Westport Pizzeria introduced me to pizza. That is the simplest way to say it, and perhaps the truest. We had just arrived from France, my family and I, new to the country and still finding our footing. Someone took us to a small place on Main Street in Westport, Connecticut. Behind the counter stood Mel Mioli — himself arrived from Sicily the year before us. He did not simply make pizza. He performed it.

Below: Mel shaping dough

The dough left his knuckles, climbed into the air, spun there — a slow planet — and came back down without a single tear. For a European child, it was a revelation. But then came the taste. That was something else entirely. A crust with memory, a simplicity that somehow carried the whole weight of a culture. I did not have the words for it then. I just knew it had done something to me.

Westport Pizzeria is now closed — Mel finally retired in January 2020. Nearly eighty years, making pizza for 51 years, his craftsmanship quietly and permanently inspired me, even though I never realized it at the time. He was a beginning. In retrospect on my own life as a chef and baker, a career in the kitchen teaches you many things, but it teaches them slowly, and often sideways. You pick up technique here, instinct there. You work alongside people who know things you don’t, and you watch closely. Pizza was always somewhere in the background of that education — something I returned to, thought about, came back to from different angles across different years and different kitchens.

Now, working at Sullivan Street Bakery in Chelsea, Mel’s influence on making pizza lives out daily. More specifically, two pizza styles meet on the same workbench every day: the New York round, stretched free-form by hand and baked openly without a frame; and the Roman taglio, high-hydration dough coaxed into a pan, docked, and given time. One asks for movement. The other asks for patience. Both, I have learned, ask for the same fundamental thing — attention. Mel made making pizza look like something between a dance and a ritual – all starting with the dough.

And that’s where knowledge shows — the moment it tears because you pushed too hard, or sticks because you didn’t read it right. You learn to stop imposing and start listening. That, I think, is what Mel was illustrating in his small pizza shop. Not tricks. Not even performance. A relationship with something alive.

Westport Pizzeria is part of my archive. It is also, I now understand, part of my career — the first entry in a long and still-unfinished education. Some beginnings are only visible in retrospect. That one was mine.