- I'd never actually made pizza before
or really worked with Italian food.
I've always admired Italian cuisine from a distance.
The very few ingredients, product driven.
I wouldn't describe our restaurant as Italian.
There are like some little things on the menu
that are like Italian-ish but style-wise,
I really just want it to fit into like our own voice.
All these things come together to create our own style.
We didn't really have any like fancy pizza places
growing up in Massachusetts, there's not a lot.
I mean there's like some OK pizza, but it's mostly like
Greek style on the conveyor belt or like arcade
with like a hot box with pizza in it.
I first got into cooking when I was
probably about like 16 or so.
I just like looked up to the cooks there
and like I came down to Charleston
and I wanted to try something else.
Pizza seemed like a fun thing to tackle.
You have to put like a label on something
for people to understand it.
We just say Neo Neapolitan because it's not
really Neapolitan. With Neapolitan pizza
your dough has to be an exact weight
and it has to be hand-mixed or you have to
have this special machine and etc., etc., it goes on.
We definitely appreciate what classic Neapolitan pizza is.
The Neo Neapolitan is just kind of Neapolitan in spirit.
I went to visit my cousins in Chicago
and we ate around so many amazing restaurants in Chicago.
Paul Kahan, the chef, has definitely been an idol of mine.
His food is like amazing.
And it's like all about intensity
and we went to Avec and I had his chorizo-stuffed dates
and they're served in this pool of piquillo
pepper sauce with sourdough bread.
The Wrath of Kahan is loosely inspired by Paul Kahan's
stuffed dates, and I think it translates so well to a pizza
'cause all the same flavors but instead of the sourdough,
we use our natural levain dough.
I kind of tried to like reverse engineer his sauce.
I'm sure ours is very different.
We use piquillos, Peppadews, and Espelette.
There's a hefty dose of Espelette in there,
so it is a little spicy. So, we sauce the pizza,
[add] some shallots, some torn pieces of medjool date,
Spanish chorizo, and then our fresh mozzarella,
and then it gets fired in the oven finished
with a little olive oil, nice and crispy.
That one, coming out of the oven, smells so
intense too 'cause the smoky chorizo
and the sauce has a little sweetness to it
and it's just super aromatic.
The Elote Pizza kind of just came from corn coming around
in season, and I was like I wanna do something with corn
but I wanna do something different.
I've eaten elote like a million times.
I kinda thought it was kinda goofy, elote pizza.
I wasn't so sure about it, but then I was like
(beep) it, let's try it, and then I made the sauce.
Just like a ton of shaved garlic, aromatics, corn,
cream, a bunch of chiles, cook for a really long time,
then pureed so it's super smooth.
And then when we build the pizza it's charred corn,
charred shishitos, mozzarella.
When it comes out, guajillo chile, a little bit of lime juice,
and that's it and it's just like really satisfying.
It's really good.
It's honestly like a pizza I kinda made as like a joke
'cause like it sounded like ridiculous.
And we made it and it was (beep) delicious.
And I was like all right, well this pizza's kinda ridiculous,
but we should totally serve it because it's really good.
I think you would never find that at a classic Italian
place, they'd be like, "Corn on pizza is silly.
Why would I do that?" But it's really good.
So, I think it's definitely an advantage for us.
The Shabazi is based on this flatbread I had in Tel Aviv.
It was like really thin and kinda crispy.
You add ground lamb, definitely some warm spices on there,
and it was served with whole parsley, labneh, and zhug,
and that was on the side, and I was like,
"Oh, this is such a fun, interactive experience.
Like so not pretentious at all.
You have like a side of this thing that you're dipping into.
The flavor was like something I'd never had before,
and the combination was so good,
I really wanted to translate it into a pizza.
So ours is similar for sure.
We don't use the warm spices, just raw tomato,
ground lamb, and we season the ground lamb with fish sauce,
and I feel like fish sauce and red meat
really have this amazing synergy and that's it.
Go into the oven, a little bit of garlic,
and then when it comes out, we garnish it
with this herb salad and then we serve it with
the same labneh and zhug that I had in Israel.
A friend of mine's parents would drive me home.
They'd be like, "You guys wanna stop and get some food?"
I'd be like, "(beep) yeah, I wanna go to Pizza Hut."
And they had like the whole buffet out
and they had like dessert pizza, which like as an adult
sounds kinda terrible, but like as a kid,
it was amazing. It's so satisfying and simple
that anybody can enjoy it. You know?
It's not hard to understand.
And you can take that formula and tweak it
what you want. There's nothing on the menu
that isn't memorable as a flavor combination.
My style is definitely intense.
I try to make flavors really punchy and balanced,
so it's like acid, fat, salt, spice,
all those at the same time, and together it all works.
But if that balance is out of whack,
it would be like terrible.