“The best pizza maker in the world", said the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago, speaking about Franco Pepe’s tour in California. “Pepe is not the usual rustic pizza chef, he’s part of the new generation of Italian gastro-philosophers”.

Praises at the end of a superstar tour: first in London with Identità Golose and Harrods, then in the US, playing solo, nine days between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with six tasting events, all sold out, and certainly not for their moderate price (195 dollars to attend the cooking demo and devour 4 slices of “Pepe style” pizza, including paired wines).

The result: sold out. And at the end, they’d never want to leave. They were all asking things, shaking my hand... There were people coming especially from Texas, some even from Mexico. And there were many entrepreneurs, they made me staggering offers, too big for me».

Pepe is in fact an honest man and when you ask him what was the compliment he most appreciated, he mentions Jonathan Gold. And not because Gold is a famous American Pulitzer-winning food critic and journalist, rather because of what he told him, after eating his pizza: «Dear Franco, you know what? It tastes like Caiazzo», that is to say the village in Campania where “Pepe’s granddad opened his pizzeria” – again we mention the Los Angeles Times. And where today "almost every night Pepe’s pizzeria, Pepe in Grani, is open, as many as 400 customers find their way down the narrow alleys to wait in lines that can last two hours".

Lots of praise, enough to get intoxicated, to get stunned, «a great experience for which I must thank Nancy», who’s surname is Silverton, patron of a some very popular places in LA (and Singapore), called Mozza and Spacca, in co-ownership with Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich: «She visited me a few years ago in Caiazzo». She was the one who wanted Pepe in California and at the end her only regret, so to speak, was that «Now my clients have tasted Franco’s pizza, they will no longer want to eat the ones we prepare!».
CP

2015 was for sure an excellent year for La Sorgente, Arcangelo Zulli’s pizzeria in Guardiagrele, Chieti: on top of being mentioned as one of the best Pizzerie d’Italia according to Guida dell’Espresso they received three Spicchi from Gambero Rosso and the special award for best pizza served in a plate this year with “Provocazione”, a dough made with semi-whole-wheat and ventricina teramana sausage, smoked buffalo milk mozzarella, marinated red onion from Tropea, bitter almonds, orange honey and wild fennel. Still, La Sorgente is certainly not a recent revelation.

It’s been exactly 30 years since Zulli started to work with pizza, first with the approximation that was so common at the time, then with increasing research and attention, without ever backing down when facing new stimuli such as the courses and activities organised by Università della Pizza, which he’s been assiduously attending since 2010. In time, together with his staff – mostly formed by family members, from his children in the dining room to his daughter-in-law in the pastry making department – he’s made the restaurant one of the points of reference in the region when it comes to high quality pizza. This thanks to tasty and easy-to-digest dough and to toppings that represent the territory of Abruzzo and its excellences, which have led La Sorgente to become one of the Slow Food Pizzerie dell’Alleanza.

Zulli now presents different types of dough, the result of long maturation and almost always with mother yeast: from the classic one, cooked in the pan, with which he had already began in 1985, and which is part of the local tradition, to the Roman style on the shovel – fine tuned with Renato Bosco, whose project Figli di Pasta Madre Zulli joined – but also that made with spelt flour and the one made with poolish and mother yeast, crispy outside and soft inside, used with more elegant toppings. Then there’s the original Riempizza (in the picture), a pizza on the shovel with very high hydration (93%) and with a rustic taste of whole-wheat flour, which mimics the street food trend: the edges are folded inside, and it’s then filled following the pizza-chef’s inspiration, for instance with calamari, stracciata, peppers, courgettes, red garlic from Sulmona, lemon zest, curly parsley, Sarawak pepper and extra virgin olive oil.
LS