A Day Making The World’s #1 Pizza in NYC

Una Pizza Napoletana was voted number one

in the world twice,

number one in America twice.

Our style of pizza is rooted in Neapolitan,

but it's our own thing.

I've made every single pizza dough since 1996.

We've sold out every day since we've opened this location.

Regardless of the accolades,

every day I try to be better at what we're doing.

You have all these elements

that you're dealing with every day

that are constantly changing and in flux.

The ethos of what drives the place is the idea

of like truly never compromising.

[upbeat music]

Hi, I'm Anthony Mangieri,

owner and pizza maker of Una Pizza Napoletana.

We're here in the Lower East Side, New York City.

Come on in. I gotta start making dough.

We got service tonight.

So this is our dining room.

We've been open at this location for six years.

The reason we're open three days a week

is because I'm 53 years old, and this is extremely physical,

and I'm here for like 15 hours a day or more.

So we come in every day around 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning.

Every single thing we serve is prepped every day.

So we got a lot to do today,

and if we don't get all this done,

then we can't open at 5:00.

How's the dish machine going?

[Anthony laughing]

[Worker] Kevin's asking around.

Okay, yeah, tell him it's like a super emergency.

It needs to be fixed before we open tonight.

The dish machine broke.

That's normal restaurant.

That's the stuff that you don't see on Chef's Table.

[Anthony laughing]

Everything we do happens right back here.

Here, we have Henry and Desi.

They're banging it out back here with prep,

and then this is the dough room,

and this is where I'm gonna be making dough

for the next couple hours.

I think of this as fine dining,

but at the same time, it's also pizza,

so I don't wanna wear like a chef coat,

and look like I'm trying to be something else.

[gentle bright music]

So this is what I do every day for the last 30 years.

I make dough.

This is, to me, the most important part of the business.

It's what I go to bed thinking about,

and I'm always trying to find a way to make it better.

It's no joke. It starts here.

I change the recipe every day.

I don't use the exact same mixtures of flour every day,

and I'm always micro-adjusting.

Making dough is like such a living thing.

Every environment's different.

It's just every little thing changes

what you're gonna end up with.

Every day, I use anywhere between four

to like eight different kinds

of Italian flour because they all do different things.

I've experimented with every kind of flour I could find

over the last 30 years,

and I'm still experimenting.

I didn't wanna always be a pizza maker.

I wanted to be a professional skateboarder and BMX racer,

and I spent the majority of my youth living

with my grandmother,

and then throughout my teens

and into my early twenties,

I was really playing a lot of music

and trying to figure out if there was a way for me

to be a jazz musician.

Then, I realized at one point that I kind of sucked,

and I started leaning into making bread and pizza instead.

I grew up in New Jersey, the Italy of America.

I don't think of what we do

as New Jersey pizza or New York pizza.

It's our pizza, and it keeps evolving.

I'm not like trying to adhere

to any strict idea or anything else.

There's no rules for me.

[water trickling]

I'm weighing out the water for making dough,

and we're using world-famous New York City tap water.

The water is only gonna really be a catalyst

in your doughmaking

if you're making a naturally leavened dough product.

With what we're doing, it's pretty critical,

'cause there's like water, flour, salt.

That's the only thing in our dough.

There's no commercial yeast,

there's no other ingredients,

there's no sugar, no malt, nothing,

so the water's a big component of the flavor,

and this is my fancy machine,

[Anthony laughing]

telling me what temperature water is.

We're gonna add our starter.

This is what makes the dough raise.

So this is, in Italian, it's the madre.

It's sourdough naturally leavened.

It's the way leavened products were made

for thousands of years before commercial yeast.

It's just flour and water

that we keep refreshing every day.

You're letting a lot of the parts of the wheat

that are hard to digest burn out in the fermentation.

So by the time you cook it and eat it,

it's much easier to digest.

In the mixer is all the flour that I measured,

and then I'm gonna put some water in here.

I don't weigh like how much I put in.

If the starter's looking really strong and healthy,

I'm gonna use a little less.

Same with depending on the temperature.

If it's cold out, I'll use a little more.

It also depends on the time of the day

that I'm making the dough.

That's the precision.

It's more just like kind of adjusting from what I'm seeing.

This is Sicilian sea salt.

This is made in a very old-fashioned, ancient way though,

where they take it from the sea,

and they make the big piles in Trapani,

and they let it sit in the sun,

and that's how the salt comes out of the water.

It's beautiful.

I like to let the dough start to come together

and develop some of the gluten before I add the salt,

'cause the salt,

it inhibits the growth of the dough,

so I wanna add it towards the end of the mixing cycle.

I'm adding the salt now, and now some water,

and you can see when I add the water,

it kind of breaks the dough back down,

and it's making it kind of come all apart again,

and I'm gonna mix it to bring it back together.

Originally, this was, I believe,

like kind of a French bread baking technique,

and a way to be able to get a lot more water into the dough.

So the idea for me is like I wanna try

to produce a really highly hydrated dough.

A lot of water in the dough

is kind of like where a lot of those bubbles will come from,

and that structure that's super interesting.

It also becomes a lot more difficult to handle.

There's like a fine line.

If you can push it right to the line,

that's where the pizza can be really amazing.

Okay.

[upbeat music]

It is physical.

This is an extremely physical job.

It's like being...

It's total manual labor.

I'm gonna do the whole thing all over again.

So I make two batches for tonight.

The reason I do that

is because I'm one person balling and weighing,

and I don't want the dough to be sitting once I mix it

and have it start developing gluten

and everything before I can ball it.

Now, I'm gonna weigh out all the dough,

and I have to work pretty fast now too

'cause I don't want the pizza to sit too long at this state.

You wanna hurry up and get it balled

and in the tray.

It starts to get

where the gluten starts really getting activated,

and starts almost doing its first proofing,

and I don't want it to really proof before its balling.

[upbeat music]

What I do is a quick fold to kind of just get 'em organized.

The shaping and the way

that I handle 'em comes out better

if you do this little quick fold.

It's also a really old-fashioned technique

for when a baker works alone,

and it's giving it a little bit of a push

towards the next raise,

and then I'm gonna go back and ball them all,

and then they'll go in the trays.

You know, my technique for balling these doughs

is always changing,

and then I kind of like just do this,

and I develop the shape,

and then I set it back down,

and I just finish it for a second like that.

So it's very loose.

The shape on it is very loose.

Today, I think we're gonna have like 135 pizzas.

It depends on how much water I use,

and which flour I'm using, and where I mix,

'cause some days I make it weigh a little less,

and I end up with more dough.

Some days, I make it weigh a little more,

and I end up with less dough.

So I'm done balling dough.

I'm gonna go light up the oven.

We gotta get it ready.

It's about noon,

and we gotta be ready to go by 5:00 pm tonight.

So let's do it.

[upbeat music]

So we have a handmade oven from Italy.

It's the same family who's been making this oven for me

for almost 30 years.

I'm getting the oven ready for lighting.

I'm gonna put the coals from last night into the center.

I use a mixture of woods,

and I'm always kind of experimenting

and seeing which one we like best.

Right now, I'm using birch and oak.

The flow of the flame kind of circulates around the oven.

So the fire and the flame

and the smoke never go below about five inches,

so there's a chamber of space where there's no smoke

that ever touches the dough.

So it doesn't really affect the flavor.

It's more just for the burn quality.

It's not like you're smoking the pizza.

I've always used a wood-fired oven,

really because from the beginning, when I was a kid,

I was super into history,

and I wanted to try to just recreate as close as I could

to the way pizza and bread was made like 2000 years ago.

So it also adds like 50%

of the difficulty every night when you're working.

But when it works right, it's magical.

I'm peeling some bark off of the wood to just help light it.

It's basically like I'm on a camping trip every day.

This is gonna light pretty easily

'cause the bricks in here are still hot from last night,

and we start the oven like three

or four hours before we open.

One of the things

that's like actually a really old baker's technique

is that if you guys look inside the oven,

the entire dome,

all the bricks were white.

It's from burning it last night.

Then, as soon as you start it, all the bricks turn black.

Everything is covered in soot.

A basic old-school way

of knowing like oh, the oven's hot enough to cook in,

is when all the stones burn off all the soot again,

and you can see the stone again.

So that's gonna be our basic way of knowing.

So right now, we're just gonna keep feeding it with wood,

and we're gonna do it in a gentle way.

So we're gonna go slow,

and let the heat actually penetrate the stones,

especially the floor.

'Cause once we open,

all this wood is gonna live in the left corner

for the entire night.

So whatever we can do right now

to get the floor hot is gonna have to sustain the floor

for the entire evening when we make like 130 pizzas

or 150 pizzas.

And here's our mozzarella.

We get it from the same family

for since the beginning of the business basically,

and buffalo mozzarella is a pretty wet cheese.

If you're gonna cook with it, you have to drain it.

So we cut ours in half.

We let it drain for three or four hours

before we cut it into the size

that we wanna use on the pizza,

and this has been draining for just a few hours,

and look at all this liquid that's underneath it.

Imagine this releasing on the pizza when we're cooking 'em.

You're gonna end up with like a soggy pizza

just covered in water,

and it's a little bit of a process,

but the cheese is incredible, so it's worth the effort.

So the oven's starting to get going now,

and once it does, I can't put my arm in the oven,

so I'm gonna use this tool.

This is a pizza peel.

There's a metal one like this that we use

for actually moving the pizzas around in the oven

and taking 'em out.

I could just grab it, do it, drop it back,

get back to what I was doing.

So I came up with all these things

that were just to make it function for a one-man operation.

And I saw this in the store,

and what it is

is, you know, it's funny,

it's a Christmas wreath hanger,

and the same with like this whole cutout too.

Originally, people would just have two people,

so you'd stand like this, and somebody would slide it on.

But since I was alone,

I was like I need to have this thing supported

and have it be flushed,

so I started always cutting out the counter,

and making sure that thickness was the thickness

of this peel, so I could just slide the dough right on,

turn around, grab it, go in the oven,

set it back, grab this,

and move it around and set it on the plate.

That's how it all came together like this.

So that's the story of this little setup in here.

The oven's going.

We gotta get in the kitchen,

and we're gonna make our sorbetto

and our ice cream that we make every day for service.

So we gotta keep it moving.

[upbeat music]

So now, we're gonna spin our sorbetto.

Every day, we juice a fruit.

Don't get any of my measurements on camera.

I don't want anyone trying to make this.

Tonight, what we're gonna serve our guests is Asian pear

that are locally grown.

My grandfather was a ice cream maker,

and that's what he did for a living,

so I'm kind of like always been obsessed with ice cream,

and I feel like it's a little bit of a nod to him,

but like I take a lot of pride in this,

and I love when people order it.

We just juiced our Asian pears,

locally grown,

these are from Pennsylvania,

and then some lemon

'cause it acts almost like a stabilizer.

If I did straight Asian pear,

it would have a texture like baby food.

I think like after you eat a pizza,

it's nice to have something that isn't like carb-based

or wheat-based.

It's nice to have something that's lighter

and kind of cuts it,

and it's a great way to end your meal.

I can't wait for you guys to try this.

So that's it, and then it's going straight into the machine.

It's an Italian machine,

Carpigiani.

So this is all refrigeration around it.

So it's freezing it as it's spinning it,

and then the design of the paddle and everything is perfect,

and that's how it's able to spin it

and put just enough air into it,

and it makes an incredible texture.

You guys can see.

So that's what we just poured in,

and it's still total liquid right now.

So we're gonna use that little air valve to open it

and keep checking,

and see like when we get to the right consistency.

Now, it's turning into what looks like an ice cream

or a sorbetto.

So now, it's pretty much ready.

Every fruit gives you a little bit different consistency.

So we don't use any stabilizers.

So here it is.

Making it every single day fresh,

that like really goes a long way in the texture of it,

and the taste, and the experience for the guests.

So now, we're gonna make the cremolata.

So this is, again, so simple.

It's almost like an in-between texturally

of like American ice cream, gelato, and Italian ice.

It's like a little bit lighter,

a little bit more milky.

There is no egg in it.

I like simple flavors,

and then I like to keep pushing on that,

and figure out how to make it better, cleaner, simpler,

and still be like really amazing, and people love it.

Same thing with as a sorbetto,

directly in the machine.

So it's almost ready.

We're about to finish up our cremolata.

We're gonna get it out of the machine.

This is the consistency that I'm looking for,

and the texture is really good.

So here, I have some finely-ground Sicilian almonds,

and it just gives it a really cool texture,

and then we serve it with like our house whipped cream,

and a tiny little slice of orange peel

from Caffe Sicilia a Noto,

which is, like, he makes the best candied orange peel

on earth.

It basically tastes like the best vanilla soft serve ever.

And that's it. Ice cream's done.

Now, we're just gonna put this in the freezer.

One of my team members

is gonna roast the peppers in the oven,

and then our front of the house

is gonna show up pretty soon,

and then they're gonna start setting up the dining room,

and then we're gonna do pre-shift around 4:30.

Alright, time for my burrito.

See you later.

[Anthony laughing]

[upbeat music]

Okay, it's 4:30.

We're gonna do pre-shift real quick before we open at five.

Come on.

Hey.

How you guys doing?

Good. Good, okay.

Try to make your movements through the room

as efficient as possible.

If you're going to the back to get a fork,

make sure on your way,

you're clearing a table,

you're engaging with a guest,

you're just maximizing those kind of movements.

Every single thing in the restaurant is your responsibility

from the front door to the back door,

other than making pizza.

The whole restaurant is yours to worry about, okay?

And that's it, if you have any questions,

just always ask me.

Cool, thank you guys.

[upbeat music]

We just finished with our pre-shift.

It's five o'clock. We have a line outside.

I'm gonna go get changed,

and we're gonna start making some pizzas.

[upbeat music]

So we're back here in the pizza station.

Our system is designed as I'm opening the pies

and building 'em, and Sean is putting the pizzas in the oven

and taking 'em out.

It's just the two of us back here tonight,

and it's really all about like just efficiency,

and being able to move in this space together,

and have everything in its right place.

'Cause as you can see, we have to move really quick,

or the dough's gonna stick to the counter,

and then they're gonna rip,

they're gonna get holes in 'em,

he won't be able to get 'em in the oven,

so we need to be really fast.

We have our spolvero, which is this special flour

that's like a semolina,

but it's milled specifically for working on the counter,

and that's what we use to help slide this super wet dough in

and out of the oven.

The dough is extremely delicate.

We can't slap it around.

I'm never gonna touch the edges.

And if you push on it,

you're gonna deflate the air out of it,

and it might not come back in the oven.

I always wanna create as much air in the dough as possible,

and have it really come out looking wild,

like a piece of nature.

And so I have all my ingredients lined up in bowls

in the order of kind of the way that I top the pizzas,

and I just work down through the line.

So the toppings are really basic,

and really focused on the highest quality ingredients.

Super simple.

These tomatoes are like three times the price

of what people think good tomatoes are.

They're hand-harvested.

They're sweet, but they're also acidic.

They taste a little bit like a green fruit.

This is the spoon that we've made every single pizza with

in 30 years.

Sauce is nice today.

Yeah, the cheese is really nice.

Everything's nice.

Today, I think we're gonna have like 135 pizzas.

We've never not sold out, and it's been six years.

So we opened up about a half an hour ago,

and we've almost already made 20 pizzas.

To open it and top it, just one, is probably like a minute.

And to bake it, it's like max two minutes.

We don't have a kitchen printer back here,

and I did that purposefully

because I want the servers to come back and engage with us,

'cause the idea is we wanna know what's going on,

we want them to know what's going on,

and so there's a lot of communication.

We only cook three pizzas at a time, maximum ever,

and then once we start and we start landing 'em,

that becomes the spots for the night,

and that's where you always land them.

But then once they set, we pick 'em up,

and move them a little bit around

to kinda get the bottom even.

The flakes that we throw in

that we keep under the oven

is a really ancient technique from Naples,

and what it does is it creates a boost

in the temperature in the oven, but a very slight boost.

It's kind of like a little bit

of like a thermostat adjustment for the oven.

The goal being that we cook the pizza as fast as possible

with it still being fully cooked.

So when Sean's sliding the pizza in,

and you're gonna set it down like that,

and then you quickly pull it out from under it,

and the idea is to get it out,

so that the pizza goes on in a completely perfect circle.

It takes a lot of practice.

The nuances of when it comes out great

is connected to these movements.

So I think that's kind of it for tonight.

I have like another six hours of making pizza.

I hope you guys enjoyed spending the day with me

and seeing a little bit of what it's like

to be a pizza maker here at Una Pizza Napoletana,

and come and see me sooner, right?

I'm always here.

[upbeat music]

Not bad for an old guy.