When Michael Carter started selling barbecue off of his front porch in 2020, he didn’t know it would lead to his becoming the executive chef of a beloved restaurant — let alone one whose staff consists entirely of formerly incarcerated people.
But a mutual friend introduced Carter to Muhammad Abdul-Hadi, the founder and owner of Down North Pizza in Philadelphia, which has become a beacon of community, offering lemonade for local kids and free lunches for the neighborhood in times of need. It also changed the lives of a kitchen full of ex-convicts, including Carter, who needed a fresh start.
“We the Pizza: Slangin’ Pies and Savin’ Lives,” written by Abdul-Hadi with recipes from Carter, includes 65 recipes and the story about the restaurant’s mission to educate and support formerly incarcerated people while serving smile-inducing food.
“When I add up the guys who work here, it’s about 63 years incarcerated. So it’s like we understand each other, where we come from,” Carter said in an interview. “We had the same barriers when we came home, like whether it be employment, housing, health care — we all had to figure it out.”
Down North Pizza employs seven staff members, most of whom have formal culinary training. If they don’t, they’ve learned from their colleagues in the kitchen.
Carter was laid off from another restaurant when it closed at the beginning of the Covid pandemic. So he bought a smoker and started selling food from his porch to make money. He’d pursued a degree in culinary management from the Art Institute and had experience cooking in an array of restaurants, but none, he said, offered the sense of community that Down North Pizza provides.
“In those restaurants, I kind of had to walk a tightrope,” he said. “Like the locked-up guys are in the back with the undocumented workers. And everybody has to be quiet. ... And we don’t have any of that here. It’s based on mutual respect, admiration, and we all share the same journeys.”
About two-thirds of people released from prison will be arrested again within three years of their release, according to the Justice Department. One-third of formerly incarcerated people participating in a study by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics couldn’t find jobs within four years of their release.
Abdul-Hadi developed the business in hope of reducing recidivism rates in the area.
“We’re building a revolution for the people through business economics by looking to advance everyone, particularly the formerly incarcerated, so we can shatter glass ceilings,” said Abdul-Hadi, who was awarded for his work by the James Beard Foundation last year.
Abdul-Hadi, raised in West Philadelphia, earned a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and law enforcement administration from Temple University in 2018, a year before he founded Down North Pizza.
When Carter started working at Down North Pizza in 2020, it was still a work in progress. The top oven was broken, so Carter had to do squats to reach the bottom oven to get every order baking. He lost 40 pounds during that time, he said.
Eventually more orders came through, and as the restaurant made more money and garnered more attention (even making The New York Times’ 2021 Restaurant List), it got entirely new equipment. The media attention, combined with word of mouth, turned Down North Pizza into a local staple — kids in the neighborhood know they can wait in the shop for the school bus during the summer, grab a lemonade and “kick it,” Carter said.
“We were doing a free lunch program in 2021,” Carter said. “Chicken fingers, slice of pizza and some fries. I went to the day cares down the street and basically told them, ‘Yo, bring the kids through for lunch time on us.’ And it turned into the rest of the neighborhood hearing about it. And before you know it we had a line down the block, and we were just feeding the neighborhood. So a lot of that stuff, it shows basically that we’re here for the community, strictly for the community.”
Once locals tried Down North Pizza’s cuisine, the food spoke for itself. The joint offers pizza pies, wings and loaded fries, as well as homemade lemonade and handspun milkshakes. Carter’s favorite is the Norf Fries — hand-cut fries topped with cheese sauce, barbecue sauce, scallions and beef bacon, a Philly staple. The restaurant is entirely halal, so the food is prepared in compliance with Islamic laws.
Carter said that while foodies outside of Philly aren’t usually familiar with beef bacon, the future for Down North Pizza might hold more shops in other cities across the country. In America, one-third of the adult working population are estimated to have a criminal record, he said. “So it’s nothing short of employees or people looking to be employed.”
CORRECTION (Feb. 18, 2025. 12:20 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misstated a statistic in a quote from executive chef Michael Carter. One-third of working adults in the U.S. are estimated to have a criminal record, not “one-third of the population has been incarcerated.” The quote has been removed and paraphrased.