One For The Books: Oscar Venegas Of Tony’s Pizza Wins Top Prize At Pizza Expo
by Joe Bonadio
The first time I interviewed Oscar Venegas, longtime Kitchen Manager for Tony’s Pizza Napoletana, was in the Summer of 2021. The two of us had met briefly at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas two years earlier, where we both traveled to work with Tony. When we sat down for that first interview, Venegas was just gearing up to return and compete at the massive culinary event for the first time. The chef had decided to throw his hat into the ring shortly after attending Expo in 2019—and now he’d get his chance. At the time, Venegas told me: “I’m going to go back and do some studying, figure out which style of pizza I want to compete in. And go to work.”
As it turned out, he was good to his word. The following year, Venegas ended up snaring third place in the traditional category at Pizza Expo ’22, beyond encouraging for a first showing. When I spoke to him after the contest, he said “It was a shock, to be honest….after this, I just want to keep competing.” The young pizzaiolo had caught the competitive bug.
Last month at Pizza Expo ’25, the chef took a huge leap forward, seizing first place in the pan category in just his fourth appearance. Competing on the biggest stage against 62 of the world’s best pizza makers, Venegas had taken the top prize.
Eager to hear all the details, I spoke with my friend shortly after his return from Las Vegas. Lightly edited for clarity and length, our interview is below.
JB: First off, congratulations man. Amazing work.
Oscar Venegas (OV): Thank you.
JB: The fourth time’s a charm, apparently.
OV: Yeah! This is my first time competing in pan division, too.
JB: You changed it up.
OV: I changed it up. The first time I competed at Expo it was in the traditional style, and that’s when I got third place.
JB: A very encouraging result.
OV: It was! It really was. So I decided to try something new, and I went into the Pan Division, with Adam Sachs. I’ve seen him compete in that style, and it kind of inspired me to do it. So I ended up going that route….and it turned out pretty well.
JB: As well as it could turn out!
OV: (Laughter)
JB: So Oscar, what do you think made this time different?
OV: Well after competing a couple of times, I figured some things out. I’ve heard a lot of judges talk about what they expected in a pizza; They wanted a pizza they could take home, eat while watching the game, and enjoy comfortably. So I tried not to go too crazy with it, and to stick to the basics. To mainly work on my dough, and to make sure that the pie had toppings that people kind of knew, and that it was delicious all the way around. So it was more of a comfort-food kind of approach.
JB: Tell me about the dough.
OV: This time around, I really worked on my actual dough recipe. I studied how to do longer ferments, longer bake times. New techniques, some things Tony and I have been working on in the restaurants themselves that I was able to apply in the competition. Then once I got the dough and the bake going, I focused for about five weeks on getting my toppings down: having different people try the sauce, try the toppings. I went on what people liked on the pie, what the average person enjoyed. I figured if they liked it, the judges would probably like it too.
JB: So tell me about your pie.
OV: My pie was pretty much an upside-down Sicilian, meaning cheese on the bottom, sauce on top. I did a vodka Bolognese ragu, and finished it off with burrata, fresh basil, volcanic black salt and extra virgin olive oil. The inspiration came from making pasta at home one night, and trying to figure out what sauce to make. I really was craving a vodka cream sauce, and I’m a real meat-and-cheese kind of guy. And as soon as I tried this sauce, I thought This would actually be great on a pizza.
So the next day I went to work—and it just came together.
JB: What’s in the sauce?
OV: It’s tomato sauce mixed with vodka and some heavy cream. Then it has ground beef, sausage, and we use nduja. The nduja that we use at Tony’s is one of the best I’ve ever tried. Natale (Tony’s GM) is a real connoisseur when it comes to nduja, and when we brought this one in he was just amazed by it. That made me want to put it in my pie.
JB: It adds a certain something, that red pepper heat.
OV: Yes, it’s not as spicy as you would think, but it gives you that nice mellow heat right at the very end.
JB: It’s similar to my Aunt Dee Dee’s trick: she would always put a few slices of pepperoni in her meat sauce. With that extra peppery heat at the end, her sauce was always the best.
OV: And that’s what it comes down to when making competition pies. You’re always trying to figure out: What can make my pizza just a little bit better. There’s always going to be a missing ingredient, a missed technique. And the more you do it, through trial and error eventually you find that one thing that makes the pie Your Pie.
JB: Like you mentioned before, so much of it comes down to the dough. As Tony says, Slow is the Secret. How long did you ferment your dough?
OV: My dough was fermented for about 48 hours. It was also a little tricky because I had to make my dough here in San Francisco, and travel with it all the way to Vegas. Because I competed on Tuesday, and I was traveling on Monday. So I had to carry a whole bag full of dough onto the plane.
JB: (Laughter)
OV: All I could do was worry about my dough, and whether it was going to be blown up, or somehow destroyed…
JB: Because of temperature it’s outside of your control.
OV: It really is. When we taught school here, Tony and I would talk about how the water here is a little different than in Las Vegas. Making my dough here in San Francisco, I got to make it the way I wanted to make it, the way I’m used to. But if something had happened to that dough and I had to remake it in Vegas, it was not going to be the same. But it came out just a little bit different in the end.
JB: Obviously it worked. Were there any other surprises this time around?
OV: Well, this is my first time competing in pan style, so I didn’t know everything about how the competition for pan division works. When I got there, I realized I had to stretch and parbake my dough in front of the judges. So I had to figure out what time I was going to be there, and at what points I had to stretch my dough, and then parbake it in perfect conditions. But at Expo, there’s no such thing as perfect conditions: you’re always thrown different curveballs.
One of those curveballs was trying to get the parbake right, and I had to fight for oven space on top of one of the PizzaMasters they had. Also, they had no proofing boxes. So I couldn’t use a proofer, and it was kind of cold inside the convention center—and all of that works against you when you’re trying to get a pizza to rise well. If it’s too cold, it won’t rise enough, and if it’s too hot it will just blow.
So Adam and I were trying to figure out how we could recreate what we do here, but at Pizza Expo. And that was the most terrifying thing I had to do during the entire competition.
JB: Because there are so many variables?
OV: There are so many variables. But we managed to find some space, and kept it up there for two or three hours. Which was a little longer than we’d like, but because it was so cold in there we had to work with it. And I made the mistake of only bringing one Sicilian pan, and no cover.
So I only had one chance to make one parbake—and that was going to be my competition pie. So it was all-in or nothing, pretty much.
JB: Wow, that’s some serious pressure. So one last question: you’ve been at this competition thing for a few years, and you got damn close, right out of the gate. What’s it like to win?
OV: It’s definitely exciting. It’s surreal. When I heard my name called, I was just wondering, Is this real? Is this happening?
And to be recognized alongside so many great chefs out there, it’s just….it’s a great achievement. It’s something that has inspired me to continue my culinary career, and to keep getting better at what I do.
JB: Well you’re in the books now. Congratulations again, Oscar.
OV: Thank you, Joe.
