Cutchogue’s T&Z Pizza Co. Is Raising the Bar for Pizza on Long Island

Move over, DiGiorno. Take a hike, Tombstone. Cutchogue’s own T&Z Pizza Co. is coming for the frozen pizza market.

What began as a COVID-pandemic pivot for Terry McGuire has grown into a full-fledged brand of flash-frozen, quick-crisping pizza — now available in local stores and, outside the summer season, through direct delivery. Fast forward to today: McGuire has a new partner, Zach VanDerBeek, whose hospitality background includes the beloved Babette’s, a high-end East Hampton Village restaurant many still remember fondly.

“The whole thing is so special,” McGuire said during an interview over piping hot slices with a base worthy of the title crispiest crust ever. “We’re excited to go toward wholesale. This is buildable and sellable. You can’t play ‘pizza’ forever — you have to do something real.”

Before the pandemic, McGuire was busy building a catering business when he came across an abandoned trailer on the side of the road. That sparked a wild idea: fix it up, install a wood-fired oven, and take the show on the road. Voilà — a portable catering service was born.

Working under the name Homeslice Pizza and with a previous business partner, McGuire put to good use a license he’d obtained in 2018 to make and sell frozen pizzas. At the time, they could produce about 100 pizzas a day. Then came a write-up in the New York Post that began: “Got carbs? Normally any self-respecting resident of the Hamptons would shudder at the thought, but coronavirus changes everything.”

“It got crazy clicks,” McGuire recalled, though his name was spelled incorrectly in the article. “I was selling maybe $200 worth of pizza a week at a farmers market in Riverhead. Business went up in March 2020 by 2,600 percent. All of a sudden, we had 4,600 direct-to-consumer clients.”

Over the next four years, McGuire refined his pizza-making process through plenty of trial and error — emphasis on the error. There were costly investments in ovens and freezers, and, of course, plenty of figurative blood, sweat and tears.

“Nobody taught me anything. Do I partially cook them? Do I use a vacuum sealer? I didn’t know. Nobody could show me how to do it,” he said. “But eventually, I figured it out.” He credits his failures as the biggest contributors to his success.

“It’s ultimately how I’ve gotten to this point.”

In the summer of 2024, while catering a party, McGuire ran into VanDerBeek — a friend from their East Hampton High School days in the mid-1990s. After catching up on nearly 30 years apart, the conversation turned to business. VanDerBeek, fresh off closing the California outpost of Babette’s he had managed — not long before the original East Hampton location also shut its doors — had been planning to get into the pizza business.

“I was looking at buying an old-school pizza place on Long Island somewhere,” VanDerBeek said. “When we started talking about what we were both doing, a light bulb went off for both of us: We could do this together and be a lot more successful than either of us doing it alone.”

It’s a partnership forged in fire — specifically, inside a wood-burning oven.

When VanDerBeek came on board last October as co-owner of the newly rebranded T&Z Pizza Co., his first focus was the ingredients. The ones McGuire had been using weren’t bad, he said — but they could be better. With a deep knowledge of sourcing from his family’s restaurant (even if Babette’s never served pizza) VanDerBeek brought a new level of quality to the operation.

“My goal whenever I cook is to be as proud of it as I possibly can,” he said. “So getting the cleanest, purest ingredients is very important. It’s not necessarily about what’s most expensive or highly regarded — it’s about what’s healthy and tastes amazing. What neither of us expected was taking a good, clean pizza and turning it into what I think is the healthiest frozen pizza on the market.”

Their sauce is made from organic tomatoes that come in nearly 7-pound cans, and their crust is crafted from organic whole wheat flour. The dough has become so popular they now sell it separately.

“You get crispiness that doesn’t flop,” McGuire said. “It’s healthier, it’s more flavorful. The dough we’re making now is like a flavorful bread. It’s got some nuttiness to it — it’s more interesting.”

The cheese is a blend of cow’s milk and buffalo mozzarella. T&Z has also introduced new varieties like pepperoni, mushroom, and garlic scape (the latter sourced from Marilee Foster’s farm in Sagaponack). The pizzas cook in under four minutes and land somewhere between Neapolitan-style and New York-style.

You can find T&Z Pizza Co. at Serene Green in Noyac, Farm & Forage in Southampton Village, Green Thumb in Water Mill, Marilee’s Farmstand in Sagaponack, Eastport General Store, Sylvester Manor Farm on Shelter Island, and NoFo Pot Pies in Mattituck. Residential delivery is available from Amagansett to Manorville with a minimum order of six pizzas.

“Pizza is an art,” McGuire said. “This is all an art project gone out of control, from my first oven till now. I needed to give people something I’m proud of — not just a product. And if I can feed you and you’re happy, it’s cool.”