ANTHONY MANGIERI
Following his own path has taken pizza chef Anthony Mangieri to the top of the world rankings at his New York restaurant Una Pizza Napoletana. He tells Tina Nielsen about a winding career, driven by instinct, and a firm focus on delivering beautiful experiences
A
nyone walking down Orchard Street in New York City’s Lower East side around 4pm on a Tursday,
Friday or Saturday will see a line beginning to form outside number 173. For many pizza fans, standing in line well before dinner time is the only way to try the food of famed chef Anthony Mangieri at his restaurant Una Pizza Napoletana. It opens just three nights
a week and reservations are snapped up within minutes of becoming available. With 150 portions of pizza dough available for each day, it can feel like winning the lottery to get through the doors and choose from the short menu of six pizzas, served up Neapolitan style, characterized by the thin, puffy crust with a raised edge and a soft moist center. According to Jersey-born
Mangieri, the limited nature is part of what makes the place special. “We can’t serve as many people as we would like to, but
Left: Anthony Mangieri has reached the top with his pizza after a 30-year career
we don’t want to, all of a sudden, make 1,000 pizzas a night and take away what makes it great,” he says. After almost 30 years in
the business, Mangieri remains guided by the principle that he should make the dough himself and every portion ever served at Una, as he calls the restaurant, has come from his hand. Quite simply, if he is
not around, the restaurant doesn’t open. “I make all the dough that we serve. So, I’m there every day. I either bake the pizza or open all [the dough balls to make] the pizza,” he says. It is not because other
people can’t do it; he has trained staff – but for Mangieri this feels like a duty. “If people choose to come into the restaurant to spend their hard-earned money and their evening with us, I feel such a responsibility that I need to be there and give myself to them,” he says. “Food is so connected to the person and the way you handle it. I just feel like it’s not my pizza unless I’m the one making it.” Part of this is driven by the quest to improve. “I go in every day and I honestly hope that today is the day that I’m
better than I was yesterday and I finally figure it out, the messing around with the recipe is done, I got it,” he says. “I want to make the pizza because I want to try to be better at it.”
SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL
He has gone from cooking a pizza on the slate floor of the fireplace in his mother’s living room as a 15-year-old pizza geek, right to the top of the world – in 2024, Una Pizza Napoletana was named as the number one on the Italian ranking 50 Top Pizza. Long before that, American diners were aware of his genius. In a 2019 review New York
Times critic Pete Wells described Una as “unmistakeably the finest sit-down pizza in the five boroughs.”
He was in his mid-20s
“Food is so connected to the person and I feel like it is not my pizza if I am not the one making it ”
when he opened his first pizza place and while “it went really well for a small local place,” it never received the attention he was hoping for. “I was really trying to do something with it and push it and give it all my love, so I decided to finally move to New York to have a bigger audience,” he explains. In a case of fortuitous
timing, as he made that move to New York City, food writer Ed Levine published a book on pizza called A slice of heaven and included a chapter on Mangieri and Una Pizza Napoletana. It gave his pizza the attention he craved and lines out the door soon followed, as he made his name in Manhattan. A winding career has taken
him from the Jersey Shore to New York City, then California in search of a life closer to the outdoors to indulge his love of cycling, back to New York, then New Jersey and finally, since 2022, New York City, for the latest iteration of the restaurant he’d started in 1996. Sine the latest return to Manhattan things have fallen into place. “I think we’re just firing on
all cylinders. We really focus a lot on hospitality, gratitude and giving people as much love as we can,” he says. “We just want to feel like we’re doing something beautiful, something that makes people feel like they can push the envelope on whatever they’re doing in life.” Tat it happens to be pizza is almost immaterial; it is about the attitude. “I feel like I would have the same approach if I was a plumber or an electrician, it’s manual labor and I’m trying to
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