Freelance Pizza, a charitable but questionably legal project started by Dave Quaile during the pandemic, might be coming back after a year-long absence, writes Jason Sheehan for Philadelphia Magazine.

Quaile, a culinary school dropout with a love for making pizza, started documenting his pizza experiments on Instagram when COVID-19 brought the entire city to a standstill. 

He then started giving away slices in exchange for dry goods and clothing donations. Not exactly a legal practice, but he was helping others and having fun in the process.

Freelance Pizza quickly gained a cult following and Quaile expanded his operation from his own kitchen first to commercial kitchens abandoned by their regular crews and later to after-hours pop-ups on street corners that felt “like a weird, shady drug deal, but with pizza and clothes that I’d walk to Philly AIDS Thrift on my way to work every day.”

Once Freelance Pizza stopped being fun, he stopped doing it. But more than a year later, his Instagram account is once again active and he is considering coming back.

“I’m still figuring out the best method to keep doing this because I honestly love and miss it,” said Quaile. 

Read more about Freelance Pizza and what a return may look like at Philadelphia Magazine.

_____