Like far too many young adults, Charlie Anderson didn’t enjoy what he was doing everyday as he started his career.
After graduating from The University of Michigan with a degree in environmental engineering, he went to work as an air quality compliance engineer. Anderson would spend his time going to landfills and measuring their gas composition, analyzing methane content and oxygen levels. From there, he’d lead monthly meetings with his company’s clients to explain the results.
He didn’t love that.
On a daily basis Anderson couldn’t wait to wrap up his work to get home and do something he was actually passionate about: cooking.
“While I was in college, I was just getting really into cooking as a hobby,” Anderson says while sitting in the dining room of his new Downtown slice shop, Good Pizza. “I struggled a little bit. I liked learning and following recipes and things like that, but I always struggled to kind of feel confident as a cook.”
A turning point for Anderson arrived when he came across the book Salt Fat Acid Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat.
“It kind of gets more into the underlying principles behind cooking,” he says. “It's really about those four things, like how to use salt, how to use fat, acid and heat. If you master those four things, you can pretty much cook anything and you don't even need a recipe. You can kind of freestyle in the kitchen.”
Anderson’s work mastering that hobby turned into a YouTube channel, @CharlieAndersonCooking, focused on baking bread, and it took off in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. From there, he found success making YouTube videos that focused on pizza. Videos explore recipes for sauce, the methods to making great dough and gluten-free approaches to the craft. Today, he has more than 180,000 subscribers and multiple videos that have surpassed one million views.
All of that led Anderson to where he is today on Downtown’s East Fourth Street — which he prefaced with a video titled "How I'm opening the world's best pizzeria," posted last October.
RELATED: Good Pizza, YouTuber Charlie Anderson's East Fourth Pizzeria, Is Now Open
“It wasn't ever really in the front of my mind,” Anderson says of opening a restaurant. He wasn’t someone that grew up in the industry, or really had experience working in restaurants at all. He first got a job at Citizen Pie on West 25th St. in Ohio City, where he worked for roughly a year and fell in love with the job in a way he never could with environmental engineering.
“There are some good pizzerias around here for sure, but I've been traveling to New York, they've got these super good pizzerias on every corner,” Anderson says. “And I just kind of wanted to bring something like that to Cleveland. Just really high-quality pizza at an affordable price.”
This isn’t what Anderson grew up dreaming of. It’s not what he was educated to do, either.
But it is, most importantly, what makes him happy.
“I think success is just being happy with what you do and being able to make a living off of something that makes you happy,” he says. “I feel like my life has completely changed since I was in my engineering job. I felt trapped and kind of just going through the motions. Whereas now I can control what I do every day.”
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