Behind the scenes at D.C.'s viral oxtail pizza carryout

On a weekday afternoon in early September, a small crowd has formed in the cramped waiting area at Today’s Pizza, a carryout on 12 St. NE in Brookland that has recently blown up on social media for its innovative menu and snappy videos. The line is nowhere near what it reaches on weekend evenings — or before a Commanders game — but the mix of locals and out-of-towners are still hungry and ready to sample the oxtail, jerk chicken, and seafood slices, crab-stuffed egg rolls, and other foods inspired by Black culinary traditions.

As everyone stares into their phones awaiting orders, Aqil Baker, one of the shop’s two co-owners, is interrupted first by a truck driver who wants to discuss the trash pickup schedule and next by a woman asking about parking.

Sensing that customers are growing impatient, 60-year-old Baker — muscled and bearded, wearing thick-rimmed glasses and sleek athletic gear that makes him look 15 years younger — brings out small bowls of apple cobbler cheesecake for customers to sample while they wait. He’s met with nods of approval when he asks how it tastes. No one is staring at their phones anymore.

“Everybody that comes in here is somebody,” Baker says later. “So I'm gonna treat Jay-Z the same way I would treat those two guys [that were] sitting right there because they are important parts of the machinery to keep that door opening and closing.”

This customary warm welcome is just one of the reasons Today’s Pizza has amassed more than 170,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok, where Baker regularly posts videos of influencers, athletes, and everyday neighbors tasting their pies. But for the co-owners and main kitchen staff, it’s always been bigger than pizza. Combined, they’ve spent more than 40 years in prison for crimes they committed when they were younger and caught up in D.C. street life. They’re returning citizens who see the business as an opportunity to support their community in ways they would have benefited from as younger men.

“We are a Black-owned business. We come from the streets and from, basically, being discarded citizens,” says co-owner Kwabena "Shahir" Nkrumah. “We came from being those people who were counted out. … That pre-school to prison pipeline, all of those tropes — statistically, we fell into that. And to be able to build a million-dollar carryout is unheard of.”

As Baker and Nkrumah tell it, the opportunity to open the store more or less fell into their lap. A few years after Baker was released from prison in 2013, following an 18-year stint, the two were introduced by a mutual friend at their mosque. (Their shared Islamic faith later became a staple of their business practices, as all of their menu items are halal and made without pork.) 

During the pandemic, Baker’s wife learned that the owners of the pizzeria next door to her real estate brokerage were selling their store. Baker says he “looked up the numbers” and saw that in the U.S., pizza was a nearly $50 billion industry. He had a bad taste in his mouth from memories of his father, who once owned a carryout on New York Ave NW and left the family when Baker was a child. But the deal felt like an answered prayer for Baker and Nkrumah, who’d been looking together for investment opportunities since the early pandemic.

In the past, Nkrumah had owned an independent record label and helped operate his family’s now-closed restaurant and lounge, Flava at Wazobia, near the Howard Theatre. Baker had sold Islamic clothes and oils. But the brick-and-mortar pizza shop felt tangible and sustainable.

When the aspiring entrepreneurs took over the pizza shop in December 2021, business got off to a slow start. They didn’t change much from the previous owners’ operation, selling pizza with classic toppings. 

“Neither one of us are chefs,” says Nkrumah. “We’re just businessmen.”

Things began to change when they brought in the catering company Mama’s Boiz, a pair of brothers, Jerome and Idris McIntyre, to run the kitchen. The latter met Nkrumah while incarcerated, but their connection continued years later as he brought his homemade sauces and dishes to the shop, helping them out informally in the kitchen. Idris McIntyre quit his full-time job roughly two years ago, and Mama’s Boiz has led flavor and dish creation ever since.  

One of their early innovations was adding oxtail pizza to the menu. D.C. food reviewer Big Schlim had suggested trying the tender, fatty, slow-cooked Caribbean favorite as a pizza topping, and they obliged. A New York shop had already popularized oxtail pizza, but the trend hadn’t made its way down to the D.C. area yet.

Shortly after Mama’s Boiz got the recipe down, Schlim posted a video of himself trying Today’s Pizza’s version. Customers began rolling in. 

“It was almost instantaneous,” says Nkrumah. ”It spread like wildfire. People were coming from all over and posting us all over social media.”

Baker also beefed up their own social media presence, recording customers trying the oxtail and jerk slices and testing out slogans like, “You know we the cheesiest,” and, “Pizza from the Black experience.” He also tagged influencers as collaborators on posts, which helped grow the store’s following. A few viral videos later, and foodies were visiting from other states just to try the oxtail on a regular basis.

“It's been a blessing because people pay for the true, organic grassroots marketing that we have received,” says Nkrumah. “We haven't really paid for marketing, but we have received so much support from the community at large.”

The effort they’ve put in online has paid off. They’ve since opened a satellite location at Sycamore & Oak, the all Black-owned business hub in Congress Heights. Nkrumah says he hopes their business model and positive energy inspires investors to help them expand throughout the region and beyond.

In line with their desire to give back, they run cooking classes for local kids on Mondays through Mama’s Boiz’s nonprofit — Brothers Against Drugs, Jail, and Murder — and host workshops aimed at preventing local youth from making the same mistakes they did. They plan to partner with D.C.’s Department of Parks and Recreation to expand their reach and host additional workshops at the nearby Turkey Thicket Recreation Center. 

“Just because you were incarcerated, I don’t care for how long, you do have an opportunity,” says McIyntre, who, like Baker, served 18 years in federal prison. “You still can make your own way.”

Back at the shop, extraordinary smells are wafting from the kitchen. McIntyre is rolling out a new seafood platter served with a strawberry mango jerk sauce, along with new gooey desserts like a peach cobbler cinnamon roll.

Like classic D.C. carryouts, the menu seems to feature almost everything. Today’s Pizza even sells a specialty pizza covered in fries, chicken tenders, and mumbo sauce, an ode to the city’s carryout culture that dates back to the 1960s — but really took off in the ‘90s when “the city was extravagant, when everything was over-the-top,” Baker says. (Unlike those spots, however, the most popular items at Today’s cost upwards of $20, a result of McIntyre’s insistence that they use fresh, high-quality ingredients.) 

The team doesn’t always agree on the direction of the business. McIntyre, for example, shares separately that he hopes they rebrand and start offering breakfast. Nkrumah hopes they franchise Today’s and “build it into an alternative pizza empire to rival Papa John’s or Domino’s,” bringing gourmet pizza from the Black experience to the masses. 

But one thing they all agree on is that everything they do should honor their faith and provide a positive example for the city that shaped them.

“We made mistakes,” Baker says. “But we’re giving back to the communities that we once ravaged and tore apart. And we’re trying to make a difference with the youth. That's the biggest thing we can do. 

“We can't take back what we did,” he adds. “But we can live better from this day on until we die.”