Why Pizza Purists Love Neapolitan-Style Pies

Walk into any slice shop in New York City and a pizzaiolo will claim to specialize in Neapolitan pizza. Naples’ singular approach to the dish has become a shorthand of sorts for any pie that seems to be thin, flat, and round in 2018. But at Una Pizza Napoletana, chef Anthony Mangieri is using imported ingredients and traditional cooking techniques to pay homage to his Neapolitan ancestry, all while creating a product that’s uniquely rooted in the five boroughs. Topped with buffalo mozzarella, San Marzano tomato sauce, sea salt from Trapani, and olive oil from Sorrento, each pie from Una Pizza Napoletana is a carefully orchestrated opera of flavor, the pieces blending together to form one perfectly balanced work of art. A fixture in the NYC slice game for decades, Mangieri made a name for himself as a savant-like pizza purist hellbent on perfection. Today, returning to Manhattan after years on the west coast, the chef just wants to make a pizza that perfectly represents his own unique tastes and experiences. "For me, at this point in my life, I don’t think the pizza is the best. I think that it’s just mine and it’s what I offer," Mangieri says. "That’s what I bring to New York. I bring myself and my ideas and my independence." Subscribe to First We Feast on YouTube: http://goo.gl/UxFzhK Check out more of First We Feast here: http://firstwefeast.com/ https://twitter.com/firstwefeast https://www.facebook.com/FirstWeFeast http://instagram.com/firstwefeast First We Feast videos offer an iconoclastic view into the culinary world, taking you behind-the-scenes with some of the country's best chefs and finding the unexpected places where food and pop culture intersect.