Lucali | Brooklyn, NY
In a former Carroll Gardens candy store, Mark Iacona crafts pizzas that celebrate a bygone era of an Italian immigrant neighborhood.
On any given afternoon between half-past two and four-thirty, a line for a Brooklyn pizzeria waitlist wraps around the tree-lined block of Henry Street in Carroll Gardens. This means that right now, just a few blocks from the apartment where I write this, the line has already begun to form.
At the front of this line are the professionals. By this, I mean someone with too much money and not enough time has hired someone with not enough money and too much time to stand in line for them.
Just behind these chair-carrying Taskrabbits are the ones who are sticking this one out themselves. Perhaps they live in the neighborhood and know the drill.
At the back — so far back they’re not sure where they’re standing is still considered Carroll Gardens — are those who will not get a table until eleven (if they’re lucky) or perhaps (and more likely) none at all.
All are waiting for the moment — some arbitrary time between four and about four-thirty — when the hostess — one of the “neighborhood girls” — will step outside, sit at her wooden table, take out her pencil, open her notebook, and deliver each their verdict. She never forgets to add: “This isn’t a guaranteed spot, just a waitlist.”
Not in line but planning to eat there tonight are the ignorant. There’s no walking in at seven at a spot like this. And anyone in this line —even those hired — knows that the most important ingredient in these pizzas is the very act of having waited.
The restaurant is Lucali.
***
At 36, Mark Iacona, chef and owner of Lucali, had never made a pizza in his life. He wasn’t a trained chef — or even an untrained one. He’d never been to Italy.
He happened upon the business by chance.
After hearing that the owner of the candy store he’d hung out in as a child — just as his parents had — faced no choice but to rent out the space to a new tenant, he signed a lease. He couldn’t bear the idea of a chain taking over the space. At first, he thought his younger brother could take over the store to make extra cash, but as he stepped behind the other side of the candy store’s counter and discovered its back rooms for the first time, the wheels began to turn.
Stranger as Mark may have been to pizza, he was no stranger to construction. He had worked in marble and granite fabrication for years — he had even done work for Frank Sinatra. He was one of the industry’s best.
For two years, he worked on transforming the space — at first no concrete sense of what would occupy the space — keeping nothing of the candy store except the front and back door and a Coca-Cola sign that still hangs on the brick wall.
“I wanted to do [Lucali] the way the craftsmen did it back [in the day]. There’s no sheetrock. I did plaster work. You know, I put up that tin ceiling,” he says in a thick Brooklyn accent in an interview I find online, “And I laid those floors. I faced nail them. I wanted to do it the old-school way. I wanted it to be more like a movie set.”
Next, Mark needed to learn to make pizza. He began by buying dough from a pizzeria a few blocks away and learning to stretch it. He practiced and practiced. Next, he purchased equipment from a pizzeria that was closing down and asked for their recipe. He claims that within two weeks he had nailed the recipe he still uses to this day.
When the paper finally came down from the windows in 2006, the place filled.
It’s been full ever since.
***
There are seemingly no frills at Lucali, yet I get the sense that every last choice is intentional: the jars of tomato sauce placed on a wooden sideboard, the picture of his grandmother hung on the wall by the oven, the brass chamber sticks, the chalkboard menu posted on the wall (there are no printed menus at Lucali and only two choices: pizza or calzone), even the bowls of mozzarella on the marble counter.
In every choice is an ode to a bygone era of Carroll Gardens — once an almost exclusively Italian American immigrant community.
Since Mark’s childhood, Carroll Gardens has changed dramatically.
“There are still people here that I was in kindergarten with that I still see on a daily basis,” he says, “but for the most part mostly everybody’s gone. It’s like everything else in life, everything changes.”
Storefronts once home to old-fashioned Italian eateries now house boutique dry cleaners and natural wine stores. Spots like Café del Sud where Italian-Americans once drank espressos after work are now Dunkin-Donuts. Catholic schools — even churches — have been closed and converted into multi-million dollar condominiums. Gone are the days of neighborhood games of ball in Carroll Park (“The Yankee Stadium of Carroll Gardens,” Mark says), summer evenings on brownstone stoops, Italian widows dressed in black, social clubs, and men smoking cigars.
Yet, walk into Lucali today and it’s as if it has always looked this way. When I tell my mom he did it all himself, she doesn’t believe me: “I assumed it was all original. I can’t believe it.” She’s right. It seems as if the tin ceiling has always been there, the plastered walls are original, and the brick oven has burned for a century.
***
So what makes Lucali and its pizzas so sought after? How’d it become a B.Y.O.B. destination for wine collectors — there’s a 1971 bottle of La Tâche in the window — and feed celebrities in the likes of Jay Z., Beyoncé, Paul McCartney, and David Beckham?
Is it the way he stretches out the dough with a wine bottle?
The bread crumbs scattered across the aluminum serving tray to create a barrier between the hot dough and the cool metal?
The heap of fresh basil he cuts atop each pie?
I reckon it’s for something more than just the flour, or the dough, or the basil.
Instead, it’s in the way Lucali twists time.
When I dine here, I am, for a few hours, transported to a bygone era of my neighborhood — an era in which craftsmanship is revered. Watch Mark work: His hands, once skilled in carving marble and face-nailing floors, now coax perfect circles from wine bottles and flour. Here, every detail is thoughtfully considered, every movement deliberate.
Here, things are done the slow way, the hard way, the right way.