February 11, 2025
Provided images/Defiant Collective
Down North Pizza founder Muhammad Abdul-Hadi is telling more of his story, including his past brush with incarceration, in the brand's new cookbook.
When Down North Pizza opened in 2020, its founder manned the deep fryer with an ankle monitor strapped to his leg.
Muhammad Abdul-Hadi had designed the Strawberry Mansion shop with recidivism in mind. His plan was to exclusively hire formerly incarcerated workers and train them for a new life in restaurants. Growing up in West Philadelphia, Abdul-Hadi had known people impacted by the carceral system, but the mission became uniquely personal when he was indicted on felony charges related to the Liberation Way insurance fraud scheme. While he ultimately avoided prison time for running sober living homes in the company's network, he was placed on house arrest.
Abdul-Hadi recounts the experience in his new cookbook "We the Pizza: Slanging' Pies and Savin' Lives," out Tuesday.
"The story of Down North Pizza has never been told to the extent it's being told in the book," he said. "(Readers) can expect to learn a lot about myself and also the journey that the other chefs and cooks have had throughout their lives to get to this point."
Abdul-Hadi sees the book as a "memoir with some recipes in it" — 65, to be exact. "We the Pizza" shows readers how to make some of Down North's sauces, doughs and square halal pies, each named after a song by a Philadelphia musician. In between the instructions for homemade cheese whiz and lamb sausage pizza, fans will find personal stories and facts about U.S. incarceration, which disproportionally affects Black men. A chronological timeline printed on the bottom of the pages traces the history of Jim Crow laws, the civil rights movement and the FBI's targeting of Black leaders in it.
Some of Down North's famous friends, like chefs Marc Vetri and Marcus Samuelsson, contribute recipes to the cookbook. Danny Trejo, who has often spoken about his past incarceration, wrote a forward, too. But the focus is understandably on Abdul-Hadi and his colleagues. Executive chef Michael Carter writes about making his first pizza dough out of crushed ramen noodles and Cheez-Its at State Correctional Institution — Greensburg; he topped the pie with prison commissary ingredients like sliced turkey logs and cooked it with a bucket of electrified water in his cell.
"One of the goals that I think we've done very well at is showing the world who we are," Abdul-Hadi said. "So that people's perception of individuals who've been impacted by the carceral system is not like, oh, they're this or that, or they're just evil. It's taking a deeper dive to see like, oh wow, this person went through that growing up and I don't know how I would've turned out if I had to go through similar circumstances."
Down North Pizza specializes in square halal pies.
Provided image/Defiant Collective
Down North Pizza's commitment to reducing recidivism extends beyond employment. Abdul-Hadi has long offered workers housing in the two apartments above the shop, and connected them with transportation, legal and mental health resources. Through his foundation, he has also launched initiatives to take formerly incarcerated parents and their children on outdoor retreats and build a "healing" garden of at the Juvenile Justice Services Center in West Philadelphia. The latter project, which has expanded to include weekly culinary and horticulture classes, started in 2022 after Abdul-Hadi toured the facilities.
"I remember going past this one open space that was just grass," he said. "And I was like, that was it. My brain just started. I literally pointed, 'What are y'all doing with that space?'
"I look at it like a concrete to the rose type, being as though it's inside a prison. To have something positive that could grow from that."
Down North Pizza has numerous other plans in the pipeline. After partnering with GoPuff on frozen pies in 2024, the company is looking to expand further into consumer packaged goods. Abdul-Hadi hopes to see Down North pizzas and sauce in grocery stores in the near future. The foundation is also seeking grant funding to help more Strawberry Mansion homeowners at risk of losing their houses to rising property taxes — it covered the bill for 11 homeowners in 2023 — and working on advancing its Down North Treehouse educational center. Abdul-Hadi said he hopes to break ground "in the next couple years."
Almost half a decade after the pizza shop's launch, its founder (and now, cookbook author) says he can see the impact when he walks around the neighborhood.
"Strawberry Mansion was infamous before, but for the wrong reasons," he said. "We've been able to kind of turn it around, so that's not the first thing (people) think about when they think about Strawberry Mansion. It's like, oh, that cool pizza shop. Because there's always something going on. There's always a photographer, always something being filmed and the community can see that.
"That's been great, and we only look to build on that."
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