How I Accidentally Gave a Pizza Expo Keynote

A couple weeks ago I was completely in my element in Las Vegas. I’m not a gambler and I actually have no interest in most of what Las Vegas is known for, but I go every year for Pizza Expo aka the largest pizza trade show in the world.

I started attending pizza trade shows in 2006, two years before launching this tour company. It didn’t take long before I started getting involved, first as a pizza judge and later as a speaker. Now I run a Las Vegas pizza tour as an official part of Pizza Expo and I usually get assigned a subject or two to address at official event seminars. The tour always sells out and the seminars are usually well attended, but something different happened last year. 

Just minutes away from my 9:30am start time on Tuesday, March 24 I decided to dash out of my seminar room to look for a friend. When I found him standing in a huge line, I asked, “Why are you in this queue, my seminar room is right over there?” He told me this WAS the line to get into my seminar. I didn’t understand. The room was already pretty full. 

That’s when my favorite room monitor Rita shouted to me “YOU BETTER FIND SOME MORE SEATS!” Event staff was already on top of it because this crowd was apparently going to exceed the legal capacity of my seminar room. That’s when Meaghan, who runs logistics for the show, told me we’d need to move the entire crowd into a larger room: the huge keynote room!

They made an announcement to the room and led everyone down the hall and around the corner while Meaghan whisked me into the backstage area to get my A/V situation figured out. You don’t need to know all the details of my very low-tech setup but you do need to know that my presentations are always based on a series of images powered by my trusty decade-old laptop. That may work in the seminar rooms, but not so much in the big Keynote space. We were able to see my slides, but no presenter notes and no preview of the next image. 

This wasn’t the right time to freak out, so I just rolled with it. The presentation was all about current trends in the pizza industry, which is definitely my specialty since I regularly visit over 100 different pizzerias across the country every year. I know this stuff and I have a lot to say about it. Truth be told, I will never be able to shake the imposter syndrome that kicks in when I think about how NYC Pizza Tour guide me is presenting information to the people whose pizzerias inspire me — so I always end up over-preparing. 

I showed charts, graphs, and photos to prove my points about various trends in pizza. There’s the condiment trend, wherein products like Mike’s Hot Honey have inspired thousands of pizzerias to create their own specialized dips and drizzles. Then there’s the minimalist trend at slice shops both in NYC and beyond. I addressed newer regional styles like Tokyo-Neapolitan and London Style, both of which I argue are technically NOT regional styles at all! It was an extremely fun presentation to give and I’m honored to have been asked to give it. I just wasn’t prepared to do it in a room with such a big stage and fancy lighting!

HUGE thanks to all the fantastic people at Pizza Expo for maintaining such a quality event, even if I do always feel out of place being there. Thank you Bill, Meaghan, Rita, Jeremy White, Denise, Jeremy Galvin, Mike Lamarca, Josh, and everyone else who puts such hard work into this event.