Anyone walking down Orchard Street in New York City’s Lower East side around 4pm on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday will see a line beginning to form outside number 173.
For many pizza fans, standing in line well before dinner time is the only way to try the food of famed chef Anthony Mangieri at his restaurant Una Pizza Napoletana. It opens just three nights a week and reservations are snapped up within minutes of becoming available. With 150 portions of pizza dough available for each day, it can feel like winning the lottery to get through the doors and choose from the short menu of six pizzas, served up Neapolitan style, characterized by the thin, puffy crust with a raised edge and a soft moist center.
According to Jersey-born Mangieri, the limited nature is part of what makes the place special. “We can’t serve as many people as we would like to, but we don’t want to, all of a sudden, make 1,000 pizzas a night and take away what makes it great,” he says.
After almost 30 years in the business, Mangieri remains guided by the principle that he should make the dough himself and every portion ever served at Una, as he calls the restaurant, has come from his hand. Quite simply, if he is not around, the restaurant doesn’t open. “I make all the dough that we serve. So, I’m there every day. I either bake the pizza or open all [the dough balls to make] the pizza,” he says.
It is not because other people can’t do it; he has trained staff – but for Mangieri this feels like a duty. “If people choose to come into the restaurant to spend their hard-earned money and their evening with us, I feel such a responsibility that I need to be there and give myself to them,” he says. “Food is so connected to the person and the way you handle it. I just feel like it’s not my pizza unless I’m the one making it.”
Part of this is driven by the quest to improve. “I go in every day and I honestly hope that today is the day that I’m better than I was yesterday and I finally figure it out, the messing around with the recipe is done, I got it,” he says. “I want to make the pizza because I want to try to be better at it.”
Something beautiful
He has gone from cooking a pizza on the slate floor of the fireplace in his mother’s living room as a 15-year-old pizza geek, right to the top of the world – in 2024, Una Pizza Napoletana was named as
the number one on the Italian ranking 50 Top Pizza. Long before that, American diners were aware of his genius.
In a 2019 review New York Times critic Pete Wells described Una as “unmistakeably the finest sit-down pizza in the five boroughs.”
He was in his mid-20s when he opened his first pizza place and while “it went really well for a small local place,” it never received the attention he was hoping for. “I was really trying to do something with it and push it and give it all my love, so I decided to finally move to New York to have a bigger audience,” he explains.
In a case of fortuitous timing, as he made that move to New York City, food writer Ed Levine published a book on pizza called A slice of heaven and included a chapter on Mangieri and Una Pizza Napoletana. It gave his pizza the attention he craved and lines out the door soon followed, as he made his name in Manhattan.
A winding career has taken him from the Jersey Shore to New York City, then California in search of a life closer to the outdoors to indulge his love of cycling, back to New York, then New Jersey and finally, since 2022, New York City, for the latest iteration of the restaurant he’d started in 1996.
Sine the latest return to Manhattan things have fallen into place. “I think we’re just firing on all cylinders. We really focus a lot on hospitality, gratitude and giving people as much love as we can,” he says. “We just want to feel like we’re doing something beautiful, something that makes people feel like they can push the envelope on whatever they’re doing in life.”
That it happens to be pizza is almost immaterial; it is about the attitude. “I feel like I would have the same approach if I was a plumber or an electrician, it’s manual labor and I’m trying to do it in the most elevated way I can,” he says.
Bread baking to pizza making
Growing up with his grandmother, his Italian heritage loomed large. Against a backdrop of stories about his grandfather who made ice cream and put his love into every detail of the product, Mangieri started visiting Italy with his mum.
“It just blew my mind. I really fell in love with Italy at a young age – the culture, the music, the people and the food,” he recalls.
At the same time his mother and grandmother took him to all the pizzerias in New York City and he threw himself into learning everything he could about Italian food. He became a fan of Italian American pizza, his reference points were John’s on Bleecker Street, Lombardi’s, Totonno’s and Patsy’s, old-school iconic pizza places in the city.
But eating pizza in Naples changed him. He fell for it “head over heels. I thought, ‘holy cow, this is so different, so foreign,’” he recalls. He embarked on a mission to recreate that experience in New York City where, at the time, almost no one was doing that kind of pizza.
Over time and with his own technique evolving, he says he has moved further away from the idea of the Naples pizza he set out to recreate. “Years ago, I started to feel like it had nothing to do with Naples. Of course, it has a lot to do with Naples in the root and in the idea. Pizza was invented there,” he says. “But I feel that, as we’ve grown, we do our own thing, and I use ingredients from wherever I think they’re best to create what I think makes our pizza the best that it can be. When you do something, eventually you need to find your own voice.”
The base of the coveted Una pizza, the crust blistered, charred and airy, is made on instinct. There is no recipe and, Mangieri says, no two days are the same. Playing with different blends of flours – some nights as many as eight – the dough is a constant work in progress.
“It can be pretty wild and crazy and puffy, and kind of all over the place. It’s super hydrated and very difficult to work with and to get in and out of the oven and bake properly, but it just went that way,” he says. “I keep riding with it and keep adjusting it. I change the flour blend every day. I don’t think I’ve made dough the same way in at least the last 10 years, and I don’t write anything down,” he says, adding, “but then I’ve made every single piece of dough we’ve served for 30 years, so I have a pretty good sense of how it reacts.”
Though simple in nature, pizza is far from simple to make, given all the variables. “You’re dealing with a wood burning oven, which is not easy to have at a precise temperature, because every piece of wood is different. The dough is proofing from the beginning of service to the end of service and is evolving throughout service. And then you’re dealing with an item that is so particular to the person that opens the dough on the counter, because your fingers and your movements really affect the way the pizza comes out.”
Though the young Mangieri’s ambition was always to make pizza, he started out with a bakery called Sant Arsenio. He couldn’t afford the set-up for a pizza restaurant, so with a wood oven he built with his father, behind a counter, he started selling bread. “We built the whole place out ourselves. It was very bare bones and that was how I started.”
For two years, he slugged it out six days a week, working through the night while his friends continued their normal lives. It was hard graft and he soon started to question his life choices. “It was really tough work. I was working from 10pm until 2pm the next day. I didn’t have any money; I didn’t have a car. I was living at home. I had no girlfriend. All my friends were going off to college and had girlfriends and were going out at night. And I was like crazy baking bread all night alone,” he says.
While working the bakery, he had started experimenting with the pizzas, teaching himself what worked. “I was trying to understand if this was something I could figure out,” he says. Making pizza professionally remained his dream, but he eventually closed the bakery, and just as he was about to look for a “normal” job, he got the opportunity to open a place in New Jersey where he could give it a go as a pizza maker. This became the first iteration of Una Pizza Napoletana.
“I thought if it doesn’t work out then that’s it, but here we are 30 years later”.
A different approach
There are thousands of pizza places in New York City, from slice joints to dine-in restaurants with tablecloths, and competition is fierce. Running a pizza restaurant – or any restaurant – in New York City is tough. “The place is not very forgiving. There’s just an endless amount of expenses, and there’s always some waiting around the corner that you didn’t anticipate,” he says, but adds that a crowded market doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to add something if it is good.
“My grandmother told me that there’s always room for something beautiful or great in the world, even if there are 10,000 pizzerias. If you do something great, and you’re not chasing after everybody, you’re being your own person, and really putting it in, you can find your way,” he says.
His singular approach to the restaurant extends to how he navigates the crisis in staffing.
“This is the biggest talking point for me and all my peers around the world, we’re all always short staffed. We’re always stressed out about it; every day someone’s calling out or not showing up,” he says.
After three decades in the business, he has chosen a different path at Una Pizza Napoletana; one of equity. He was alert to the lack of transparency with pay and tips: “One person’s getting this percentage, one person’s getting that percentage, but they left early, and this person gets cut, and this person comes in and they’re counting on getting paid, but we have a slow night, you can go home,” he says. “I just didn’t want that.”
So, at the front of house everyone is paid the same and all the tips are split evenly. Everyone comes in at the same time and leaves at the same time. “So even if we had a slow night – which we never do, thank god – and we have six people scheduled for front of the house, we’re going to keep them there the whole service, the whole shift. They’re still going to make their money. We never cut shifts,” he says.
His take on parity goes further – everything is everybody’s responsibility, except for the pizza. There is no dedicated dishwasher, no busser, nobody in the kitchen covered in soapy water and feeling miserable. “Everyone does everything, we shift it around regularly, it’s even and open,” he says.
“Sometimes people come in and they work one shift and say, ‘Oh, I’m not washing dishes’ and so we say, ‘OK well, then you don’t have to work here.’”
His chosen path of following his north is not an easy one, but it has worked. “It’s 30 years of going at things with this mentality of, ‘This is the way we’re going to do it and if you don’t like it, too bad,’” he says.
“As crazy as the world is, I think a lot of people are looking for things that are truthful, that are transparent, that are authentic and filled with love and hard work. And if you do those things, I think inevitably people start to get attracted to what you do.”
Tina Nielsen
