PHOENIX, Oct 23 — One of the few times Chris Bianco, arguably the nation’s most revered pizzaiolo, has been at a loss for words was about 15 years ago, when a friend asked him to visit a priest known as Father Joe in hospice care.
“I just kind of froze,” said Bianco, a normally garrulous chef who ultimately mustered the strength to speak to the dying priest.
“I say, ‘Hey, Father Joe, is there anything you can share with me to make me a better man?'” Bianco recalled. “He says: ‘Just understand, if you’re in this bed, you’ll always ask for more time. So don’t waste any time.'”
The message stuck, and it’s a big reason that in May, at age 54, Bianco opened Tratto, a small Italian restaurant in a Camelback Corridor strip mall here.
Tratto serves no pizza at all. As it turns out, the dish that built Bianco a national reputation also nearly broke him.
In 2010, a severe asthma attack, combined with pneumonia, landed Bianco, a lifelong asthmatic, in the emergency room. The culprit was years of exposure to airborne flour and smoke from his wood-burning oven.
“My doctor says I have to keep my head out of the oven if I want to see 50,” Bianco said in an interview that year with The Arizona Republic, which printed the news on its front page, under the headline, “Food stunner: Pizza guru Bianco will leave kitchen.”
Today, he says the revelation that he had what he calls “baker’s lung” was pivotal, prompting him to rethink his business. “I had been protected from death,” he said. “Now when I look at the human experience, I don’t want to waste any opportunity.”
Bianco was hardly a slacker to begin with. Born in the Bronx, he dropped out of high school, worked his way through various restaurant kitchens and opened his first Pizzeria Bianco here nearly 30 years ago.
The example he set with his pies — impeccable ingredients riding crusts as fine as fresh bakery bread, steamy and crisp from the wood-fired oven — presaged America’s embrace of craft pizza and opened minds to the idea that superlative pies could be the measure of a great chef.
The hosannas from tastemakers who have pronounced his pizza “perfect” (Mario Batali) or the “best” (critics Ruth Reichl, Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue, Bill Addison of Eater) are notably unambiguous, particularly for a dish served worldwide.
“It was everything I expected it to be and so much more,” said Riad Nasr, the former co-chef at the New York restaurants Balthazar and Minetta Tavern, who first visited Pizzeria Bianco in 2013 and returned for five days last spring to cook with Bianco.
Bianco talks like an excitable, speechmaking New York taxi driver, but he is modest about his pizza.
“I don’t think it’s better than anyone’s best, but I’ve never had one that I think is better,” he said over lunch at the Pizzeria Bianco in downtown Phoenix, a 42-seat restaurant in an early 20th-century brick-and-wood building.
The chef wore, as he always does, a blue-gray work shirt — he buys them in bulk from a uniform supplier — and, with his skybound hair, a look of perpetual dishevelment. He ordered his two favourite pies: the marinara (homemade tomato sauce, wild oregano, translucent garlic slivers, no cheese) and the Rosa (house-made mozzarella, red onion, spicy-fresh rosemary, chopped Arizona pistachios, Parmigiano-Reggiano).
“Take this one, it’s the best piece,” Bianco told me, handing over a marinara slice whose crust was puffy and blister-pocked at the edge, thin but crisp at the tip.
The dough is made from a combination of hard red spring wheat from Arizona and Utah. Bianco and his brother, Marco, his restaurant group’s baker, are advocates of wheat grown in the region. They use local White Sonora Wheat, one the North America’s oldest surviving varieties, for the bread at Pane Bianco, a sandwich shop and bakery, and for Tratto’s pasta.
“Fifteen years ago, you couldn’t get local durum,” Chris Bianco said. “It all went to Italy.”
Bianco arrived in Phoenix in 1985, at age 23. “I just wanted to get away from what I was,” he said. He had heard that Arizona women were attractive and that the desert would ease his asthma.
His interest in cooking had been piqued by a job at a New York pizzeria he describes as “nothing special but still awesome, you know?” In Phoenix, he started a small business selling his handmade mozzarella and pasta to restaurants. It soon developed into a catering operation of sorts.
“I’d come to your house with my little hand-cranked pasta machine,” he said, “It’d be like cocktail-hour dinner theater.”
A chance encounter with a Renato wood-burning oven at one of his catering gigs led Bianco to try his hand at pizza; a grocer at the event offered him small space in his store for the first Pizzeria Bianco, in 1988. It was a takeout-only operation, with three pizzas on the menu: margherita, marinara and one featuring market produce.
Two years of nonstop work in the grocery left Bianco both exhausted and hungry for experience. He traveled in Italy for half a year, then cooked for three years at an Italian restaurant in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
He opened the first bricks-and-mortar Pizzeria Bianco in 1994 in a local mall, then moved it two years later to its current space, where his old Renato oven is stationed outside, like a monument.
For years, he baked every pizza himself, a practice that, combined with the restaurant’s small size, created waiting lines for tables that regularly stretched beyond two hours. Bar Bianco opened next door in 1997, in part to help absorb the crowds.
“People are sitting on the lawn at his restaurant, not caring about the time,” recalled Deborah Madison, the chef and cookbook author, who befriended Bianco when both were working in Santa Fe. “It’s pizza, and he’s not getting his knickers in a twist about making gourmet food. It’s the way food should be.”
Bianco’s national reputation solidified in 2003, when be became the first pizzaiolo to win a regional chef award from the James Beard Foundation.
But the acclaim fueled his anxiety when his doctor recommended seven years later that he retire from the oven. “The physicality of my existence was what I could give you,” Bianco said. “What do I have to offer beyond the physicality of my existence?”
Bianco accepted a partnership with Jamie Oliver, the British chef and cookbook author, and one of his many celebrity friends. (Jimmy Kimmel was best man at Bianco’s wedding.) For nearly three years, Bianco spent a week every month in London, helping Oliver open and then operate Union Jacks, a wood-oven pizzeria.
“Ultimately I had to make a choice to go all in on England, or come back and make what I have here better,” Bianco said.
He returned to Phoenix full time two years ago. He credits Seth Sulka, his company’s chief executive and a former general manager of the Phoenix Mercury of the WNBA, with helping him professionalise his operations, freeing him to serve the Bianco Group as creative visionary and kitchen mentor.
The fruits of that collaboration include a cookbook, “Bianco: Pizza, Pasta and Other Food I Like,” due out next summer, and Tratto.
The restaurant isn’t the chef’s first stab at a non-pizzeria. Three years ago, Bianco opened a place called simply Italian Restaurant. It was quickly converted into another Pizzeria Bianco. “People kept asking about pizzas,” he said.
Tratto is next door to that second pizzeria (a third, in Tucson, closed in September), and if it succeeds, Bianco suggests that will have to do with his state of mind.
“The light went on for me when it was not me wanting to be great, but me wanting to be part of a community,” he said. His approach to business now, he added, is “more of a it-takes-a-village kind of thing.”
The communal spirit pervades Bianco’s private life as well. He married for the first time in 2013, and is the father of two young children. His family fills a long table at the newer pizzeria every Tuesday night.
The group includes Bianco’s parents, Leo and Francesca, and his brother. His mother cooks a dessert on Tuesdays, usually something classically simple, like tarts packed with local berries. “She has a following,” Bianco said.
The 35-seat restaurant is, like all of his businesses, austerely fashionable. Diners enter through a door facing a consignment store into a dimly lit dining room hung with his father’s still-life paintings. “We deserve to eat well in a not-so-amazing space, in a strip mall,” Bianco said.
Bianco leaves the execution of Tratto’s one-page menu to Anthony Andiario, but it was easy to detect an extension of Bianco’s cooking dictum (“It’s about stopping when it’s enough”) in dishes from the midsummer menu: a salad of local melon, shaved cucumber and mint; chicken roasted with bay leaves and Arizona grapes attached to their stems; farinata, the Italian chickpea crepe, thick with oil-cured olives and desert-grown peppers and I’itoi onions.
“This tastes ancient to me,” Bianco said of a simple tomato sauce draping a platter of ricotta gnocchi.
He allows that not making pizza still weighs on him, but as dinner at Tratto drew to a close, he looked to be enjoying his new role. He had just returned from the kitchen, pleased to discover that he wasn’t really needed.
“I used to make every pizza,” Bianco said. “With Tratto, I work the line more for me than for it. I like it, and I need it.”
Roasted Japanese eggplant with crushed tomato, pecorino and thyme
Yield: 4 servings as an antipasto, or 2 as a main dish
Total time: 50 minutes
4 small Japanese eggplants
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Sea salt
Cracked black pepper
1 large, very ripe heirloom tomato
2 cloves garlic, crushed
4 sprigs of fresh thyme
2 ounces pecorino di Fossa (or Parmigiano-Reggiano), shaved or thinly sliced
1. Heat oven to 450 degrees.
2. Peel the eggplant and place in a roasting pan or dish. Coat eggplant with 2 tablespoons olive oil, and season well with salt and pepper. Roast until tender and light golden brown, about 25 to 30 minutes.
3. While the eggplant cooks, hand-crush the tomato in a medium bowl and add garlic, 1/2 teaspoon salt, remaining olive oil and thyme sprigs. Stir to combine.
4. When eggplant is tender and light golden brown, add tomato mixture to the roasting pan, and roast for another 10 minutes.
5. Scatter with pecorino and roast for about 5 minutes until cheese is melted.
6. Transfer to a serving dish, including the pan drippings, and serve hot. ― The New York Times
