Down North Pizza’s founder set out to help formerly incarcerated people get their lives back. Then it became personal.
Muhammad Abdul-Hadi had no experience in pizza when he conceived Down North. He just wanted to help formerly incarcerated people. He is now telling his story, and sharing dozens of recipes.
More than a decade ago, Muhammad Abdul-Hadi was working at addiction treatment centers and developing real estate. He thought he could combine his two lines of work by employing some of his clients to renovate properties, helping to keep them out of the criminal justice system.
In 2015, Abdul-Hadi bought a ramshackle, three-story storefront in the city’s Strawberry Mansion section, one of the poorest areas of the city. He didn’t quite know what he would do with it. But it was on busy Lehigh Avenue, next to a Free Library branch. In 2017, he decided that it could work as a takeout pizzeria and that it would exclusively employ previously incarcerated people.
Abdul-Hadi said he chose pizza because “I didn’t see too many Blacks in pizza. I thought a lot of times, we limit ourselves to certain genres of food. I wanted to shatter ceilings in different ways. I was looking at how we could potentially penetrate this market and help some people out.”
He had no prior experience in restaurants, but “when someone says I can’t do something, I’m going to show you I can do it 10 times more,” he said.
By all measures, Down North Pizza has been a success since opening in March 2021. Its core staff of six has had few turnovers, Abdul-Hadi said. And the shop has won acclaim not only for its social mission but for its crispy-edged, Detroit-inspired square pizzas. It was among three Philadelphia restaurants cited in November 2021 by the New York Times in a roundup of “the 50 most vibrant and delicious restaurants” in the United States. Last year, Abdul-Hadi and the Down North Foundation received a Leadership Award from the James Beard Foundation.
Now, Abdul-Hadi is telling his story and that of Down North in the new We the Pizza, a cookbook that showcases executive chef Mike Carter’s recipes along with anecdotes, facts about the criminal justice system, and even a Spotify playlist. David Joachim, who works with Marc Vetri on his books, collaborated with Abdul-Hadi on the book. Amurri Lauren, a local photographer, captured the people, food, and street scenes.
The book has been in the works since late 2021, when Raquel Pelzel, then editorial director of cookbooks for Clarkson Potter and now at Voracious, spotted Down North in a Bon Appetit article. “I just thought the story was incredible, and Muhammad seemed like such an amazing leader and doing something that was so great for his community,” Pelzel said.
“Then I actually went to Philly and tried the pizza and I was just like, ‘I’m done,’” Pelzel said. “There’s so many layers to this book. I’d really love readers to fall in love with it multiple times over — obviously, it’s a pizza book and user-friendly. But then you also start reading the stories, and then you fall into the backstory of the people who work there, and then the third layer is obviously the ‘ticker’ at the bottom.” Rather than arrange stories and statistics about the U.S. incarceration system in the back or front matter, blurbs appear at the bottom of some pages.
“It’s probably one of the most important books I’ve ever worked on in my life,” Pelzel said.
Down North’s launch in 2021 generated plenty of media coverage. But few people knew that at the time Abdul-Hadi was himself recently caught inside the justice system.
In We the Pizza, Abdul-Hadi relates how he pleaded guilty to insurance fraud in 2020, just a few months before Down North’s soft opening. For a year, he had to live alone, associate with few people, and charge his ankle monitor in the outlet next to Down North’s deep-fryer.
Abdul-Hadi, now 39, grew up in West Philadelphia in what he calls privilege — “not financial privilege,” he said in an interview. “It’s the privilege of having two parents in a household growing up.” His father, Khalil, who died in 2011, was a mechanical engineer and counseled inmates at Holmesburg Prison.
In 2015, around the time he bought Down North’s building, Abdul-Hadi started a company called Legacy House to provide housing and support for the clients of Liberty Way, an addiction treatment center based in Bucks County. After only a few years, Legacy House grew to 13 locations. Meanwhile, Abdul-Hadi’s real estate business, Prestige Worldwide, was renovating properties throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania. He enrolled in the criminal justice program at Temple University to learn more about the system, and in May 2018, he received his bachelor’s degree.
The insurance-fraud indictment, in March 2019, came “clear out of nowhere,” he writes in We the Pizza. The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s Office accused Abdul-Hadi and 10 other people of fraud for illegally directing clients to live at the homes as part of their treatment. The state alleged that Liberty Way clients were trapped in a cycle of ineffective treatments and near-inevitable relapse as the company made tens of millions of dollars from insurance reimbursements and kickbacks.
“I was just a contractor in the situation, but it seems I was doing business with the wrong people,” Abdul-Hadi writes.
In June 2020, Abdul-Hadi accepted a deal in which he paid $500,000 restitution and served a year of house arrest and five years’ probation, according to court records. “I had firsthand knowledge of how hard it is to get back on your feet after incarceration,” he writes.
At the time, restaurants were failing all over because of the pandemic. Yet “giving up on Down North was not an option,” he writes. “Quite the opposite. My indictment and house arrest only strengthened my resolve to get this pizza shop open.”
That fall, Down North began doing pop-ups to test the concept. When it opened officially, Abdul-Hadi said in an interview, he avoided the spotlight “because I don’t really care about a lot of the other stuff that people care about. I’m the owner. I was so focused on the strides that we were making and the impact that Down North was having that I let certain things slip away on the media side.”
“What’s important now is that we are still here, and we are still thriving,” Abdul-Hadi said. “As long as we are still doing what we’re doing, making great pizza and being a social beacon, then Down North is Down North. And that’s the goal.”
The cookbook portion of We the Pizza is all about Carter, 39, who joined Down North in 2020 after he was laid off from V Street, a vegan restaurant in Center City that closed during the pandemic. He and Abdul-Hadi were inspired by Philadelphia songs while naming the pizzas — the plain cheese is No Betta Love, after the Young Gunz hit, and the vegetable-topped Uptown Vibes was conceived as the song by North Philly native Meek Mill was charting in 2020.
In We the Pizza, Carter writes that Daniel Gutter, owner of Circles & Squares and Pizza Plus, “taught me his square-pie dough,” but wanting it “lighter and fluffier,” along with “more flavor” from the cheese, Carter “took what the Gut showed me and made it my own.” But this wasn’t his first pizza effort.
While serving 7½ years in a state prison in western Pennsylvania for aggravated assault, Carter created crude doughs in his cell by mixing crushed ramen noodles and Cheez-Its in potato chip bags and cooking them in a “stinger” pot fired by bare electrical wires. (He includes the recipe in the book with the warning: “Do not try this at home.”)
Making pizza, he writes, is his way of showing how he is succeeding.
“We’ve become like a destination spot for people that hit the city,” Carter said last week at Down North, where he said about a third of the customers are from the neighborhood. “They’re always saying, ‘Why don’t you put it downtown?’ I say, ‘Why don’t you all come to Strawberry Mansion?’ Believe it or not, a lot of people from out of town, I tell them to grab their pizza and go to the park,” said Carter, referring to Fairmount Park, just blocks from the shop. “We’ve got the biggest inner-city park in the country. I had a guy come back and said, ‘Yo, you’re right.’”
Besides accolades, Down North has attracted powerful allies from academia (Celeste Winston of Temple), the business world (Triple Bottom Brewing, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Juvenile Justice Service Center), and the culinary world. Carter and the rest of Down North’s crew have collaborated with chefs such as Mike Solomonov of Zahav, Marc Vetri of Vetri Cucina, Marcus Samuelsson of Red Rooster, Cristina Martinez of South Philly Barbacoa/Casa Mexico, and Reem Assil of Reem’s California, boosting the shop’s visibility. (Some of the chefs also lent recipes featured on Down North’s menu and in We the Pizza.)
There is more on the way from Abdul-Hadi and Carter, who say they are preparing to open a second restaurant, in West Philadelphia, with the same mission. It will not be a pizzeria, Abdul-Hadi said, but he hopes it will repeat Down North’s success — in every way.
“I’m a for-profit business, so I need to make money, but that’s not the fulfilling part for me,” Abdul-Hadi said. Down North “changed my life because I have an opportunity to change others’ lives. That’s the transformative thing for me. The thing that keeps me going is seeing the guys and women doing good and also excelling in life.”
This story has been updated to adjust a number of details with respect to Down North’s history, Carter’s work with Gutter, and to correct a misspelling of Abdul-Hadi’s first name.