Mombo's Pizza

Over the years the question echoes off the stainless steel ovens and hoods. "Why Mombo's? What does it mean?" Back when MOMBO'S was first conceived, founder Fred Poulos and his wife Marianna Poulos pondered long and hard over an appropriate name for their new venture. At the time their daughter Giovanna was about 2 years old and just learning how to speak. Marianna, a first generation Italian, had taught Giovanna to call Fred "Babbo", Italian for "Daddy". One day little Gio came running up to her parents in great excitement to share some discovery she had made. In her excitement she was calling out , "Mommy, Babbo, Mommy Mombo Mombo!" and it hit them...Perfect! "MOMBO! What a great name for a pizza place and certainly it reflects all three of us!" And so "MOMBO's" was born. But where did this great tradition of classic East Coast Style pizza come from? That's more the story of Fred's restaurant carreer and goes something like this: Fred Poulos was raised in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a blue-collar neighborhood just over the Mystic River from Boston. The teenage Fred got a job making sandwiches at a Jewish deli, "Murray and Eddie's Delicatessen". The deli (and his Greek grandmother) introduced him to a world of food possibilities. Fred graduated high school in 1970, got in his car and followed the road out of town. He found Provincetown at the very end of that road at the tip of Cape Cod. The place had it all: art, history and a Portuguese fishing village. He harvested steamer and Quahog clams, mussels and red crab. The blue fish would chase the squid right onto the beach! Provincetown fishermen were mostly immigrants from the Azores. He got very serious about food there.