Celebs were surprised with pizza during the Oscars last night, and the pizza parlor owner was just as surprised!
E! News spoke to Big Mama's and Papa's Pizzeria owner Wayne Grigorian about Ellen DeGeneres tasty stunt during the telecast yesterday, and while some may question whether or not the funnywoman had this special surprise up her sleeve, Grigorian insists it wasn't planned.
In fact, he didn't know it was all going down until he saw it on the television!
"My daughter called me last night and she said, 'Dad, are you watching TV?' I said, 'No,' I was working on the computer. She said, 'Turn the television on because you guys are delivering pizza to the Oscars.' I said, 'What?!,'" he tells E! News.
"I turn the TV on and I see one of our guys located in the Hollywood area, Sunset Boulevard, which is almost walking distance from where the event was happening, and I see the guy, Edgar. I know him very well. I know all of them. And I said, 'I can't believe that! This guy is delivering pizza on the stage at the Oscars!'"
So you could only imagine what Grigorian was feeling at that moment. "It was quite exciting, it was quite amazing. I was stunned. I couldn't even talk. What is going on here? We were not even aware of that. It was quite a surprise. It was a very pleasant surprise," he said.
Grigorian continued to deny any claims that the stunt was planned, telling us that although Ellen is a regular customer of theirs, "we didn't know nothing about it."
"I guess they felt hungry at the time and wanted to order some pizza and decided to order from us. We appreciate that. We are very much grateful to her," he added.
The pizzeria's business, as one might have guessed, skyrocketed after it's Oscar debut. "Last night, because we have online ordering service here, and our online orders started all of a sudden pouring. We were getting orders in frequency of one every minute, we were not ready for that. We knew were gonna get some orders because of the Oscars, but this event it made it unbelievable."
But Grigorian wasn't mad about that at all. "It's a wonderful thing," he said. "It's just like winning the lottery."
—Reporting by James Sullivan