do it in the most elevated way I can,” he says.


BREAD BAKING TO PIZZA MAKING


Growing up with his grandmother, his Italian heritage loomed large. Against a backdrop of stories about his grandfather who made ice cream and put his love into every detail of the product, Mangieri started visiting Italy with his mum. “It just blew my mind. I


really fell in love with Italy at a young age – the culture, the music, the people and the food,” he recalls. At the same time his mother and grandmother took him to all the pizzerias in New York City and he threw himself into learning everything he could about Italian food. He became a fan of Italian


American pizza, his reference points were John’s on Bleecker Street, Lombardi’s, Totonno’s and Patsy’s, old-school iconic pizza places in the city. But eating pizza in Naples


changed him. He fell for it “head over heels. I thought, ‘holy cow, this is so different, so foreign,’” he recalls. He embarked on a mission


to recreate that experience in New York City where, at the time, almost no one was doing that kind of pizza. Over time and with his own


technique evolving, he says he has moved further away from the idea of the Naples pizza he set out to recreate. “Years ago, I started to


feel like it had nothing to do with Naples. Of course, it has a lot to do with Naples in the root and in the idea. Pizza was invented there,” he says. “But


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I feel that, as we’ve grown, we do our own thing, and I use ingredients from wherever I think they’re best to create what I think makes our pizza the best that it can be. When you do something, eventually you need to find your own voice.” Te base of the coveted


Una pizza, the crust blistered, charred and airy, is made on instinct. Tere is no recipe and, Mangieri says, no two days are the same. Playing with different blends of flours – some nights as many as eight – the dough is a constant work in progress. “It can be pretty wild and


crazy and puffy, and kind of all over the place. It’s super hydrated and very difficult to work with and to get in and out of the oven and bake properly, but it just went that way,” he says. “I keep riding with it and keep adjusting it. I change the flour blend every day. I don’t think I’ve made dough the same way in at least the last 10 years, and I don’t write anything down,” he says, adding, “but then I’ve made every single piece of dough we’ve served for 30 years, so I have a pretty good sense of how it reacts.” Tough simple in nature,


pizza is far from simple to


make, given all the variables. “You’re dealing with a wood


burning oven, which is not easy to have at a precise temperature, because every piece of wood is different. Te dough is proofing from the beginning of service to the end of service and is evolving throughout service. And then you’re dealing with an item that is so particular to the person that opens the dough on the counter, because your fingers and your movements really affect the way the pizza comes out.” Tough the young


Mangieri’s ambition was always to make pizza, he started out with a bakery called Sant Arsenio. He couldn’t afford the set-up for a pizza restaurant, so with a wood oven he built with his father, behind a counter, he started selling bread. “We built the whole place


“Italy just blew my mind – I really fell in love with the culture, the food and the music at a young age”


out ourselves. It was very bare bones and that was how I started.” For two years, he slugged


it out six days a week, working through the night while his friends continued their normal lives. It was hard graft and he soon started to question his life choices. “It was really tough work. I


was working from 10pm until 2pm the next day. I didn’t have any money; I didn’t have a car. I was living at home. I had no girlfriend. All my friends were going off to college and had girlfriends and were going out at night. And I was like crazy baking bread all night alone,” he says. While working the bakery,


he had started experimenting with the pizzas, teaching himself what worked. “I was trying to understand if this was something I could figure out,” he says. Making pizza professionally remained his dream, but he eventually closed the bakery, and just as he was about to look for a “normal” job, he got the opportunity to open a place in New Jersey where he could give it a go as a pizza maker. Tis became the first iteration of Una Pizza Napoletana. “I thought if it doesn’t work


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