Wood-Fired Obsession
Chef Anthony Giordano brings his lifelong history with pizza to Rhode Island.
photos: will blunt
“Pizza begins and ends with the dough,” says chef and pizzaiolo Anthony Giordano of Anna’s Vesuviano. “Everything else is secondary.”
Growing up in Poughkeepsie, New York, pizza surrounded Giordano from a young age. “Every Friday my dad used to make pizza,” he recalls. “I remember sitting there watching him—he was always making square pizzas on a sheet tray. He would pretend not to see me, and when he’d bend down to put the pizza in the oven, I’d steal some raw dough and eat it.” Between his family’s tradition, his father regularly taking him to Totonno’s on Coney Island, and a growing infatuation with Anthony Mangieri’s Una Pizza Napoletana, Giordano was hooked.
Studying archaeology and anthropology in college, Giordano felt the call, and moved to Italy just outside of Caserta, a small city near Naples. He found work at a bed and breakfast with a wood oven, and stayed three years.
Between eating pizza in Naples at least twice a week and working at the B&B, Giordano dove into the history of the food and pizza he found himself surrounded by. “It helped me understand the multicultural influences of pizza. Naples was a Greek colony, with Arab and Spanish influences,” he says. But Giordano wasn’t just there to eat: he was there to research. “I did a history dive into Neapolitan pizza,” he says. “Eating over there, at places like L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele, shows what flatbread in Naples was when it first started, and what it always will be. A big flat disc, minimally dressed, and not that well leavened. You can see a smaller version of that from the Middle East. I was really moved by it.”
Coming back to the United States, Giordano cooked all over the country, following his brother into the world of fine dining with the Make It Nice and the Bastianich groups, as well as several other restaurants in New York and California. When the pandemic hit, Giordano, tired of cooking food he didn’t feel passionate about, moved up to his partner’s hometown of Providence and opened his pizza truck, Anna’s Vesuviano.
Through trial and error, “lots of anger,” and learning how to work with his oven, Giordano is continuously developing his sourdough pizza recipe: not quite Neapolitan, and definitely not classic American by-the-slice, but somewhere in between: acid and grain-forward in flavor, crispy, fluffy, and charred and spotted by his hybrid wood and gas oven. “The only way I can create the most magnificent product is by being an explorer— looking for clues in books and being passionate."
This obsession has led to Giordano’s final product: an expression of himself and his region. Instead of using Italian flours, his dough mainly consists of flours sourced from across New England, as well as his three-year-old Rhode Island born-and-bred starter. His toppings are simple and seasonal, using local vegetables, meats, and cheeses, like his summer corn pie with smoked corn cream, burnt scallions, corn kernels, and Pecorino Romano. And for Giordano, if his dough doesn’t taste better than the day before, he’s not satisfied: “It’s a wild, live product until the moment it hits the deck of the oven,” he says. “The more that I learn about pizza, the more that I research, the more that I fail and make a shitty pie, those are the best days, because I never let it happen again. I have to have that standard: tomorrow has to be better. I hold myself to it.”
