In a move that should surprise no one who knows him, Tucson pizzaiola Mat Cable took a little pizza side trip en route to a cooking gig with the Italian Consulate of Boston.
Actually, it was more of a pizza pilgrimage, a 24-hour stopover last week in a city that has two of the oldest pizzerias in America.
Frank Pepe is one of the country’s oldest pizzerias and the trailblazer of New Haven, Connecticut’s coal-fired pizza tradition.
New Haven, Connecticut, where Cable’s ancestors had settled from Italy generations ago and some family still call home, is regarded as one of the great pizza cities of the world, Cable will tell you.
Cable
Proof of this can be seen on Wooster Street in New Haven’s Little Italy section, where Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, opened in 1925, and Sally’s Apizza Restaurant, which followed in 1938, still reign supreme to a host of next gen’ers, including Modern Apizza on nearby State Street.
“Frank Pepe has been voted multiple times as the best pizzeria in the country. And then there’s Sally’s Apizza,” Cable said hours after he and fellow Tucson City of Gastronomy chef ambassador Obadiah Hindman had visited both landmark restaurants located down the street from one another.
At New Haven’s historic Sally’s Apizza Restaurant, they still cook their tomato pies over coal.
The pair made the stopover last weekend, a day before they were due in Boston to help Italian chef ambassador Mario Marini prepare a dinner for 350 at the Italian Consulate of Boston’s Festa della Repubblica Italiana — aka Republic Day.
Cable and Hindman, with Hindman’s wife Paula, flew into Hartford, Connecticut, on May 30 and drove the 40 minutes to New Haven. They hit Wooster Street just as the sun was setting and the dinner crowd was starting to gather.
Zio Peppe/Fresco Pizzeria & Pasteria chef-owner Mat Cable couldn’t help himself on a recent visit to New Haven’s historic Wooster Street pizzerias; he had to sneak a peak into the kitchens.
Frank Pepe and Sally’s Apizza use coal-fired ovens similar to the one that Naples immigrant Gennaro Lombardi used in 1905 when he opened the country’s first pizzeria in New York. The coal gives the crust a unique char that you can’t get from wood- or gas-fired ovens.
Lombardi established the template for the Italian bakers who followed, including Frank Pepe, who worked at a pasta factory and bakery in New Haven while selling his tomato pies to fellow Italian immigrants along Wooster Square. He took over the bakery in 1925 and rebranded it his namesake pizzeria.
New Haven native Salvatore “Sally” Consiglio‘s mother, Filomena, pushed her son into the business after buying a restaurant with a bread oven on Wooster Street. He opened it in 1938, incorporating his family’s distinctive tomato sauce over their signature chewy, crispy thin crust with the classic coal char.
Cable, chef-owner of Tucson’s Zio Peppe and Fresco, couldn’t help himself when he snuck a peek into Frank Pepe’s kitchen that Friday night as the cooks prepped pies and stoked the coal flames in the brick oven.
Tucson chefs Mat Cable, left, and Obadiah Hindman made a pitstop at two iconic New Haven pizzerias en route to Boston last weekend. Hindman’s wife, Paula, center, tagged along
“Matt’s a pizza guru, right? And his family is from here. So it was like a homecoming and a pilgrimage,” Hindman said the day after as they made the 2½-hour drive to Boston. “We had a good time last night.”
