If you want to become wise, try doing something for 50 years.
“One thing I really appreciate, that I am more proud of than almost anything else, is the fact that when I first started, I was the first and only pizza place in town that sold pizza by the slice,” says Carmine Vento. “And nobody believed in it. ‘How are you gonna make money selling by the slice?’ Nobody knew I started in this business as a dishwasher at a place in New Jersey where they were selling 700 pizzas a day.”
Las Vegas didn’t understand pizza—real pizza—when Vento arrived in 1976 and opened Villa Pizza near Commercial Center on Sahara Avenue. Maybe nobody believed in it, but since Villa opened during a culinary strike that closed several hotel-casinos, “a lot of people were not working and home all day, and they needed a place to go,” he explains. And, of course, an inexpensive place to eat…