Because it was based in 1924 by a baker from Naples, Italy, named Antonio Pero, little or no has modified at Totonno’s Pizzeria Napolitana. The restaurant has operated in the identical one-story constructing in Coney Island, burned coal in the identical brick oven and adopted the identical recipe to make pizza that’s broadly held to be amongst New York Metropolis’s best.
In all that point, Totonno’s has been repeatedly owned and operated by one household. Now it’s on the point of what might be essentially the most consequential change in its historical past: The household is in search of an investor or purchaser to take over. On Wednesday evening, a notice was added to Totonno’s web site asking events to ship an electronic mail.
Explaining the choice, Louise Ciminieri, who owns the pizzeria together with her sister, Antoinette Balzano, and their brother, Frank Balzano, mentioned, “We’re developing in age and we don’t have the manpower to proceed.”
The household is adamant that the best purchaser will likely be enthusiastic about carrying on their century-old approach of creating pizza. The enterprise strategies are virtually as previous. Totonno’s accepted solely money till two years in the past, when after a protracted pandemic pause it started taking bank cards.
Potential patrons “can’t go by numbers,” mentioned Ms. Ciminieri, recognized to everybody as Cookie. “They’ve to know the potential, they usually have to know my blood, sweat and tears in that place for 45 years.”
She was a younger mom when she began serving to her aunt across the pizzeria. She would watch as her uncle, Jerry Pero, made pizza the best way he had been taught by his father, Antonio, who had arrived in Manhattan in 1903 and commenced working at a coal-oven pizzeria on Spring Road, that will later be renamed Lombardi’s. The pizzas he baked have been wrapped in paper and offered on the road to newly arrived Italian immigrants who lived in tenements close by. House ovens have been uncommon, and household lore has it that clients would reheat their pies on cast-iron radiators.
This direct line of ancestry reaching again to the earliest American pizzerias places Totonno’s in a category of its personal, mentioned Scott Wiener, a pizza historian and columnist for Pizza At present journal.
“It’s the longest lineage I do know of for any pizza-making household within the U.S.,” Mr. Wiener mentioned.
Totonno’s resistance to such improvements because the aged pizza cheese recognized within the commerce as low-moisture mozzarella is partly the results of steady household rule, Mr. Wiener mentioned. However he suspects that geographic isolation performed a job, too.
“Coney Island is form of the Galápagos,” he mentioned. “Genetic mutations aren’t occurring on the identical frequency they’re in Manhattan. That’s a pizza that’s in all probability within the type Antonio Pero was making on Spring Road in 1903.”
The Totonno’s methodology isn’t sophisticated. Slices of recent, well-drained mozzarella are laid instantly on the dough. Subsequent, for an everyday pizza, is a skinny layer of pulped Italian tomatoes. White pies get a scattering of chopped garlic as a substitute. Each varieties are completed with olive oil and grated pecorino. A brief checklist of toppings, restricted to pepperoni, anchovies, purple onions, garlic, recent mushrooms and basil, will be added by request.
“Every thing is strictly the identical, the best way our grandfather made it,” Ms. Ciminieri mentioned. “Individuals are available in on a regular basis and say, ‘I’ll provide you with a greater value on cheese.’ No.”
When bricks within the oven are dislodged, they’re changed. When gear breaks down, it’s fastened, and when it’s past restore it’s merely put aside. A handbook money register, an vintage counterweight scale as soon as used to weigh dough and a hand-cranked cheese grater, have been moved to the entrance window upon retirement. A fridge chest for Coca-Cola now sits in one of many two small again rooms the place Antonio Pero and his spouse lived and raised their 4 youngsters.
The constructing, which might be a part of any sale of the enterprise, is an easy construction perched on bricks over the Coney Island sand. There isn’t a cement underneath the ground, which helped the waters swept in from the Atlantic Ocean by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 to empty away shortly, in response to Ms. Balzano, although not earlier than doing appreciable harm to the eating room.
“They’ve confronted virtually biblical challenges,” mentioned Senator Chuck Schumer, a Brooklyn native who was an ardent Totonno’s fan lengthy earlier than he grew to become majority chief. “That they had a fireplace, they have been flooded after which that they had pestilence throughout the pandemic.”
Mr. Schumer has pedaled to Totonno’s on his bicycle, and has convened massive household gatherings there to have fun his birthday, despite the fact that there was a threat of being despatched away with out pizza.
“Within the previous days, you stood on line, and when Totonno’s ran out of dough they’d come exterior and say, ‘You’ll have to come back again one other time,’” he mentioned. “However it was value ready for each minute.”
No pizza was served at Totonno’s for almost a yr after a fireplace in 2009. Rebuilding after Sandy took 5 months. Bouncing again from the pandemic has been a a lot slower course of. The pizzeria has not reopened for indoor eating but. Pies for takeout and supply are offered solely on Saturday and Sunday, and even that could be a pressure for Ms. Ciminieri, the no-nonsense guardian of the eating room.
All this has induced grave concern amongst individuals who care about New York pizza traditions. Mr. Wiener, the pizza historian, mentioned he worries about “the slimness of the chance that the precise particular person will get in there and preserves it.” If the brand new proprietor “has rooster wings on that menu, we are going to know that the solar has set.”
A date for a centennial celebration later this yr has not been set because the household seems to be for somebody who shares its imaginative and prescient.
“We’ve acquired to maintain our grandfather’s identify and his pizza alive,” Ms. Balzano mentioned. “We will’t let it go.”
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