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Rest in pizza.
Patsy Grimaldi, who was credited with launching NYC’s coal-fire, brick-oven pizza craze in the 1990s from his Brooklyn pie shop, died of natural causes Thursday night, according to close friends. He was 93.
“He was a visionary who maintained a life-long passion — maybe obsession — for making and sharing great pizza,” his longtime friend and business partner Matt Grogan told The Post.
“He will go down in history for his generosity and for simultaneously launching a renaissance of artisan pizza-making in New York City, and for pioneering a path to making Brooklyn cool.”
Grimaldi was raised in Bronx, the son of Italian immigrants Frederico Grimaldi and Maria Juliana Lancieri Grimaldi.
He joined the family business at the age 10 after his father died, working at his uncle Patsy Lancieri’s famous East Harlem pizzeria as a bus boy.
He was soon promoted to pizza maker and eventually went on manage the restaurant, briefly leaving the business in the 1950s to serve in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.
He met his late wife, the former Carol Abbe, in 1969, and their first date was at Patsy’s Pizzeria. The two married in 1971, raised a family in Queens and were together until Carol’s death in 2014.
Grimaldi opened his own “Patsy’s Pizzeria” in June 1990 at the site of a former hardware store at 19 Old Fulton St. in DUMBO, a location then surrounded by industrial buildings before a real estate boom years later brought plenty of high-rise luxury condos and eventually nearby Brooklyn Bridge Park.
At the time, Grimaldi commissioned what was the first coal oven built in the Big Apple in more than 50 years.
He would later tell family and friends he secured the oven because “he wanted to make pizza the way it was made a 100 years ago,” recalled Grogan.
However, the pizzaiolo had to change the business’ name to “Grimaldi’s” in 1995 when he was sued after his uncle died, and his aunt sold the Patsy’s name.
Grimaldi sold his eponymous eatery — and its naming rights — in 1999 to Frank Ciolli, so he and Carol could spent more time with their developmentally disabled son Pat and travel more.
But after Ciollli moved the business next door following a dispute with his landlord over rent, Grimaldi came out of retirement in 2012. Patsy and Carol then partnered with Grogan to open Juliana’s, named after Grimaldi’s mother, at the original location.
The move set off a feud that lasted until Ciolli’s son Joe took over Grimaldi’s operations five years ago.
However, both tourist-hotspots now share a friendly rivalry along with legendary Gravesend eatery L&B Spumoni Gardens, which expanded in December by opening a second location across the street from Juliana’s and Grimaldi’s.
Besides his wife, Grimaldi is pre-deceased by his son Pat; and four of his five siblings. He’s survived by his daughter, Victoria Strickland; his grandson David Strickland; and his younger sister.
Even late in life, Grimaldi spent much of his time greeting customers from his favorite corner table at Juliana’s and occasionally even flipped pies.
He was always old-school in every sense, even snubbing the social media phenomenon of people taking pictures of food before eating it.
“People today, they come in and they start taking pictures before they even take a bite,” Grimaldi once said.
“I tell everybody, ‘Look, don’t take a picture now. Eat the pizza because it’s gonna get cold, and you’re not going to enjoy it. You have to enjoy it while it’s hot.’ ”
