PIZZA!!
Bravo loved to happen.
The year was 2004. Dean just arrived back in Pretoria from an extended tour of small taverns and dining rooms that took him across the entire world. From Bangkok to Calgary. From Buenos Aires to Bratislava. He saw it all. One can only imagine his dismay when he came back home and found his beloved Pretoria severely lacking on the culinary front. He wanted something new! He wanted something fresh! Dammit, he wanted something Spectacular! He was depressed. He was downright beaten down and no less than a week after he arrived home he took off again. To where? No one was certain. Some people said he went to Peru to live with a tribe of hunter gatherers deep in the Loreto region. Others whispered that he took a vow of silence and was now living in a monastery deep in the Himalayas.
Years passed. Then, suddenly, at the beginning of 2009 he was sighted: First in Naples and then two weeks later in Tripoli. After the second sighting, it was confirmed that he was being followed by a troop of wild dogs and then, he was back. Dean was a changed man. He had the look of a thousand warrior monks in his eyes. He smelled of resolve and, well, wild dogs. What happened next is uncertain… all records indicate that the property in the heart of Pretoria (that later became Bravo) never existed. All that is known is that one day, it was there. Dean worked his fingers to the bone and soon called upon his darling sister, Daniele to help him.
Daniele was a sight to see. She was as beautiful as she was ferocious. She had spent the last year in Paris on a sort of extended vacation after an incident a year earlier involving her car and a stranger’s house. In a nutshell, a man had cut her off in traffic and Daniele proceeded to follow him home, drag him out of his car and then beat him unconscious with his own shoes. She then drove her car into his living room. Four times. When the cops arrived at the scene she tried to steal their vehicle to make her escape. It finally took five policemen to take her down. The man whose home she had destroyed (a Mister Frank Jefferson) was scared to death of her and refused to press charges, out of fear for his and his family’s safety. Daniele didn’t care. She had become bored with Pretoria anyway, and Paris seemed like a nice enough place to lay low for a while. Naturally, taken her fiery disposition, Paris soon became too hot for her. Here the record is unclear and all that is known is that the “Paris Incident” involved two old ladies, a train and a really large wheel of cheese. Either way, she soon found her way back to Pretoria, coincidentally, just as Dean desperately needed her help.
The two of them worked hard and without breaks, for weeks on end. They had done it! They had succeeded in bringing Dean’s vision to the masses, but there was one problem: Dean was lonely. He longed for a confidant, a companion, a Brother in arms.
As fate would have it, Daniel happened to be in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. He had just came back home to Pretoria after a grueling worldwide amateur tennis tour. He had performed well and his tennis skills had gotten the attention of a bunch of promoters and companies, all of who were now interested in turning Daniel into a popular brand. It had been fun, but the late night drinking sessions in Cairo and the Russian roulette in Hamburg had taken its toll. Daniel was spent and on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He stumbled into Bravo one Wednesday night, took out his mandolin (which he had mastered somewhere between Serbia and Vienna (the nights there were long and lonely)) and proceeded to play a 3 hour set, in which he broke down and cried twice. Dean was repulsed, but Daniele saw something that took her breath away. Daniel, on the other hand, refused to leave the shop after that. Soon Dean conceded and Daniel became part of the Bravo family. Before they knew it this world weary tennis prodigy had crept into their hearts and became Dean’s closest friend, and the man of Daniele’s dreams.And so, Bravo was complete.
A lot has changed since the beginning: The wild dogs no longer regularly frequent the shop, Daniel’s thousand yard stare seems less intense and it has been almost three years since Daniele had last assaulted anyone. The heart and fire of Bravo, however, remains intact: it has become a bastion of Good Times; a haven for anyone looking for a place where they can enjoy the finest Pizza in a safe and friendly environment. Here at Bravo, everyone is welcome, everything is okay and everybody loves everybody.
Except those two elderly women from Paris and Mister Frank Jefferson.
