By Eileen Moon
ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS – It started the way things do in a small town, with someone who was strolling along First Avenue noticing the posters plastering the windows of a long-vacant building.
“Una Pizza Napoletana,” the posters read. Soon, other people noticed and the buzz began to grow. Inevitably, in a time of tweets and texts and Instagram, the news went viral: This small town on Sandy Hook Bay was soon to welcome the most renowned pizza chef this side of the Bay of Naples.
After pioneering his own particular version of Neapolitan pizza, first in Point Pleasant, then in New York City, then in San Francisco and again in New York – where the most recent incarnation of Una Pizza resides at 175 Orchard St. in the East Village – Anthony Mangieri is famous. Famous for the quality of the Neapolitan-inspired pizza he makes with his own hands and famous for the passion and purpose he invests in his work and play.
“Life is short,” he said.
An avid cyclist, Mangieri keeps a bike in storage on this side of the river so he can ride to Hartshorne or Huber Woods when he gets a break from the business of renovating what will be the new home of Una Pizza in Atlantic Highlands.
A New Jersey native, Mangieri sees his latest enterprise as a return to his roots. He could be anywhere, he says, but there’s something about New Jersey and the Jersey Shore that draws its sons and daughters back, no matter how far they may have roamed.
It’s time for him to reconnect, he said, and time also to celebrate the tastes and flavors of this place we might otherwise take for granted. “I want to really connect with things in New Jersey that I love, that I think are important and worth preserving.”
He takes a brief detour from talking Una Pizza to rave about the sausage and peppers on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights, Kohr’s custard, Vic’s in Bradley Beach and Steve’s beloved Italian hot dogs at Mr. Pizza Slice in Red Bank.
He’d like to have a once-a-month event at his new restaurant that celebrates the iconic edibles of his home state in a way they deserve. “My hope and goal is like, ‘You’re doing something cool, I’m doing something cool, let’s connect and do this,’ ” he said.
He grew up in Beachwood, right across the street from his grandparents. His grandfather had an ice cream business that was pretty famous in North Jersey for 40 years, Mangieri said. His grandmother inspired his interest in the kitchen.
He was only 20 when he opened his first business, San Arsenio bakery in Red Bank, in 1992, a one-man operation that had him working into the wee hours to produce artisanal breads in the Italian tradition.
But the bakery was a little before its time. “Most people didn’t get it,” Mangieri said. “I was making these big loaves like you get in Italy, with black crust on the bottom and people would come into to the store and brush it off and say, ‘It’s stale.’ ’’
His fortunes took a turn for the better when he opened the very first Una Pizza Napoletana in Point Pleasant in 1996. He moved to the city in 2004, opening his small restaurant in the East Village.
Under the blinding magnifying lens of New York City restaurant culture, Mangieri earned a reputation for eccentricity in a field in which eccentricity is virtually the norm, portrayed as a tattooed pizza purist with a fanatical devotion to his trade.
Mangieri employs a natural leavening process to make his own dough in keeping with the traditions of Neapolitan pizza-making. The dough takes 24 hours to rise and is never refrigerated. It cooks in a custom-made, wood-fired oven in 90 seconds.
He uses San Marzano tomatoes from the same family farm in Italy he’s been buying from for decades. The buffalo mozzarella he uses is flown in from Italy once a week. “I’ve spent 20 years cultivating relationships with importers and vendors,” Mangieri said.
“We’ll have five really incredible Italian cocktails and a carefully curated, all-Italian wine list. It’s gonna blow people’s minds,” Mangieri said. “They’re really fun, really drinkable, really easy.”
Though he has been visiting relatives in Italy since he was a child, it was when he was old enough to travel on his own that he really began to fall in love with the culture, Mangieri said.
He met his wife, Ilaria, during one of his visits to Naples. He’d been out with a friend one evening when he caught sight of her in a bar, regretting that he hadn’t spoken to her then. The next day, he looked up while walking down the street to see her coming toward him. She recognized him right away. “I thought, I’m madly in love with this person. I want to marry her, and that’s it.”
A 10-year saga of love’s labors lost and found followed during which Ilaria, a writer, completed her degree and went to work for the press office at San Carlo, the oldest opera house in Naples.
With a little help from The Language School in Red Bank, Mangieri succeeded in persuading Ilaria’s parents that he was a good human being despite his attachment to body art. “I’m a good guy. I’m not in prison. I just like tattoos a lot,” he told them. “I’m American first, so I’m different from them (Italians) in a lot of ways,” he says. During one visit, he remembered, he told his Italian relatives he was going out for a run. “They were like, ‘Why?’ ”
While in the Two River area consulting for Undici Restaurant in Rumson, Mangieri went to Tiffany & Co. in Red Bank to choose an engagement ring for Ilaria.
He proposed to her in Naples, uncharacteristically wearing a suit for the occasion. And then they went out for pizza.
Today the couple lives in Murray Hill with their daughter Apollonia, 8, who attends public school and studies violin and ballet.
Ilaria assists with publicity for Una Pizza and several of her poems appear on the restaurant’s website, unapizza.com. Pizza makes an appearance in a poem titled “Naples.”
“…the castle watches the ships pass
and the pizzas rotate at the time of the fire
in the belly of the shovel
where the wood mixes oil, basil and melancholy,
evening voice
that accompanies the name of a woman
smoky profile of a memory”
Mangieri is hoping to have Una Pizza Napoletana open in Atlantic Highlands by mid-August.
“I wanted to open in Atlantic Highlands for about 10 or 15 years,” he said. “It’s amazingly located, with Hartshorne and Huber Woods for biking, hiking and running, ferry service to NYC, Sandy Hook right there. It’s really wonderful. First Avenue has endless potential and the local population is filled with an awesome mix of artists, creative types and NYC workers. The town seems to be really excited and supportive.”
