Allegra's Pizza
Description
Allegra’s Pizza is a family owned and operated pizzeria serving the Park Hill, Stapleton, Mayfair, and Montclair neighborhoods. Tony's roots in Neapolitan cuisine date back to his grandparents' emigration from Naples- the birthplace of pizza- in the early 1900's. Growing up in an Italian family in New York, Tony was surrounded by Neapolitan cooking. Sunday dinner was a grand family event that started at 3:00 pm and stretched well into the evening. Thus began his quest to make an excellent pizza.
Over the years Tony refined his pizza crust, relying on his daughter Allegra to be his taster and ultimately his biggest critic. Finally, exhausted, Allegra told her dad, "We need to have something other than pizza for dinner." With that Tony entered what Allegra calls "his Chinese phase." "His Chinese food was so bad that I told him to go back to making pizza," Allegra remembers.
"Anyone can put toppings on pizza dough" says Tony. "To make a good pizza you need to know how to make the dough in-house, how to stretch and hand-toss it, and how it should be baked in a hearth oven. No conveyer belt ovens here. Both our ovens are over 55 years old."
The pizza at Allegra’s is essentially a Neapolitan thin crust pizza. However, there is no such thing as “an authentic Neapolitan Pizza” says Tony. While the City of Naples has certified a version of pizza as “authentic” or “DOC,” as the certification is called, there are as many variations as there are households in Naples.
In fact, if someone orders a pizza in Naples and doesn’t specify a DOC pizza, they will probably get the house version. Pizza makers in Naples, called Pizzaioli, consider themselves artists and tend to resist conformity in pizza making.
Today, Allegra's Neapolitan Pizza makes its own version of the Italian Classic. On any given night you can find Tony and his wife Christine making pizzas. Allegra, now a graduate of the State University of N.Y. at Oswego, in upstate NY, works when she is back in Colorado.
You should try one. As Tony says, "if you don't like our pizza-it's free!"
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