Heggies owner Shawn Dockter needed to investigate something intriguing he’d read. It was about chef Doug Flicker.
This was 15 years ago, back when Flicker's south Minneapolis restaurant Piccolo, an Anthony Bourdain-approved gastrostomy playground, was the hottest seat in town. But when Dockter visited, he wasn’t there to talk tweezers, foams, or rabbit liver tarts: The frozen pizza boss wanted to confirm that Flicker did indeed chow down on Heggies during his rare moments away from Piccolo.
“In an interview, somebody asked Doug: What do you make for yourself at home?” says Dockter, whose Milaca-based company launched from inside a garage 36 years ago. “And I think his answer was something along the lines of, ‘After I'm cooking for everybody all day long, more often than not, I throw in a Heggies.’ After reading that, I had to go eat at his restaurant and introduce ourselves.”
Flicker confirms to Racket that he had “fallen in love” with Heggies, years earlier, after encountering ‘em in the freezer aisle of the Lunds at 47th & Cedar.
"A lot of great chefs and people came though Piccolo," Flicker says. "But nobody really got that excited until the owner of Heggies came through; everybody was beside themselves.”
Dockter and Flicker struck up a fast friendship after meeting at Piccolo, which closed in 2017. A business partnership blossomed, too. A decade-ish ago Heggies enlisted Flicker as a pizza consultant, a partnership that produced two pies eight years ago. There was the Sloppy Joe, a seasonal riff on the school cafeteria favorite, and the El Jefe, a chorizo-loaded Mexican pie that eventually joined Heggies' full-time roster.
The new Italian Beef pizza—sliced beef, giardiniera, sweety drop peppers, mozzarella/provolone blend—emerged from a field of six to 10 contenders Flicker dreamt up last year. Most of the mad-scientist creation phase takes place in the kitchen of Bull’s Horn, Flicker’s spectacular south Minneapolis dive bar. “It’s just convenient from a creative standpoint, like, ‘Shit, I’ve got the dried Italian spices right here,’” he says.
Building the pizzas requires Flicker to tweak his chef brain, considering Heggies pies are assembled by hand along a conveyor line—there’s no time for sticky ingredients or fussy placement. He tests the spec pizzas in bar ovens, home ovens, and convection ovens before the Heggies team takes ‘em back to the plant for freezing and shelf-life analysis.
"About once a year we'll all go down to Bull's Horn and Doug will roll out 10, 15, 20 pizzas,” Dockter says. “We all just start talking ideas, and after that you don't eat for about three days because you're so full of the amazing things he puts together; this [new pizza] just made a lot of sense.”
(Flicker says he can’t share any of the rejected recipes, calling the frozen pizza market “amazingly secretive and competitive.”)
As for the winner, the brand-new Italian Beef pizza that’s already hitting bars and grocery stores? Flicker says he perfected it over three months, toying with five or six different beef brands, several cheese blends, and a handful of giardiniera recipes. The standard-issue Heggies sauce got tweaked “a tiny bit, but not too much.”
So, how does the damn thing taste? Ian Ringgenberg, Racket’s chief pasty/travel correspondent, provided this rave review…
“The new Italian Beef Heggies flavor at Grumpy's is the pizza sensation that Minneapolis has been waiting for. It's actually crazy how fresh the giardiniera tastes given that it's been through an oven, and those little drop peppers burst in your mouth like an Italian gusher.”
There you have it.
Flicker reports that he, too, is quite pleased with the Italian Beef Heggies.
"I'm a consultant who makes pizzas, and it's their decision what moves forward,” he says. “The first couple times, I took it kinda personal and was disappointed when things didn't move forward. My main concern, at this point, is that they're happy with the work that I do; I'm obviously very excited this pizza made it through, and even more excited I get to sell it in my bar."
