Anthony Mangieri didn’t call his pizzeria Anthony’s, or even Tony’s.  He named it Una Pizza Napoletana –  Italian for “A Neapolitan Pizza.”

The Neapolitan immigrants who first brought pizza to New York over 100 years ago made their pies much larger, thinner and crisper than the originals back home. For the better part of a century, there was no turning back.

Not Mangieri. On family visits to Naples he cultivated a soft spot for softer pizza. The pizzeria he opened in 1996 on the Jersey shore was a beachhead for a Neapolitan pizza renaissance that wouldn’t take hold for at least a decade. He moved Una to New York’s East 12th Street in 2004 and San Francisco’s 11th Street in 2010, gaining reverence and notoriety on both coasts as a pizza fundamentalist who was fanatical about his Margherita and nearly as demanding of those lining up for it.

In 2018 Mangieri returned Una to downtown New York. Last month I caught up with him at 175 Orchard Street, curious to know if he had mellowed at 50. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

How did you come up with the generic-sounding name Una Pizza Napoletana?

I remember sitting in my grandmother’s dining room. I was writing down all these names. I wanted a name that just said what it is. I didn’t want it to be my name. I wanted the name to mean something humble, but also beautiful. Some people think it means “one”, “number one” or something like that. It actually just means “A Neapolitan Pizza.” I thought it was cool to have that name.

Why did the pizza in Naples have such a profound effect on you?

When you’re a teenager, you’re looking for something so you don’t feel alone in life. When I discovered the pizza in Naples and the culture in Naples, it touched me so deeply. I found where I belonged. I found my people. I found my thing. 

The irony is that back home, this connection made you an outcast. Your fellow New Jerseyans had their own way of making and eating pizza. Same when you moved to New York. Yours was a movement of one.

I didn’t have any peers in America to look up to or be inspired by when it came to Neapolitan pizza. I definitely had pizzerias that I loved in America, like Totonno’s, Lombardi’s, John’s on Bleecker Street. There were a bunch of places that I really loved, but nothing like what touched me in Naples, nothing like what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

In the back of your mind, were you determined to be a rebel? Were you looking to create the next big thing?

It wasn’t like I wanted to do it as a concept. It’s not like Neapolitan pizza is my new concept after I had a barbecue place. My family is from that part of the world. It’s life to me. This is all I do. When I started to discover this style of cooking when I was very young and with my family in Italy, I would come back and be like, oh my God, how could no one be making this in America! It felt so ethnic and exotic. It didn’t even seem Italian to me, from what I grew up eating, which was Italian-American.

You were a tattooed hipster baker and a one-track food obsessive long before these identities became millennial archetypes. Your single-mindedness foreshadowed a generation of young food geeks who would lock themselves in a garage and not step back out into the light of day until they’d mastered the chocolate chip cookie.

I think people always did that with music, or writing, or painting. Not to say that I ever thought of myself as an artist. But I approached my work ethic with the idea of doing something like that. Most people that were in cooking would get through something and then want to get on to the next concept. Or maybe they were no longer stimulated. Maybe I’m just a dummy (laughs). I’m constantly stimulated by one thing. That’s the way I approached it. I just wanted to make this thing and make it better every day.

There’s a British expression “end of”: A person has perfected the lobster roll, the Korean chicken wing, or pizza and it’s end of story. But you weren’t the end of, were you? You were the beginning of.

What does that even mean? If you’ve achieved something, that’s the end of it? I don’t believe there’s an end to your life’s work. Otherwise, you’re dead. The journey and the constantly wanting to learn and waking up curious, I think that’s what makes life beautiful. If you really want to bring something to your community, your co-workers, your family or your friends, the only way to do that in your work is to go in with a curiosity and a humbleness and never feel that you’re the best, that there’s nowhere to go with this.

So you don’t think you’re the best? That’s not the impression you gave us in the early days of Una.

When you’re young, you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re looking for something to latch onto. Then, if you’re in it for real and it’s not bullshit, you’re gonna push and push and push and all of sudden you feel like, I’m surpassing my teachers and my inspirations so F them, I’m better than them now. You get egotistical. I’m the best. I’m great. I’m better than everybody. And you need that. That’s what gets you through life. Otherwise, you’re going get kicked in the nuts.

Then you get to a place as an adult where every day you have self-doubt. Maybe I’m full of shit. I gotta figure things out. Which is weird, because I know more now than I did then. I was 25 and I didn’t know anything. I thought I was the best. Now I’m 50 and I think I don’t know anything. There are people coming in here, they shouldn’t even be coming in. I don’t know what I’m doing.

Are you telling me Anthony Mangieri has imposter syndrome?

Don’t kid yourself, I have my ego. But I think you have to have doubts. How else can you keep learning? Honestly, if this was something I thought I had mastered, I would just close. I wouldn’t want to get up and put in any effort. 

I still change the dough recipe every day. I’m trying to improve every aspect of this restaurant, every day. Last week, I was talking about this new project I was working on for a certain part of this restaurant to make it better and one of my co-workers said to me, “Man, I didn’t think you could push it any further.” Somehow, I keep finding ways to try to fine-tune it and make it better. That’s a certain way of approaching life in general.

Do you feel you’re a perfectionist, more so than an innovator?

If you understand Neapolitan cuisine and you understand the flavors and ingredients of Southern Italy, I think the innovating is subtle. I don’t think innovating means all of a sudden you go to Naples and you’re seeing  a super-thin crust made with cornmeal and covered in hot dogs and french fries. I don’t think innovating means going 180 degrees the other way. It just means this is what we made today, if we do this tomorrow this way it’s better. And the next day this. And the next day this. That’s the innovating. Making those micro-adjustments to constantly make it better. 

There’s a really incredible guy who I love, Richard Sachs, a bicycle frame maker in Connecticut. Incredible craftsman and artist. He was a big inspiration. One of the things he always said that I loved was “imperfection is perfection.” For me, that’s where the innovation is. That’s the pushing. That’s the journey. Going to your space every day and thinking, yesterday didn’t work well so now I will try this. Or this raw material isn’t what it used to be so I’m going to search for a better one that’s going to take what I’m trying to achieve to a higher level.

Did you find this kind of subtle innovation happening in Naples?

Over time, as I kept progressing and pushing myself, I was going back to Naples and the people of that era [the noughties] where not progressing. I felt like I was surpassing it. I felt like they didn’t care. They weren’t making those micro-adjustments to constantly make it better. It’s almost like when you go to an old restaurant that’s been around for like 50 years and the third generation is running it and you go in and you’re like, this is crap. It was like that in Naples for quite a few years.

The awesome thing is there’s been an evolution, led by a lot of younger kids like Carlo Sammarco and Salvatore Lioniello who grew up on pizza in Naples and Campania. With social media they’re more connected, more worldly. They’re more open to experiment. Before, it was, “this is the way Neapolitan pizza has to be made or it’s not Neapolitan.” Now they’re approaching it with passion, with open-mindedness. They’re trying to use the best ingredients. They’re trying to make it better. The pizza in Naples and Campania is the best it’s been in years.

Why didn’t you like it when we pizza lovers broke your rules?

When I was younger, I was more of a stickler for everything. Uh-oh, they’re sharing a pizza, it’s going to be ruined! Now I don’t care what people do. Once it leaves us, do whatever you want. You can throw it on the ground and dance on top of it. I have my opinions and I think you shouldn’t share. You just miss the whole experience of it. I love pizza slices. I love Italian-American pizza. I love Roman pizza. But if I’m in Naples, I still love to eat pizza with a knife and fork, like a steak. When you eat it that way, that’s when you experience everything – the flavors, the dough – at its highest. 

On a good night, our pizza is puffy and wild and has some crazy air structure in it. If you cut it into slices as soon as at it comes out, it crushes all that beautiful work. But….(sighs)….whatever.  Everyone can do whatever they want.

You’ve maybe softened, Anthony, but you’re still that maniac who insists on things being a certain way. I love your pizza and stand in awe of your commitment,  but I wouldn’t want to live with you.

No, I’m actually a good roommatel. (Laughs) 

But you can’t sit back and relax, can you?

I refuse to relent. You definitely cannot get the pizza that I made in Mount Pleasant (New Jersey) when I was 20. Or the pizza that I made on 12th Street (New York) when I was 28. We’re constantly trying to make our pizza better. I’m truly thankful to still be able to do this, to be at a point where we’re pushing and we’re learning and we’re trying to be better and we’re super busy. It’s just like all gratitude, man.

Margot and Fergus Henderson at Joe Allen

As a lad, my father would take me to eat at Joe Allen, the enduring West Side gathering place in New York’s Theatre District. He invariably ordered us burgers and not because it was the restaurant’s least expensive main dish. Most of the Broadway personalities seated near us knew to order the burger, too. It was the best thing on the menu.

The father of the great English chef Fergus Henderson of St John Restaurant fame also took his son to the great theatre-land haunt and also insisted he have a burger.

The happy discovery of Fergus and my shared boyhood experience was undimmed by two differences in our stories: First, Fergus’s father took him to the Joe Allen in London’s West End, not the one on Manhattan’s West Side. Second, the Joe Allen burger of his memory was never the best thing on the menu. It was the best thing off the menu: In London the burger has always been unlisted – the worst kept secret around Covent Garden.

I encountered Fergus this week at the London Joe Allen, sharing a table with his wife Margot Henderson, the chef at Rochelle Canteen, and trying the guest burger she had created for Joe’s. Her Margot burger, one of four burger collaborations to be featured at Joe Allen this month, consists of a Swaledale chuck mince patty layered with roast and raw beetroot, roast red onion, watercress, green sauce and Rochelle ketchup on a St John bun.

As good as Margot’s on-menu burger is, I secretly wanted the off-menu burger Fergus and his dad enjoyed all those years ago. And now I’m hankering to take my son to Joe Allen and – what else? – insist he polish off one, too.

On a return visit earlier this month I didn’t watch the clock. I focused instead on Dom, shadowing his slow movements, tuning out the backround noise of the pizzeria and tuning in to the vocals of Claudio Villa, the “little king” of Italian song, playing on the pizza maker’s small red boombox. If ever there was music to make – and wait for – pizza by, this was it!

I mean no disrespect to the eight-time champion by asserting his feat was not quite as impressive as it seems. Nathan’s Famous franks (frankfurters) just ain’t what they used to be. They’ve shrunk over the years by, I reckon, over 25 percent, mostly in their girth. I had two in five minutes last month at the original Coney Island location. They were shamefully skinny. There was little of the signature juice and none of celebrated snap.

Back in my 20s I had a recurring Coney Island dream: I would close my eyes for a moment, then reopen them to see the world’s playground in its heyday. All the vanished arcades, rides and funhouses would be back. A Nathan’s frank would cost five cents. My grandfather would buy me two, when one was plenty.

Now I have a new dream: I close my eyes for a moment, then reopen them to see the Nathan’s incredible shrinking hot dog restored to its original, plump size. I buy two – one for my son and one for me. With our first bites the natural casing enclosing the franks breaks open. The plump hot dogs explode with juices and, we, with happiness.

I asked Attilio Reale, the accomplished pizza baker at New York’s Buca Brick Oven Pizza on West 103rd Street, if he learned to fold and tie his classic pizzaiolo hat back home in Naples.

No, the Neapolitan learned the technique working in the kitchens of American restaurants alongside Mexicans.

The major difference between these two styles is that the Mexican headgear is made with a bandanna and his, with a white cloth napkin or, if you prefer, a tovagliolo bianco.

Back in London I spotted a pizza baker at Pizza East Portobello, the new Notting Hill location of Pizza East, wearing a pizzaiolo hat nearly identical to Reale’s New York Mexican-Italian style. The main difference was that the London version was made with a tovagliolo nero.

The black hat fits suits the deconstructed workshop look of Pizza East Portobello or, if you prefer, Pizza East West. These guys could be painters, of either canvases or flats. More intimate than the original Pizza East East, its pizzas were comparable to the one I rated amongst the top 10 pizzas in London. The puffy-edged rounds pulled out of the beautifully tiled, built-in brick oven did, however, reveal some worry spots:

• The rims and bottoms of the sourdough crusts were not charred and blistered. Either by accident or design there was no black in these pizzas.
• The toppings were applied haphazardly.
• Cornicione creep – the infringement of the puffed rim towards the center, restricting the surface area available for toppings – persists.

5 Napkin built its reputation as well as its growing fleet of burger brasseries – the fourth 5 Napkin opens in Boston in a month and a fifth in Miami Beach’s South Beach soon after – on chuck meat. Even so, the introspective D’Amico was thinking the unthinkable: chucking some of the chuck.

D’Amico was restless. A chef with a passion for exploring new ideas, he was having a difficult time savouring the success of repetition, doing the same thing over and over again.

So where do you go after a 5 Napkin Burger? A 6 Napkin Burger? No, D’Amico decided to break the monotony of chuck by adding new cuts into his mince (ground beef) mix. He was after a beefier, steakier burger.

How, I’ve often wondered, did the unsung neighborhood Irish pubs of New York turn out such outstanding chopped steak burgers?  They weren’t sourcing locally and expensively from New York-area butchers (Pat LaFrieda, David Schweid) now as famous as the hot restaurants they supply (Minetta Tavern, Spotted Pig, Ai Fiori). D’Amico suspects the pubs relied on unsellable and therefore cheap cuts and scraps dumped by the national meatpacking plants. Who knew this was the stuff that great burgers were made of?

D’Amico’s idea was to incorporate somewhat leaner scraps of sirloin and, though no longer a bargain, hanger steak (thick skirt in the UK, onglet in France) into his chuck. To keep the fat content of his burgers at a steady, 5-napkin-worthy 20 percent D’Amico asked Schweid to supply him with a fattier blend of chuck than usual.

On 11 February 2011 at 11:38 AM D’Amico served me one of the first prototypes.

This photo does not lie: D’Amico’s new burger was deep-flavoured, as intended, and hit the 6-napkin mark, even if this was unintended. Importantly, it was black, crusty and caramelized like a steak on the outside, despite the deep-pink interior. The high contrast in colour and texture reflected an ideal that has eluded some burger chefs in New York and many more beyond the city line. I’ve yet to find a Londoner who can get the rouge et noir effect just right.

Not all burgers have to be crusty. On the same trip I introduced myself to the bash style burger, accessorized with caramelized onions, bacon jam, pickles, American (yellow) cheese and special sauce, at the new gastro winepub (not my term) Burger & Barrel on the northern frontier of Manhattan’s SoHo. Forget napkins: For this baby they should equip you with a disposable raincoat. When you’re devouring this sponge of succulent beef you’re not too bothered if there’s not much of a crust.The B&B bash burger, for all its messy merits, was no New York chopped steak burger. For that you have to have the blackened surfaces of D’Amico’s prototype.

Will D’Amico risk disappointing his most loyal regulars by replacing his 100-percent chuck burgers with the final version of his new blend? Will he commission a UK counterpart of that blend when he brings 5 Napkin to London in July for my BurgerMonday pop-up? In both instances he’ll have to convince himself first and his untroubled partners second. For them the success of repetition is leaving only a sweet taste.

…in a place like this…

Yet when Hugue Dufour, the French-Canadian chef-proprietor of the M. Wells Diner in Queens, New York, asked me if I’d ordered his silky-smooth parsnip soup with the sautéed foie gras topper I was surprised anyone would regard this accessory as optional.

“On ne vit qu’un foie“, I replied, a play on the French expression on ne vit qu’une fois – “you only live once.” What I essentially said to Dufour was that “you only live one liver” (wasn’t that the original title of a James Bond film?) and so I would pay the $10 supplement so as not to squander the opportunity. I don’t know what he thought of my pun, but he did reward me with this…

Eat like a kid, dine like a prince.

From feticismo to fettuccine

Comprising most of section “2” on the floor map above, Eataly’s dry pasta department is only slightly larger than your average Tesco Express mini-market. Five aisles are consecrated not just to Italian pasta but to Italian pasta made within the borders of Gragnano, a municipality in the province Naples and the region of Campania. The artisan producers of Gragnano first sought recognition from the European Union to protect the provenance of their prized pasta. Here at Eataly they seek to establish it as a status symbol as well an Italianissimo imperative. Forget Dolce and Gabbana: the designer DG stylish New Yorkers simply must have in their apartments is di Gragnano.
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Eataly didn’t need to sell me on the virtues of what my go-to sources on Italian cooking regard as the world’s best dry pasta. Were I any more excited by its endless assortment of Gragnano they’d have to empty a brown paper bag of Afeltra penne and fit it – the bag, not the penne – over my hyperventilating head. I did need to be sold on a producer, however, and it’s there, in its curatorial role, that Eataly falls short: There’s no effective way to choose among brands of varying value other than by comparing prices and packaging.

With three of my go-to sources – celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Lidia Bastianich and MasterChef (USA) judge Joe Bastianich – as partners in this enterprise and a fourth, the estimable Slow Food, acting as consultant I initially thought that quality assurance would be in the bag. But to make Eataly financially viable founder Oscar Farinetti had to set aside shelf space for deep-pocketed food companies, both Italian and American, and possibly ask moguls Mario, Lidia and Joe, the co-owners of Del Posto, the first Italian restaurant in New York to be awarded four stars by The New York Times since 1974, to set aside some of their personal preferences for small artisan producers. Mega-brands infiltrate the selection, right under Slow Food’s nose.

Yet if Eataly is occasionally turning slow food for a fast buck I don’t think that alone explains my ambivalence towards this spectacular addition to the New York foodscape. I fear my thoughts about this shopping and dining complex are shaded by a crisis in my own Italianissimo complex and, more to the point, my disillusionment with Italian coffee culture and style. These are topsy-turvy times and the beautiful is turning ugly: George Clooney is pitching Swiss espresso to the Italians and lending his image to three-story Nespresso billboards spoiling the postcard views of timeless piazze. Lavazza 1995 calendar girl Carla Bruni is married to a French president who, horror of horrors, wears shoe lifts. She tells mean lies about Michelle Obama. And the Italian-roasted espressos prepared at Eataly by uniformed baristas under the eyes of Maria Grazia Cucinotta are not nearly as good as the American ones prepared a few blocks north by tatooed retrosexual geeks in a coffee shop that goes by the less-than-Puccini-esque name of Stumptown.

Left: Carla Bruni for Lavazza. Right: Lizz Hudson for Stumptown

Do Luke Holden and Ben Conniff stuff too much fresh Maine lobster meat into the lobster rolls at their New York seafood eatery Luke’s Lobster? Judging from the photo above you’d have to say yes: 4 ounces (113 grams) of lobster chunks from 5 to 6 claws is simply too much meat to fit into a split-top bun.

But is stuffing too much lobster into a buttered and toasted roll an undesirable thing? Judging from the photo below you’d have to say no. They couldn’t overload this baby with mayonnaise even if they wanted to. Where would you put it?