Deaf couple launch pizza place in the Mission

There's a full house during the dinner rush at Mozzeria, a month-old Italian restaurant and pizzeria writes Paolo Lucchesi for the San Francisco Chronical (04/01/12). 

Every one of the 45 or so seats is full. There's a slight hint of smoke in the air, thanks to the huge wood-fired oven in the middle of the narrow dining room. Music is playing, but the din is noticeably muted.

A waitress carrying two full plates meanders through the crowd, stopping short of a standing patron blocking her path. With both hands full, she can't tap him on the shoulder. And before sidestepping and successfully swiveling by, she can't ask him to move, because the diner is deaf. And so is she.

Mozzeria may be the first restaurant run by a deaf couple in a major city. The owners, the husband-and-wife pair of Melody and Russell Stein, were both born deaf. Their children, 10-year-old Rylan and 12-year-old Taysia, can hear and are frequent presences in the restaurant. Russell Stein's mother helps out, too.

Yet Mozzeria is more than an endearing family effort. It's already become a beacon for the Bay Area's close-knit deaf community.

Melody Stein was born in Hong Kong and moved to Fremont at age 6. She attended Washington, D.C.'s Gallaudet University, where she met her future husband. He was from a similar big-city background, the pizza mecca that is New York.

After spending nearly a decade in South Dakota, working for a nonprofit organization serving deaf people, they decided it was time for a change. (Though one of their innovations would come in handy in their second careers.) When they moved to San Francisco, a restaurant wasn't in the plans. But that quickly changed.

"I couldn't see myself working at (nonprofit organizations) for the next 10 years, and traveling wasn't good for my family," Melody Stein said in an interview conducted by typing side by side on laptops. Instead, she decided to take after her parents, who are in the restaurant business. "Since I was a kid, I always wanted to run a restaurant," she said.

For training, she attended hospitality school, and went on a gastronomic tour of Italy. Both Steins are self-trained in the kitchen.

After two years of planning, fundraising, real estate bidding wars and the usual construction adventures, Mozzeria opened on Dec. 9, on 16th Street near Guerrero.

Opening a restaurant is never easy for anyone, but the current tech age made the bureaucratic process easier for the Steins, with tools like e-mail and iPhones. Melody Stein has chronicled the entire process, from the chimney installation to the health inspection, on her blog at mozzeria.com.

Technology is key to relating to customers, too. For deaf patrons who call the restaurant for takeout, Mozzeria uses a video relay service, a groundbreaking system that Russell Stein helped develop in his South Dakota career. It features an American Sign Language interpreter relaying a conversation between the two callers.

But for Melody, the biggest surprise of the opening process - aside from the difficulty of getting a small-business loan - was getting feedback from the hearing customers, some of whom have complained on Yelp about the lighting and the music. The Steins say the early reviews have been helpful in figuring out what people want.

The Mozzeria staff consists of eight rotating servers. All are fluent in ASL, and three are deaf. In the kitchen, two dishwashers are deaf, and the third knows ASL.

Most cooks can hear, and the ones who don't know sign language use creative ways of communicating, often jotting quick notes on a dry-erase board in the back kitchen.

There haven't been any major hiccups so far.

"Communication is not a problem, period," said line cook Franklin Grammar, who believes the universal language of restaurant kitchens trumps any potential hurdles. "With the dishwashers, you can look into each other's eyes and know."

The attitude extends to the entire restaurant. The goal is simply to be a great restaurant that all people - hearing and deaf - can enjoy.

"I want Mozzeria to be known for its pizzas and other Italian food, not for deafness," said Melody Stein, noting that they've already established regulars of all sorts.

Still, it's hard to ignore that, on many nights, the clientele is predominantly deaf.

"We are always the only deaf people in restaurants, always," Russell Stein said. "Now it's sometimes the reverse."

Yet the feeling at Mozzeria seems primarily one of locals enjoying a communal setting.

"It's simple cooking, which I love," Grammar said. "There's an aspect of family here. It's a lot bigger than any individuals."

Mozzeria, 3228 16th St. (near Guerrero Street), San Francisco; (415) 489-0963. mozzeria.com. Dinner Tuesday-Sunday; brunch Saturday-Sunday.

Film about deaf wrestler winning audiences

Having grown up both an athlete and a movie fan, Eben Kostbar knew when he heard the story of wrestler Matt Hamill that something cinematic was possible writes DAN BENNETT North County Times (27/10/11).

Kostbar, a producer, writer, director and sometime actor, had grown up inspired by underdog films such as "Rocky," "Rudy" and "Hoosiers." A former wrestler and fan of mixed martial-arts, Kostbar liked what he saw in Hamill's story. Here was an athlete who was deaf, and managed to overcome a low-income, high-risk background to find fame and success in sports.

Hamill is a three-time NCAA Division III National Champion in wrestling, and earned a silver medal in Greco-Roman wrestling and a gold medal in freestyle wrestling from the 2001 Summer Deaflympics. Hamill was later a contestant on the third season of "The Ultimate Fighter" reality television show.

The movie Kostbar co-produced and co-wrote on Hamill's life is called "The Hammer." The film is opening for short runs at dozens of theaters across the country today, including the Vista Village Metroplex 15 and UltraStar Cinemas Mission Marketplace 13 in Oceanside. It is directed by Oren Kaplan and co-written and produced by Joseph McKelheer.

"I heard Matt's story and thought, 'Wow, that's remarkable,'" Kostbar said in a telephone interview. "He's an inspiring guy. He was receptive to meeting and talking about making his story into a film, and it took off from there."

Kostbar says he knows sports films need a hook and some emotional momentum.

"Matt was open to including all of the aspects of his life," Kostbar said. "It's really a perfect underdog story. Here was a deaf person accomplishing something that had never been done by another deaf person. Although I knew American Sign Language, I didn't have a lot of experience with deaf people, but I was fascinated by this. I knew that a movie would draw the interest of hearing people who wanted to know more, and would also inspire the deaf community."

Filming for "The Hammer" happened mostly in New York, as Hamill attended Rochester Institute of Technology. While Kostbar initially considered playing the lead role himself, the filmmakers ultimately decided to hire a deaf actor, Russell Harvard, who had a role in the film "There Will Be Blood."

"We made sure we had deaf crew members, and that people from the deaf community were involved throughout," Kostbar said. "We wanted everything as authentic as possible."

After finishing production, "The Hammer" was submitted for film festivals across the country, and became a festival success story, winning audience-favorite awards almost everywhere it landed.

"The audience simply took the film to heart," Kostbar said. "We were so happy with the festival reaction."

The festival success was so strong, in fact, that "The Hammer" was able to do what most independent, low-budget films rarely do: pick up a distributor for theatrical distribution. The film will have a DVD release early next year, but the filmmakers are encouraging people to see it in theaters for maximum effect, and to show distributors that audiences will support independent films such as this.

"The film will also make wrestling and mixed-martial arts fans happy, because the action is so real," Kostbar said. "It will also bring attention to the deaf community in the best possible way. It's a film that anyone who has struggled will identify with."

Visit thehammerfilm.com