Pizza in Pittsburgh can be an inexpensive comfort food that appeals to folks of all ages or an artisanal experience that celebrates premium ingredients, old-world techniques and creative flavor combinations. Sometimes it’s both.
At Sir Pizza in Ross, the focus is squarely on family — both literally and in terms of the extended family of longtime customers and employees, some of whom have been enjoying and making its signature filled-to-the-edge pizzas cut into squares for decades.
DJ Skelton has worked the gas-fired pizza ovens for 35 years, ever since he was a 15-year-old sophomore at North Hills High School. Jim Jenson, who was raised in Sewickley, guesses he’s made about 62,000 batches of dough over the 34 years he’s worked there.
“And the first few years were with Gramps,” he says with a grin, “when Suzanne was this high,” motioning to his knees with his right hand.
Some of the customers have been coming almost as long to eat pizza topped with chopped pepperoni at the unassuming shop that opened in March 1975 at 320 Sewickley Oakmont Road in Ross.
Eat there as a kid and chances are your own children will one day crave their pizzas too, even after they’re grown and have flown the nest.
“Our busiest days are the day before and after Thanksgiving and the two days after Christmas,” when adult children often return home for the holidays, says Suzanne Filiaggi, who started working at the store alongside her father, uncle and grandfather as a teenager and now co-owns it with her cousin, Chris Filiaggi.
“We are home to people.”
As an OG customer, I can attest to that.
I started going to Sir Pizza not long after it opened a half-century ago, usually with one of my best friends from Avonworth High School, Katherine Rollins Brown. Her mother, Ruth, didn’t like to cook and was always looking for an inexpensive place to get dinner.
“I ate so many of the small beef boats!” which at the time cost just 90 cents, Katherine recalls with a laugh. “And I had a small spaghetti dinner, America style, before every swim meet. I still know the phone number — 367-1333 — because I dialed it so many times.”
After living in several other cities, I rediscovered Sir Pizza when I moved back to Pittsburgh from New York City in 1994. My own five kids have scarfed down so many of their cheese and royal feast pizzas over the years — we went every Friday — that I’m pretty sure I helped put at least a few Filiaggi kids through college.
And now that my kids are scattered across the East Coast? Forget Primanti’s, Prantl’s burnt almond torte, Pamela’s pancakes or even my cooking. The first and only thing they ask to eat on visits back home is Sir Pizza.
“It’s nostalgia,” says my oldest son, Dan. “Plus, I love the crumbled sausage and how the corner pieces are different than the inside ones. It’s crispy versus soft.”
“I can’t find pizza that tastes like home anywhere else,” echoes my daughter, Olivia. “The taste, the smell, the everything — when I have that first bite after not having it for so long, it legitimately fills my whole body with happiness.”
Full family effort
When brothers Ron and Rich Filiaggi of Uniontown opened Sir Pizza in 1975, their only goal was to supplement their incomes as math instructors at Oliver High School.
At the time, Rich recalls, teachers made about $4,000 a year. Ron ended up leaving the profession to move with his wife, Marci, to Columbus, Ohio, where her brother, Peter Jubeck, had turned a partnership with Pizza King into the Sir Pizza chain of restaurants.
Ron saw so much potential in pizza-making that, 18 months later, he returned to Pittsburgh and talked his brother into opening Pennsylvania’s only franchise in Ross.
Their father, Massimilliano, a coal miner, was only too happy to give his two sons money to buy the building they ended up renovating at the intersection of Rochester and Sewickley Oakmont roads.
Massimilliano, one of 10 children whose parents emigrated from Ascoli Piceno in central Italy in 1912 (and the first born in the U.S.), never made it past the eighth grade. So he had a personal stake in his sons’ success. When he retired a year later, “Gramps” moved to Pittsburgh and for the next 22 years worked alongside his sons as Sir Pizza’s official dough maker.
“He took to this place like it was his own,” says Rich, 79, of Franklin Park, arriving by 6 a.m. each day to mix the dough and prep other menu ingredients so that everything would be ready when his sons arrived after work at 2:30 p.m. The shop opened at 4.
“They came in with their pocket protectors!” Suzanne recalls. “Everyone thought they were twins.”
Suzanne and her brother, Richard, started working there as teens and so did her cousin, Christopher, and his brother, Michael. Rich’s wife, Sandy, worked with Gramps in the morning doing the books, and Ron’s wife, Marcie, helped after her day job as a teacher.
Today, there’s always three generations of family on site at any one time. That includes Suzanne’s son, Nicholas Bridges, 24, a second-year University of Pittsburgh law student who at 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday was busy weighing and cutting 9½-pound chunks of dough into small portions for the baller. He also works the counter on weekends.
“It’s hard to say when I started because I’ve been helping since I was 10 years old,” says Nicholas, as he tosses the grapefruit-sized balls of dough in flour to ready it for their run through the sheeter to become crusts. “Instead of daycare, I’d come here and do dishes.”
The 50-year-old business is not just important to his family, he says, but to so many others in the North Hills, where Sir Pizza is an institution.
“You get to witness how excited they get when they get to share [a pizza] with their families,” he says.
His Uncle Christopher, who graduated with a degree in hotel and restaurant management from Penn State in 2001, always knew he’d one day help to run the business, thanks to the many Friday evenings spent making pizza next to Gramps.
“My mom and dad are always here, so this is like our family,” he says.
Christopher also likes working with the legions of high schoolers and college students the pizzeria has employed over the years to take orders, fill beer glasses and deliver trays.
Richard and Michael would eventually leave the business to become doctors, while Suzanne took up law after graduating from North Allegheny in 1986, working as a private defense attorney before moving to the Allegheny County Office of the District Attorney. She left law to raise her three children and support her family’s business in 2010, and became “keeper of the flame” when her father retired at age 77 in 2021. She is also a member of Allegheny County Council.
“They were aging and I had to make a decision,” she says. “This became more of a focus.”
As their clientele has grown over the years, so has the shop’s footprint, expanding seven times in the last 50 years to make the kitchen larger and offer more seating. Upgrades include getting rid of the booths and medieval decor that marked the shop’s early days, though you’ll still feel like you’ve stepped into the ’70s when you walk through its glass doors.
They’ve also expanded the menu to include popular items like Buffalo chicken and gluten-free pizza (the crusts are outsourced), though their top seller remains the same as in 1975: the 14-inch royal feast pie served on a cardboard disc and laden with a gut-busting blend of pepperoni, mushrooms, red and green peppers, onions and sausage.
Save for the gluten-free pizza, everything is made in-house, from its vinaigrette dressing to the pizza sauce to the marinara and meat sauces that top the stuffed shells and lasagna.
While the family has had as many as three stores operating at a time at various locations over the decades, today there are just two: the original in Ross, and one that opened across from Soergel’s in Franklin Park 17 years ago. It’s owned and operated by licencees Stephen and Karen Yoedt, who grew up in the same neighborhood as the Filiaggis and are considered family.
About those square slices...
The family readily admits its square-cut pies — also known as tavern-style or party-style pizzas — aren’t for everyone.
“You either love it or hate it,” says Suzanne with a shrug of the shoulders. “It’s about a feeling.”
Made with egg whites and whey, the thin, pastry-like crust that comes in two sizes — 10- and 14-inch — is also something of an outlier, “and we use very little yeast so we don’t have to punch it down,” says Rich.
It is, however, made fresh every morning for both sites in the Ross kitchen and proofed for about an hour in a 115-degree heat room before being placed in a cooler to await being docked and topped for orders.
As for the toppings, a unique cup system assures each pie gets exactly the right amount of Margherita pepperoni that’s quartered, dried for two days and then minced into tiny morsels.
While most pizzerias use mozzarella on their pies for the cheesy “pull,” Sir Pizza opts for Stella smoked provolone, which has a mild, smoky flavor. It’s tossed with oregano after it’s been chopped into small tidbits like the pepperoni.
“This is not an afterthought,” says Suzanne, but an efficient system that allows every pizza to look and taste the same as it did 50 years ago.
Since 1998, the pizzeria has been open every day at 2 p.m., except on major holidays.
On a busy Friday, Skelton can make upward of 250 large pizzas in the shop’s two 550-degree ovens — eight at at time in a “dance of controlled chaos” — along with dozens of subs and hoagies built on Cellone’s bread, salads, calzones and a variety of pasta dishes.
Completely comfortable in their old-school ways, Sir Pizza has never offered online ordering or delivery.
“If you want it, you have to come see us so we can ask questions about how your mom and dad are,” Suzanne jokes. “It’s about the connection.”
Mark Feldman of Pine, who was picking up 10 large pizzas for the baseball team at Eden Christian Academy in Ohio Township on a recent Tuesday, says there’s a lot of joy in celebrating a family business that’s been around so long. He started coming 30 years ago as a high schooler, and his three kids are familiar faces.
“We used to come on Friday nights on our way to or from a movie,” he says. “It’s tradition. It’s fun.”
Nick DeHainaut of Franklin Park, who was refueling with a large supreme pizza after a round of golf with his 12-year-old son Jacob, agrees Sir Pizza is probably a staple for anyone who lives in the North Hills. A fan of its square slices for at least 25 years, “we also love what it represents” — a place where hey know your orders and you can hang out with your kids.
The goal, Suzanne says, has never been to be the best or make the most pizza, but rather to provide an ethical, safe and financially worthwhile environment within which everyone in the family — parent, child and grandchild — could thrive and reach their own personal goals.
“We just wanted to give the community a good place to bring their family to eat.”
First Published: March 13, 2025, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: March 13, 2025, 12:15 p.m.
