By Emma DeGrado
Courtesy of Kate DePetro
Sunday at The Pizza Box
I arrive at The Pizza Box just ahead of a newly-minted Sunday evening rush. String lights drape beneath the ceiling of an old-school brick Bleecker Street shop. Out back, picnic tables and a black Vespa give a patio the feel of an Italian side street. A chalkboard by the entrance reveals who is expected tonight: “Welcome Saint Joseph’s Young Adults,” it reads, followed by a verse from Corinthians: “Whatever you eat or drink, whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
An employee beckons me toward the counter, where Sharpies and sticky name tags await. She will do the same for hundreds of twenty-somethings as they trickle, then pour in—from hedge fund analysts to flight attendants whose demanding schedules leave little time for building community, much less engineering a meet-cute. As names are scribbled, the aroma of hot sausage acquaints itself with the crowd exchanging introductions.
Amid the bustle, a woman glides through the crowd with a professional camera, documenting a Margherita here and a moment there. A few minutes later, she slips behind the counter and into the kitchen. That’s Melanie Wesslock, owner of The Pizza Box and, tonight, unofficial photographer for Pizza to Pews.
Now the restaurant is packed. Clusters of young Catholics offer one another conversation and slices while hosts Kate DePetro and Anthony Gross greet newcomers. Eventually, DePetro gets everyone’s attention. Pizza to Pews, after all, has a second destination.
A quartet of teenage men linger, crooning as a caravan of young Catholics files out onto Bleecker Street. Manhattan heads turn as the crowd spans the blocks between the Pizza Box and Saint Joseph’s Church on Sixth Avenue for six o’clock Mass.
This is Pizza to Pews.
A packed box, courtesy of Melanie Wesslock
Courtesy of Melanie Wesslock
The Young Catholic Comeback
The crowds at Pizza to Pews arrive amid signs of a broader resurgence in the Catholic Church. A Hallow study of 140 United States dioceses found that the average diocese saw a 38 percent increase in converts entering the Catholic Church at Easter in 2026 compared with the year prior.
Another study by 20 U.S. dioceses found that Gen Z made up 34 percent of the 2,127 people participating in Catholic initiation programs this year.
“There are a lot of people who maybe don’t go to church because they don’t want to go alone, or maybe they want to get into faith but don’t know where to start,” DePetro told me. “And it’s easier when you’re walking together.”
Kate DePetro, 27, originally from Rhode Island, had been attending Saint Joseph’s solo when she came across Wisconsin-native Anthony Gross’s social media series where he ranked a new Manhattan parish each week. They swapped follows, messages, and an invitation to grab coffee, where the idea to grab a slice before Mass was born.
“I think there’s a gap within Gen Z when it comes to purpose and connection,” Gross, 23, analyzed. “When you can mingle with people who share similar values, but then get the purpose of a higher power, that’s why you’re seeing what we’re seeing right now. And that’s why it’s so special.”
“My generation really wants connection and principles and human interaction,” DePetro added. Pizza proved to offer a low-stakes entry point to, ultimately, fellowship rooted in faith.
“Our first event was 100 people. Our second event was 200. And now we’re at over 300—and it’s growing,” she told me. “You can just feel the Holy Spirit moving through New York City.”
That growth is palpable at Saint Joseph’s, where it’s standing-room-only, leaving ushers with no alternative than to pack congregation alongside choir members and squeeze latecomers into stairwells.
Providence Through Pizza
While The Pizza Box now boasts a bustling Bleecker Street location in the heart of Greenwich Village—serving hundreds of young Catholics their signature “farm-to-pizza” every Sunday—its owner, Melanie Wesslock, told me the pieces began falling into place years before Anthony and Kate ever met, more than 100 miles north of Manhattan.
The story begins over two decades prior, during Wesslock’s pregnancy with her son, Max, when Wesslock “went 80 percent paralyzed.” Doctors warned that she might be rendered forever to a wheelchair and, if her baby survived, they warned, he might experience significant maladies. Faced with that possibility, Melanie and her husband, Michael, bought a small property upstate, where the family believed she would be better able to get around and care for her son.
Instead, Wesslock’s paralysis resolved itself, Max was born, and the family found themselves with a country home, turning to gardening and farming, focusing on clean ingredients and local sourcing.
“I grew all the food that the baby ate. We’re still 85 percent self-sufficient,” the lifelong New Yorker shared. Now, the Wesslocks split time between the Catskills, the Upper West Side, and, most of all, Bleeker Street, where they “all work 16-hour days.”
Max Wesslock, Anthony Gross, and Kate DePetro, courtesy of Kate DePetro
That the Wesslocks eventually landed on Bleecker Street—a stretch steeped in nearly a century of New York pizza history—is another providential twist.
As a family, the Wesslocks attend Catholic Mass, but in their tiny upstate hamlet, denominational lines blur. Melanie figured most of those who attend the local Methodist church are actually Catholic. “You don’t have eight million churches in this tiny little hamlet,” she explained. More than denomination, “it really is about Christian fellowship.”
In 2021, the Durham-Oak Hill United Methodist Church was in desperate need of a new roof. At the time, Melanie, a photographer, had lost her event work to pandemic shutdowns, while Michael, who works for a bank, was working from home. The couple had built a wood-fired oven on their property years before, and Michael’s pizzas had already become a hit among friends and family. When the church needed help, the Wesslocks got to work.
Rapidly, their efforts burgeoned beyond an old-fashioned church bake sale. On a country road where Melanie said they might normally see two cars pass, some 60 cars lined up for pizzas in exchange for donations. Half-an-hour later, the Wesslocks had sold out. The proceeds would cover a new roof on the church, and the success planted the seed for a new business idea.
funrasier progog
Melanie and Michael bought an old horse trailer, with, as their site describes, “a strong frame and worn walls.” Melanie taught herself body work and welding so she could restore it. Michael oversaw the business side and refined recipes. Young Max learned the wood-fired oven.
One month later, the family had transformed the old horse box into a mobile pie-slinging operation in the Catskills.
The completed Pizza Box, Courtesy of Melanie Wesslock
The Wesslocks launched The Pizza Box that July at Oak Hill Day, a community event held by the same church that had inspired it. Once again, they spent the day making pizza, donating all proceeds back to the church.
The Pizza Box took off. The Wesslocks continued catering private parties and community events around the Catskills, but eventually began wondering whether what worked upstate could work back home in New York City. They found a storefront on Bleecker Street, in the heart of one of the city’s most competitive pizza neighborhoods.
For Melanie, the location came with an uncanny familiarity. Her first New York City apartment had been just across the street, at Bleecker and Sullivan. Stranger still, the storefront had once housed a completely unrelated pizzeria called The Pizza Box that closed 16 years before.
“That was pretty scary for us, to open a shop where we are,” Melanie explained being surrounded by culinary heavyweights. However, confident in their “different style of pizza and a different food philosophy than other restaurants,” the Wesslock family again said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
Melanie coined the term “farm-to-pizza.” Alongside classics like cheese, margherita, pepperoni, and sausage, The Pizza Box features specialty pies, rotating roughly every week and a half, depending on the harvest.
The summer menu may showcase a yellow-squash pie with pesto and fresh ricotta, an elote-inspired pizza made with New York corn, or one piled with cherry tomatoes and basil from Melanie’s own garden. Their most popular pie, pepperoni and honey, is finished with fermented garlic honey sourced from friends in the Catskills.
Winter’s menu too takes its cues from the farm. “In the off-season, we’ll do hot honey with peppers that I’ll grow this summer,” Melanie explained. Potatoes, onions, and other shelf-stable vegetables carry the farm-to-pizza philosophy through the city’s colder months.
“What we do with the farm-to-pizza concept and the sourcing,” she said, “that’s what sets us apart.”
But the Wesslocks brought more than their farm-to-pizza philosophy with them to Bleecker Street. The business that had been born out of feeding a church community would soon find itself doing the same in lower Manhattan.
Putting the Pieces Together
Now-20-year-old Max Wesslock was looking for a Catholic community near the shop when Melanie came across Anthony Gross’s social media series visiting and reviewing Catholic churches around Manhattan. One of his videos featured the young-adult Mass at St. Joseph’s Church, a brief walk from the shop.
“I DM’d him and said, ‘Hey, is that young-adult Mass every Sunday? Because I’m looking for a church for my son to go to downtown,’” Melanie recalled.
It was. Max began attending the church’s weekly 6 P.M. Mass, and Melanie admitted she would schedule certain employees on Sunday during Mass time so that they might join her son.
“I would encourage employees, ‘Hey, if you want to go to Mass with Max, I’ll cover you while you’re gone,” she said. “For me, that’s my mission—to support young people in their faith.”
The young Catholics who swarm The Pizza Box on Sunday evenings are not the only young people the Wesslocks have taken under their wing. The family hires high school students—some talented performers from LaGuardia High School who, evidently, often sing while they work. Michael and Melanie quietly work with “justice-involved” and developmentally disabled youth, offering internships, life skills, and business experience.
Later, another viral video from Anthony Gross featured The Pizza Box, bringing new customers through its doors. Kate DePetro was already one of them.
When DePetro and Gross approached the Wesslocks about gathering at The Pizza Box before Mass, the family immediately agreed. Young Catholics could come for pizza, meet one another, and then make the short walk to St. Joseph’s together. The pieces were finally in place.
Beyond Bleecker Street
Kate DePetro and Anthony Gross confidently predicted a ripple effect in the Pizza to Pews movement. “All eyes are always on Manhattan,” DePetro noted.
The duo’s dynamism helped the program garner national attention in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post. DePetro and St. Joe’s Father Jonah Teller shared the initiative’s success with Jenna Bush Hager and Sheinelle Jones on TODAY, and Gross spread the word on Fox & Friends First.
The summer brought Pizza to Pews to the Jersey Shore, Long Island, and Palm Beach. Young Catholics across the country have reached out for help creating similar communities. DePetro and Gross have set up a chapter program, charmingly called “Slices,” which already has welcomed applications from Dallas, Chicago, and Boston—plus universities like Harvard, Marquette, and Notre Dame.
“It’s just rocketing,” DePetro said. “Overall, it’s a true reflection of what’s needed in our generation: rich in tradition…that emphasis on community…wanting to belong to something bigger than ourselves.”
This fall, Pizza to Pews is back in a steady Sunday swing at The Pizza Box, where it all began.
For Melanie Wesslock, it is difficult to look at what has grown around The Pizza Box without tracing it all the way back to the frightening pregnancy that first brought her family upstate. Her paralysis resolved. The property they bought because of it became a farm. The farm led to a wood-fired oven, the oven to a church fundraiser, the fundraiser to a horse trailer, and eventually, the horse trailer to a storefront on Bleecker Street now packed with young people on their way to Mass.
“If that’s not a miracle, if that’s not God’s hand,” she shared, “then I don’t know what it is. It’s pretty incredible.”
Young Catholics or Catholic-curious can learn more about attending or hosting a Pizza to Pews event near them at pizzatopews.com.
Emma DeGrado oversees media relations for the Network of enlightened Women. She held previous roles at National Review and the Howie Carr Radio Network. Recently married, she resides in the New York City area. You can follow her on social media at @quiterightemma.
