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Daniel Holzman has built restaurants, gone viral and lost millions of dollars chasing big ideas.
As a chef and restaurateur with a big personality, Holzman has always been willing to take risks — and that trait has led to success and hard lessons. He co-founded The Meatball Shop, a casual eatery that turned humble comfort food into a cult favorite. Its mix-and-match meatballs are served in bowls, sandwiches and pasta.
Holzman and his partner, Michael Chernow, noticed how much people loved meatballs, and the idea started with something as simple as a late-night meal.
“Mike was a bartender, and he’d eat spaghetti and meatballs — hold the spaghetti. Just a bowl of meatballs. We thought, Why not make a whole restaurant around that?” Holzman tells Restaurant Influencers host Shawn Walchef of Cali BBQ Media.
The concept took off, expanding to nine locations. “We had one in Washington, D.C., one in Connecticut and seven in New York,” Holzman says, adding that New York was home to the original location.
Holzman’s willingness to swing for the fences paid off with The Meatball Shop — until it didn’t.
Investors once offered $40 million to buy a majority stake in the business, but Holzman turned it down, convinced they were on the brink of an even bigger valuation.
A year later, things unraveled.
“I was like, ‘It’s going to be worth $100 million in two years.’ You couldn’t pry my shares from my cold, dead hands,” Holzman says. “And then sales started declining like a month and a half later.”
The restaurant’s rapid expansion came with growing pains, and Holzman found himself burned out by the business side of things. As locations struggled and the company began scaling down, he made the difficult decision to step back, bringing in a new CEO to take over operations while he figured out his next move.
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Going back to California
Looking for a fresh start, Holzman moved west and opened Danny Boy’s Famous Original Pizza, determined not to repeat the same mistakes. This time, he wasn’t just thinking about food; he was thinking about the people behind it.
“It’s hard to find people if you underpay them and treat them [badly],” he says. “But if you treat people well, it’s not hard to find people at all.”
His philosophy shifted. Instead of focusing solely on scale, he prioritized building a restaurant where employees felt valued.
Even the name, Danny Boy’s Famous Original Pizza, is a nod to his love for restaurant history. In New York, pizzerias with names like Ray’s Famous Original Pizza battled over which was the “real” original. Holzman leaned into the joke, branding his shop Danny Boy’s Famous Original — a name that felt like it had already been around for decades.
For a long time, Holzman thought he wanted to be what he calls “a fancy chef,” chasing Michelin stars and prestige. However, he realized that the world didn’t match who he really was. Instead, he found success by leaning into what felt natural — both in food and in how he connected with people.
Holzman has built a following online with his brutally honest, often hilarious, social media content. But for him, authenticity is the only strategy that works. “People are smart,” he says. “They know what’s authentic and what’s not.”
Whether he’s making a video or a pizza, he’s learned that if it doesn’t come from a real place, people won’t buy into it. “At The Meatball Shop, I was so focused on building a brand that I lost sight of the people making it happen,” Holzman says. “At Danny Boy’s Famous Original Pizza, I’m making sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Related: To Make the Perfect Cocktail, You Need Collaboration. It’s the Same When You Own a Restaurant.
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