Brooklyn’s Most Eccentric Pizza Maker Has a New Restaurant | On The Line | Bon Appétit

Bon Appétit spends a day on the line with Chef Nino Coniglio, owner of Lucky Charlie in Brooklyn. A world champion pizza maker, Coniglio’s newest venture focuses on making New York-style pizza in the city’s oldest coal oven from the 1890s.

00:00 Intro
00:58 Waking up
01:36 Check oven
03:15 Macking dough
04:44 Making pasta
07:17 Dough finishes mixing
08:55 Shaping the dough
10:09 Service

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[person squeals] – Great coal-fired pizza, it’s gotta be a thick crust, it’s gotta have a snap to it, but then you also get like the char. We happen to be the steward of the oldest coal oven in New York City. There’s a lotta weird stuff
that comes with the coal oven, where it’s like custom tools, and the crazy vacuum cleaner, and I’m the owner, I’m the chef. What’s going, America? We knew coming into this, we are never going to make money on it. The devil comes to me and says, “Nino, sign this paper right now. I guarantee you, you’ll
never lose another penny in this place, but you’re not allowed to make a penny.” I’d sign the paper tomorrow. [knocking on door] – Say, “Wake up, Dada, wake up!” – Wake up! – Hey, what’s going on, guys? Nino Coniglio. We’re at Lucky Charlie’s. Believe it or not, you’re
in a restaurant right now. Give me five minutes. I’ll be right out. I’ll show you guys around. [casual upbeat music] Okay. We’re ready. [claps hands] We’re at Lucky Charlie’s. It’s one p.m. We’re sitting in the
grandma apartment right now. This is where I’ve been living, and my wife’s been visiting
to get this store open. I went to bed at seven a.m. last night. We’re working about 18 to
19 hour days over here, so come to the back,
crash out, get back up, do it all over again the next day. This is my daughter,
Penelope Luciano Coniglio. She’s adorable. So let me show the dining room. So, this is Lucky Charlie’s. First thing we do over
here at Lucky Charlie’s is go check our oven. So we’re in the kitchen over here. We got sheets of pasta. We’re doing a bunch of clams. But this is the real thing over here. This is 1890 coal fire oven, goes all the way underneath the street. This thing is crazy. It’s 17 feet by 14 feet. You got different heat zones on here. Right now, it’s 700 down the middle. So it says too hot to even read on this temperature gauge over here. And then over here, we’re at 672. So over here, we got
our big thing of coal. This is not what we use to
cook your hot dogs with. This is the stuff that
your parents give you when you’re a bad kid in
the 1980s for Christmas. So you don’t see the
Titanic and choo-choo trains back in the day running on wood, you know? It runs on this stuff. I’ve been cooking pizza
since I’m 12 years old. I’ve done it in every single way you could possibly think of, from
old school Bari ovens, Neapolitan wood-fired
ovens, [speaks Italian], steam tube ovens from Italy. Baking pizza is all about the thermal mass of the oven that you’re using. The brakes here go all
the way to the sidewalk, so there’s nothing like it. Also, because of the different heat zones, we can move a pie around
that it started off at 650, goes to 500, goes back to 700, crisps up, something that you couldn’t do really in any other oven
that I’ve ever worked with. Ooh! [casual upbeat music] Fire is doing amazing. Two p.m. Now it’s time for the dough. We have an Empire spiral mixer. This creates, as opposed to
a planetary mixer over here, where you get like a lot of
friction and banging around. Heat is the enemy of gluten development. Once you get too hot, you’re
breaking the gluten strands, so this allows us to get where we gotta go in this world. This is Gregorio. He’s a Sicilian American. He’s the only guy that
speaks Sicilian dialecto in this whole thing. This neighborhood was the
largest Sicilian community in the world outside of
Sicily for about 40 years. [both speaking Sicilian] So we just dumped the poolish. Right now at Lucky Charlie’s we’re doing about 70 doughs a day. We could be doing a lot more, but with the size of the restaurant, and the fact that we’re
not doing deliveries and DoorDash, and all the other things, it just is what it is. There’s only so many tables. This dough from today will be used 72 hours from now. The reason why we’re doing it so long is so you get different tasting notes, depending on warm and cold fermentations. What we’re doing here is slowly
incorporating everything. This is like where we kinda, you know, not sit and twiddle our thumbs, but moral of the story, don’t stare at the dough. You’ll get lost. It’s like a DMT trip or something. It’s like, you know what I mean? You’ll lose your mind. While we’re waiting for this
dough to continue mixing, these are bolognese for
our anelletti al forno. Anelletti is a very old
school Sicilian pasta. You won’t find it really
anywhere else in Italy. It’s a very hard thing
to find in New York City. It’s a baked pasta. So anellettis are like
little Spaghetti-Os, and then analletti al forno is the pasta, Pecorino sardo, caciocavallo, roasted eggplant, peas, primosale, add in breadcrumbs, and
it’s all kind layered up. Yeah. Got our little anallettis over here. And then we bake it in our coal oven after we put them all together. Stick a little pizza dough on top. That creates like a little Mount Etna. Bolognese is a, it’s from Bologna, so it wouldn’t be right to say we’re making a Bolognese Bologna thing when we’re making a Sicilian thing. So it is a little bit different. I don’t want those Bolognians coming out to whack me out, you know? They got that Bologna mind. It’s three o’clock. Dough’s finishing up, but we got a lot of [beeping] to do, so. This is our hand sheet pasta. This is for our cannelloni, which is kinda like a manicot. So this is an egg pasta dough. So farm fresh eggs,
imported semolina flour. Put it together. Let it hydrate for 30 minutes. Finish kneading, sheet
it out, let it rest. Boil, blanch, you’re done. It’s not that hard. But yeah, we’re not gonna
buy sheets of pasta, ’cause that’s [beeping] gross. You gotta do the hard thing in this world, otherwise what are you
waking up in the morning for? Most of the stuff on the menu, we kinda landed on because everything’s gotta be able to be cooked
in this oven over here. Except for the cold stuff. We don’t cook the cold stuff. We don’t cook the salads,
I mean, I don’t know. Maybe we should. So we’re on cannelloni prep. Gregorio’s knocking these
things out before service. We have a whipped spinach, Ricotta, with Pecorino sardo, which
is Pecorino from Sardinia. These are Italian terracotta
stoneware dishes that, I mean, they’re baked
at thousands of degrees to make these things, so they can survive almost any temperature. I gotta go throw on a chef coat, ’cause I gotta pull this dough out. I don’t want to mess up
my Uncle Charlie shirt. Charlie Verde will get really
[beeping] angry with me. [casual upbeat music] It’s 3:15. Dough is done. We’re gonna pull this
out and get it ready. I had to put on the sunglasses, ’cause you know, they
go with the chef coat, and I got blinded by the light, you know what I’m saying? What’s going on, America? Yeah, now it’s gotta
bench rest for 20 minutes. Bench rest is basically
where it sits on this table. You’re just creating more
strength in everything so that when we start dividing a roll, then like, the whole thing’s
not gonna fall apart. We gotta cover it up
so it doesn’t dry out. Bing, bang, boom. We’ll do it. This is my breakfast. Come on, I got [beeping]
six grams of protein, I got vitamin C in here. You know, it’s fresh
squeezed Campania lemons. We’re gonna start building
our anelletti over here. So one thing you’ll find out if you start looking into Sicilian cuisine is 80% of everything has eggplant in it. It’s eggplant on top of eggplant on top of eggplant, melanzani. So this is a Pecorino sardo from Sardinia. – [Interviewer] You don’t
normally portion this, Nino? – No. Are you outta your mind? Listen. If I portioned all this stuff everyday, what’s Gregorio gonna do? He’s gonna do nothing. [Gregorio chuckles] Jesus. What, you wanna see if I can do it? What, you think I can’t do this? As much of it seems like
not in my character, and whatever, like, I do like to just put my head down and knock stuff out. You put your head down, you
start banging out pizzas. You know, five hours, it
goes by in two seconds. [casual upbeat music] Four p.m. over here at Lucky Charlie’s. The dough is finally ready to shape. So Gregorio’s weighing out all the dough. I’m rolling in, so you see
how it’s smooth over here, and you got a little bubble? If you do this too tight,
you see the gluten ripping? That’s what you don’t wanna do. You gotta get it tight enough to where, you know, it’s gonna ferment
properly without collapsing, but without ripping the gluten apart. So I started making
pizza when I was, like, 11, 12 years old. When I was 20 years old, I went to a pizza competition
at the Javits Center. Won first place for pizza acrobatics, which is like throwing pizza around. Got on the United States Pizza Team. Got to travel around the world for free. Italy, France, China. So the US Pizza Team
is, well it used to be very focused on acrobatics. Now it’s more culinary focused. Since then, I’ve won almost
every pizza competition, international pizza
competition, in the world. I’ve won Chopped. Yeah, like DJ Khaled. All I do is win, win, win, no matter what. Even with six whisky sours, I mean. We got another 15, 20 minutes to service. Gotta knock this out real quick. See you’s on the other side! [casual upbeat music] 5:15. Already got orders rolling in. We’re gonna make some pizza right now. Come see how it’s done. How you doing? We got three pies on the menu. We got the classic,
the red, and the white. That’s all you need. You want toppings, we’ll
throw ’em on for you. Classic pie, it is fresh Mozzarella, it is DOP san marzano tomatoes, there’s basil in the sauce. But we’re not going all,
like, Tricolore over here, because trying to keep it as close to what I remember from
when I was a youth, you know, of coal oven pizza. Usually, you have always stretched dough, and I’ve been very militant about it. My entire career is
never touching the crust, or the cornicione, and
pushing there into it. So you see how I’m stretching it, but I’m never touching this end? So. Over here, we’re doing
it a little different. And this is the only
place I’ve ever done this. And I even press it out, so it doesn’t have a crust, because, I don’t know. That’s what I remember. And I think Gennaro Lombardi, and Miss Santatono, and the late great Andrew Bellucci, you know, they’d be proud. First, Pecorino sardo. Cheese first, because that’s how it was, and that’s how it feels
like it’s coming out right at the same time. Lioni Mozzarell. We’re not shy. Couple stripes. But we’re doing stripes because I said so. We got different peels. This one’s seven feet, that one’s 20 feet, the other one’s 10 feet. All right, so we’re going in. You got this? All right. Little shake. So we’re starting right here, a little left to the middle. 600 on one side, 570 on the other side. So then I’m gonna let that pie set. I’m gonna move it over to our colder spot, that’s around like 550. And I’m gonna finish it off at around 650. You hear a lot of, like,
temperatures and pizza is 700, 800, 1000 degrees going around. If you’re cooking pizza at 1,000 degrees, legitly, it’s gonna be
done in under 60 seconds. It’s gonna be a soggy mess on the bottom, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don’t want that. I don’t think most people want that. You know, you get some of these, like, Naples don guys who are like, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” I’m like, “It’s supposed
to be wet on the bottom?” You need to cook a pizza
longer at a certain temperature to get it crispier. But like, having the ability
to switch temperatures also gives you that charness, so you get the crispiness, you get like the New York, and then you get the coal high temperature all rolled into one
[beeping] beautiful package. So look. You see? You see how I got that? We call that [speaks Italian]. Beautifully burnt. See that? So, you got your crispy,
you got your char. All right. Yeah. That’s a crunch. Little 40 month aged Parmesan Reggiano. Something else that’s pretty
hard to find in the world. Sicilian extra virgin olive oil. Finita la musica. [casual upbeat music] All right, so we got red pie next. Yeah, this peel is ridiculous. This whole entire place is ridiculous. Us doing this is ridiculous. I got a wife and a two-year-old daughter, that come and visit me sometimes, because I live in a grandma
apartment in the back, you know? I’m lucky, today they’re here, but tomorrow, maybe not. A healthy amount of Pecorino sardo. Olive oil. Also very healthy amount. That’s Sicilian oregano off the branch. You see how it looks different? That’s not like your oregano out of your thing, that at your pizzeria looks like, right? ‘Cause that’s the real thing. This one’s actually the perfect one. This is a red hot anchovy. I’m gonna go find the
people that ordered this, and tell ’em I’m very proud of them. [casual upbeat music] So we started out the
first month and a half where I was literally making and baking every single pizza. These guys, like,
standing right behind me. And then, you know,
eventually you gotta get to a place where these
guys can do it themselves. I’m watching every
single pie come upstairs. Like, you’ll see me walk up with like a fork to a customer and check out their undercarriage to make sure it’s the right way. The perfect undercarriage
is [speaks Italian]. Beautifully burnt. It’s 27.7% more than G&D,
golden and delicious. This is panko breadcrumbs, all right? Now, I can’t take credit for this. This is 100% Mark Iacono from Lucali’s. Genius invention. And basically what this does is you put the pie on it, it levels it up, because the metal gets very, very hot. So it keeps the pizza crispy, and then any grease that comes from it gets sucked up by the panko breadcrumb, and it’s like an all natural without like a crust saver thing, way to keep your pizza cool. And if you don’t like
the panko on the bottom, you brush it off. Just brush it off. Who’s that? You wanna see me? You wanna make pizza? Here you go. Yeah. Thank you. I love you, Penny. – I love you, too. – Aw. I knew we needed more coal, because it needed more coal. The flame was a little low. You just gotta constantly watch it. It’s a crazy thing. So I gotta vacuum the oven. So on a regular pizza oven,
you would have a brush, ’cause you’re only two pies deep, so you can brush out all the stuff. On here, if you brush it, ’cause the oven’s so big, it would just move dust and flour and whatever else around. So here we gotta vacuum. Yeah, we’re vacuuming the flour, semolina, coal dust in certain places. It’s just part of any other maintenances, you gotta brush it out
every once in a while. Yeah, so we make a white pie because we don’t believe
in chasing waterfalls. Any pie that you order,
you do any combination of toppings up to three toppings. We don’t do more than three toppings because we’re not making
disgusting pizza over here. Stracciatella, Parma, black pepper crema. And we’ll put a little
bit extra black pepper. Real light oregano. This is a little Asiago. Little extra virgin olive oil. [casual upbeat music] That’s a white pie. Not too wet. Not too dry. A little basil. You got your black pepper. Deep cuts. Boom. Service! Just got done with the first push. Kitchen’s in good hands
with the team over here. I gotta get upstairs. You guys gotta get outta here. And remember, when you
come to Lucky Charlie’s, [speaks Italian]. Eat, drink, and who gives
a [beeping] about anything?