishwasher. He took all the food classes offered at Northrop High School. He then joined the Navy as a cook and was on active duty for six and a half years. After that, he went back to working in restaurants, and eventually, he went to Le Cordon Blue Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Ore.
“I never really cared about pizza until I got a job at La Prima Trattoria,” he says. “It was my college job. Wood-fired concept, upper-scale Italian restaurant. The passion began there.”
Bojinoff brought his culinary skills and passion back to the Fort and now sells pizza by the slice and whole specialty pies at the Union Street Market at Electric Works. Much like he used to help his family with their restaurant, he says his family has fallen into helping him, telling him it’s about time he have a place of his own.
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Johnny OX Pizzeria at the Union Street Market.Input Fort Wayne sat down with Bojinoff to learn what it means to be a pizzaiolo and explore his journey to becoming a vendor at the Union Street Market.
IFW: What can customers expect when they visit Johnny OX Pizzeria?
JB: We’re a small, mostly family-run business. We sell pizza by the slice from 11 a.m. until 2 p.m. seven days a week. We sell 18-inch specialty pies.
We try to use organic, non-GMO ingredients. We try to partner with other vendors at the market to get our ingredients from Union Street Market when possible. We make a lot of the stuff that goes on our pizza. We try to source everything locally, keeping the money here in Fort Wayne, we even get all our printing and marketing materials made locally.
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A pepperoni pie made by Johnny OX Pizzeria.
It’s a slow-fermented crust. We have a pretty extensive routine for our crust, but we’re still learning the environment. It’s been categorized as New Jersey/Connecticut pizza, or East Coast pizza. It’s neo-Neapolitan pizza, which means it’s American pizza, but we use Italian techniques.
I just want to be the best chef I could possibly be. I always try to be innovative and put flavors together that people may not have had before– same with techniques and textures too.
IFW: How did you become a chef?
JB: My great-uncle owned a soul food restaurant, Hawkin’s House of Fish, at the corner of Wiesser Park Avenue and Pontiac Street. My grandma and her sisters all helped run the restaurant. By the age of five or six, I was also helping out around the restaurant.
My grandfather on my mother’s side was the chef at a church summer camp. I always found myself hanging out in the back of the kitchen.
I got my first job as a dishwasher at 16 and never looked back. I worked there throughout high school. I took all the food classes at Northrop. I went into the Navy as a cook. I was on active duty for six and a half years. I got out and started working in restaurants in Southern California, but later on, I went to Le Cordon Blue Western Culinary Institute in Portland, Ore.
I never really cared about pizza until I got a job at La Prima Trattoria. It was my college job. Wood-fired concept, upper-scale Italian restaurant. The passion began there.
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Johnny Bojinoff, owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria, works dough for a pizza.IFW: What is a pizzaiolo, and how did you become a pizzaiolo?
JB: A pizzaiolo is someone who masters pizza, or a pizza chef. I was trained by La Prima Trattoria Pizzaiolo, Jeff Kennedy.
When Jeff Kennedy came over to La Prima, he couldn’t do all this elaborate high-end cooking we were doing, but when it came to pizza it was all about protein content and the flours that we use, fermentation, humidity control, time, temperature, coring the tomatoes, getting seeds out, like really really fine details to making pizza.
The pizza has to start with the bread– the crust. The tomato you use for your red sauce, your ingredients, and all that other stuff that you put on there is just embellishment. It doesn’t really mean anything. Some things, like if you taste the sausage that I make and it’s memorable, that’s because it’s different than your usual sausage, but what I want to be memorable about my pizza is the crust first and foremost.
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Johnny Bojinoff, owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria, works dough for a pizza.IFW: What are your favorite specialty pizzas from Johnny OX pizzeria?
JB: “I learned it in Oregon” and the “Green Ox.”
“I learned it in Oregon” is white garlic parmesan sauce, house-made Italian-spice fennel sausage from local pork, black olives, roasted red peppers, and baked lemon-truffled ricotta.
“Green OX” is based on my little daughter’s love of basil. It has Nevaeh’s basil sauce, WM mozzarella, fresh spinach, Janie’s herb-roasted shrooms, shaved garlic, and baked lemon-truffled ricotta.
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Owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria, Johnny Bojinoff, cuts a freshly made pizza.IFW: Tell us about the journey to becoming a vendor at the Union Street Market.
JB: When I came back to Fort Wayne, I was the chef at Old Crown on North Anthony. Then COVID struck and I was kind of in limbo waiting on them to decide if they were going to open up the restaurant again. I was unemployed.
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Johnny Bojinoff, owner of Johnny OX Pizzeria, puts a pizza in the oven.
I had worked on a South Caribbean restaurant concept for six years and I was ready to go on that as far as standardized recipes. I was going to execute it, and then I was looking around one day and found the website for the market. I had heard about a few of the vendors who were signed up to be here, like The Local Apple Cart and Brook’s Barbeque.
I reached out and was able to come down here to look at the space. It was hard to imagine, especially being that we had to build everything on our own. We continued talking, had Zoom meetings and met with the architects.
I originally came to Electric Works to do South Caribbean food, but the size of the space here for what I wanted to do didn’t work out. Looking at coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation and the economy, I thought a good way to reach a larger audience was to switch to the pizzeria concept.
IFW: What is it like to be a vendor at the Union Street Market?
JB: This is my first time in a “food court setting,” so to speak. A lot of different variables can affect you, mainly the traffic flow. If you have some type of brick-and-mortar in town, you know when they come in the door, they’re coming to see you. Here they could walk in, look at you, walk around for a while, and then you turn your back, and boom you have a line.
This story is made possible by SEED Fort Wayne. Learn more about the Build Institute program by visiting their website.