Emily and Matt Hyland
Emmy Squared | New York
February 2017
The odds of Matt and Emily Hyland succeeding in the specific way they have seems infinitesimal. Two pizza-loving college kids move to New York City to start their lives. They end up making their mark with the very thing that brought them together—pizza. And they manage to get the most jaded diners in the world—New Yorkers—to embrace their pizza with a level of fanaticism seldom seen in restaurants. Even more, they do it twice, in two different restaurants with two completely different styles of pizza—wood-fired Neapolitan-ish at Emily and the Detroit pan-pizza at Emmy Squared, which is the concept that’s multiplying to meet the demands of a national and global fan base.
But it all started in Rhode Island, where Brooklyn-born, Connecticut-raised Matt and Jersey-girl Emily attended Roger Williams University, and had their first date over pizza in the dorms. A food life wasn’t directly on the radar, but a good slice always brought the couple closer together. In New York, Emily became a high school teacher and then taught yoga, and Matt eventually enrolled at the Institute for Culinary Education, taking jobs doing everything from pastry at Public to smoking meats at Th e Smoke Joint, and even helping open The Breslin. But it was when the couple moved to Brooklyn and discovered Sottocasa pizzeria that Matt met his mentor, Luca Arrigoni, and began true artisan pizza-making that would lead the couple to open Emily in 2014 and Emmy Squared just two years later. Since then, both restaurants have been mainstays on year-end and best-of lists from Eater and Bon Appétit to TimeOut and Zagat, and many more.
