All posts tagged: pizza

Amore Cucina: Great Pizza in Stamford

Photos by Tom McGovern, Courtesy of Amore Cucina Bruno DiFabio’s love of pizza came full circle when he opened Amore Cucina & Bar. It’s where he made his first pizza when he was ten. Today, the six-time World Pizza Champion and restaurateur owns the 40-year-old joint in Springdale, Stamford, where he updates  Italian-American classics, and continues his exploration into the artisan pizza he started at RéNapoli (King of Naples) in Old Greenwich. The original 1975 red neon sign is retro hip. Inside, exposed brick and worn wood, a long bar that seats 30. There’s a dining room too. But if you’re a pizza geek, you’ll want to sit at the end of the bar and watch the pizza guy.   After making New York-style pizza professionally for 20 years, DiFabio went to Italy to study under a grand master pizzaiolo. He studied the science of pizza making, traveled the world to see where the ingredients are grown and processed. He collected dew in the Dolomite Mountains to get yeast for a starter dough he’s kept going for years. He filmed a pilot. He judged pizza on the …

Pepe’s Pizza’s History in the Pies

Photos by Tom McGovern, courtesy of Pepe’s Pizza Fresh-clam pizza defines Pepe’s for me. I can’t order anything else. Recently,  Gary Biamonte, grandson of Frank Pepe, who opened the original Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven , came to the Fairfield Pepe’s and got me to try a few others. He showed the history of Pepe’s through its pies. The story starts with the crust. That hand-formed, thin, charred crust is the foundation of the pizza and the business. Frank Pepe started as a baker. He arrived in New Haven in 1909, an illiterate boy from Maiori on the Italian Amalfi Coast . After working in a factory and returning to Italy to fight in World War I, he came back to New Haven and opened a bread bakery in what is now Frank Pepe’s The Spot, next door on Wooster Street. Distribution, the bane of many a small business, was a stumbling block. But if he started making “apizza” (pronounced “ah-beets” in his Neopolitan dialect)… the customer would come to him. The New Haven apizza legend …