We talked to Paola Sinisgalli and Gabriele Lamonaca, about "Unregular Pizza
1) Paola, let's start immediately from Gabriele's personal experience: how your passion for the restaurant business, and especially for the pizza sector, was born?
Gabriele arrived in New York in 2008, having just finished high school in Rome, with the idea of studying medicine in the United States. First he begins to study English, to learn the language, with the desire to enroll in medical school. In the meantime he starts working in the restaurant business, as a busboy, and later as a waiter. Instead of attending medicine, he enrolled in a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Saint Francis College in New York. He enters the world of the restaurant business more and more, working in very important restaurants to pay for his studies and living in New York. After graduating in chemistry, he is faced with a crossroads: to enroll in the faculty of medicine, or to continue in the world of work? He gets an offer to work as an intern in a customizable chocolate company, “Chocomize”. This is the first real work experience in the world of food. After that, he is hired by a French company that produces coffee, “Malongo”, and works for them as Business Development. In the meantime, he has the opportunity to participate in various fairs and events in the food sector. He notes that in New York there is a gap in the pizza sector. There is no middle ground between the cheap American one dollar pizza and the expensive Neapolitan pizza, cooked in the pizzerias built between 2008 and 2012. To eat a good pizza in New York you don't spend less than 50 dollars. At that point Gabriele begins to think about the idea of having a Roman-style pizza by the slice in the city, with a dough made with a quality flour, highly digestible, but at a low cost. His idea is inspired by the basic concept of the big successful chains, such as “Starbucks”, “Shake Shack” or “Chipotle”, but for pizza. So chains that have a certain regard for the quality of the product, which cost a little more but excessively expensive. But after about 5, 6 years in New York the first Roman pizzerias by the slice began to open. So Gabriele was right and starts getting busy, doesn't give up and decides to work on a first concept and to collect investors to open the first location. We are back in 2017. It is very difficult to convince people to invest, but Gabriele continues to do so, starting with friends and relatives, until at the end of 2019 we finally have almost all the investment to open. After a failed deal in New Jersey, we were really disheartened. To make matters worse, three months later, the Covid-19 pandemic broke out and at this point, we didn't really know what to do.
2) Why the idea of bartering? Where did it come from? Are you planning to replicate the Times Square event?
And at this point it all started. At the time, when he was looking for funds to open his pizzeria, Gabriele worked as a manager in another pizzeria in New York. From 13 March 2020 we all stay at home and Gabriele loses his job. He starts making pizzas at home.?
And this is where I come in. Gabriele and I have been engaged for about 5 years and I have been dealing with communication since 2011, since I too moved here to New York. I suggest he post his pizzas pics on Instagram, so as to start building a base of interested followers and show everyone what Gabriele can do. So we started posting the photos of the pizzas on an instagram profile called “Unregular Pizza”. He calls it that because “regular”, in New York jargon, is the simplest pizza you can have, the one with mozzarella and tomato. “Un” is a negation and therefore here is “Unregular”. Obviously it is a deliberate grammatical error, and it is so wrong that when you pronounce it it becomes correct, because in reality it should read as “irregular” (??reɡy?l?r). Since everything was closed, our friends, seeing these pizzas, started asking to make them for them and deliver them home. We started delivering them around New York by bike (of course with all the precautions, gloves, masks, etc.). We made at least a dozen free deliveries. Until a friend from Rome asked us for a pizza with potatoes and rosemary. Pizza, by the way, never seen in New York. Gabriele gets ready and tells her that he would bring her the next day. The evening before the delivery, a guy on a motorcycle gives us cocktails, sent by our friend, to thank us for the next day's delivery. This is the most interesting thing. At the time, I was reading a book that my father wrote during the pandemic, in which he talked about the fact that my grandfather had opened a cinema in a small town in Basilicata, and did not accept payments to let viewers go to see these films; however, he accepted the barter: so with a chicken he brought in two people, with 6 eggs one person, with three salamis he brought in an entire family, and so on. And so there, there was a moment of enlightenment, in which we said: it would be really fantastic to replicate this thing, but with pizza now, in recent months.
And from that moment on, from 20 May 2020, the era of bartering begins. Whoever orders a pizza, must give us something in return made by him. At the beginning, they were all edible things, or in any case to drink and made at home. Then the situation evolved, people started giving everything and more. The first to break the spell of eating barter was a dentist, who made us a chicken called "Shanghai Style'', and also gave us two electric toothbrushes, from there they started giving us riding lessons, guitar lessons. , a night in a luxury hotel in Chelsea. The Time Square event was born following the first wave of the press campaign, during which more than 4 thousand people signed up to barter. Also wanting to do one barter a day for 10 years , we would never be able to cover that amount. Some friends suggested we organize the largest bartering event in the world. We immediately took the ball, thinking it would be interesting to combine the largest barter in the world with a pizza truck in the center of Time Square. Thanks to the partnership with these guys, who work for Welcome to Time Square, we were able to realize this event; they were very important, without them all this would not have been possible. They gave us access to this billboard, which allowed us to have sponsors, which pushed people to bring very interesting things, because in the end, everyone did it with a view to yes, to offer items to exchange, but also because everyone wanted to appear on that billboard. In fact we are working on the editing of a video that will show the best barters of that day. The Time Square event was a unique and unrepeatable event, because it was done with the aim of breaking a record. I have sent everything to the Guinness World Record and we hope they will tell us that they have created a new category on bartering, or that we have broken all the records. It was an interesting thing, we did everything to organize such an event.
3) Are the ingredients you use all Made in Italy? Did you have difficulty finding them?
The ingredients tend to be all Made in Italy: from Polselli flour to Mutti sauce, for oil, for example, we are turning to De Cecco, who also helped us with the event.
As for fresh cheeses, we get them from a dairy called Lioni Latticini, in New Jersey, which makes burrata and mozzarella of the highest quality. They are very similar to those found in Italy, the best in the vicinity.
During the pandemic it was really problematic to find these products, when Gabriele worked from home, but we wanted to do things right and use only quality ingredients. This is one of the guidelines of the company. Marketing, highly targeted strategic communication, storytelling designed to capture attention, associating pizza with things that go beyond food, such as the exchange of an artistic performance and so on, but at the same time ... you taste a piece of pizza and remain enthusiastic, thanks to the quality of the ingredients. For example, now we have started to use a spicy honey (here goes the spicy honey on the pizza), coming from Calabria, so much so that the pizza that goes the most is a pizza called "Cafonata", in which there is precisely Mutti sauce, the so-called “pepperoni'', which is actually American salami, which is a little sweet and a little spicy. Then a whole burrata cheese on top, spicy honey from all over Calabria, and then a nduja sauce, where there is a little nduja and a little tomato paste. The pizza is a Roman pizza by the slice, leavened for 72 hours, therefore very easy to digest, and the dough is both fluffy and crunch when you eat it, but at the same time, we want to break away from the Italian and Roman tradition and for this reason these are born American fusion, like this “Cafonata'' pizza. An Italian accustomed to the pizzas of Rome probably wouldn't eat it, but here he is having a great success. And I, as a transplanted Italian, can guarantee that it is really good, it has a different taste that you are not used to in Italy, but it is a matter of open-mindedness and must definitely be tried. However, we target an American audience, which is very attentive to quality.
4) New Yorkers really appreciate your pizza alla romana: based on the feedback you have received from customers, what is the most requested type of pizza?
Americans are not used to a square pizza, it's something new they've never seen, so it's a bit of a surprise to them, but it's starting to catch on.
In Manhattan, the market is a little easier, the pizza we make is appreciated because here they have a little more refined palate, compared to the American suburbs. So it is very popular, they realize that it is not the dough made in an hour and then immediately placed in the oven, they immediately understand that it is a quality pizza. All reviews have 5 stars and all feedbacks are mostly positive. The pizza that goes the most is precisely the "Cafonata", then in second place, the "Unmushroom", a very good vegetarian pizza, in which there are three varieties of mushrooms, a mozzarella and a cacio e pepe sauce, (in which use Parmigiano Reggiano), and parsley. In third place, an “very American” pizza: the “Bufala chicken”, a type of pizza made with fried chicken, buffalo mozzarella and then a sauce called Buffalo chicken, a slightly spicy and sour orange sauce. This is a reinterpretation of the Buffalo chicken, to which we have replaced the buffalo mozzarella, instead of the classic one. Now also the donuts are going a lot, which Salvatore created, Gabriele's business partner, who is also our chef, and who created this savory donuts with burrata, pepperoni nduja and spicy raw onion, they are fried and when you heat them in the oven, people go crazy because there is so much melted cheese inside. Finally, there is the chicken pan (chicken parmigiana), another typical American recipe. Here at “Unregular Pizza” the quality of the pizza and the taste of Italian products are combined with American tastes and this is our strength, since we aim precisely at the American market.
5) Tell us about the pizza with burrata: why did you think of this type of pizza for the bartering event? Tell us how the idea was born.
Our pizzas by the slice are all basically called "burrapizza". For the Times Square event, it was decided to use the Cafonata base, but with the vodka sauce with spicy honey, instead of the nduja sauce. This choice was made to give impetus to an already popular recipe, which we know we like, but using the vodka sauce. a sauce that we have recently started making, driven by requests for two or three recipes, such as the chicken vodka sandwich. Furthermore, we opted for this choice also because it is a very photographable and interesting pizza, with this cheese ball, with this orange color and under the red peppers. It is said that first you eat with your eyes and therefore, we wanted to take something that could be appreciated first on a visual level and then in terms of taste. Obviously, however, that day we also gave a vegan and vegetarian option.
6) Gabriele, why did you choose Polselli flour for the dough of your pizzas? And which one do you use in particular?
We chose Polselli because it is a flour that is suitable for making Roman pizza in a pan and moreover, it is produced in the Lazio region. In particular, we use "Super" flour, an excellent flour with a very high strength indicator (W), as well as its protein content, and therefore it is the one that gives us more satisfaction from the point of view of crunchiness, lightness and digestibility. It is one of the most suitable flours, purer, without any addition of corn, soy or other, which are often found in the flours used for this type of pizza.
7) What are your plans for the future of "Unregular Pizza"?
The goal is to create a high quality Italian pizza chain. And by Italian we mean founded by Italians from Italy; in fact, paradoxical as it may seem, here in the United States in the restaurant business, there is no Italian who has created a food chain, all the large Italian food chains are actually not made by Italians, but by people descendants of Italians, but of the third generation .. Our dream is to create a fast casual Italian pizza, of a high level, and also to start shipping our pizzas but frozen, so as to start making them taste all over the USA. We are optimistic because we have a very heterogeneous and disparate follow-up. In this way we would also have the opportunity to test the rest of the American territory.