Family Business

Salvatore Carlino never intended to fall into the pizza business. He’d seen what it had done to his parents, Angelo and Roula, who dedicated 43 years of their lives to their restaurant, Papa Leone, in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. A lifetime of service and sleepless nights. 

“I grew up in a commercial kitchen,” says Salvatore, who goes by Sal, reclined on a leather banquette inside his latest venture, Lucia Alimentari, a cafe and bar connected to his second pizza restaurant on Canal St. “For them it was working 362 days out of the year. No vacations, no weekends. I never wanted that.”

Instead of following in the family tradition, Sal moved to Berlin and became a DJ, he started a record label and carved out a successful life for himself, thousands of miles away from the South Brooklyn of his childhood. Then Covid happened and he decided that, after several years in Europe, it might be time for a change. “I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he says, “but I decided to come home.” 

At the time, New York was experiencing a new wave of desire for comfort food and home cooking. People were stuck inside and looking for something to do and things to buy. Scores of DIY operations had sprung up around the city, including a handful of new pizza ventures. Intrigued, Sal did what anyone would, given the circumstances. He put his life savings into a pizza oven and set it up in his parents’ garden. 

“Maybe I was a bit cocky about it,” he says, shaking his head and smiling at the memory. “I thought that, given my experience and upbringing, I could probably do a better job than a lot of people out there. My parents were understandably upset about the whole thing! They had retired, they didn’t want their house to turn into a pizzeria.”

“The first week or two were a nightmare,” he adds. “I didn't know what I was doing. I had never experimented with wood-fired pizza at this capacity, but I had my mom and dad, and one thing you have to know about my mom and dad is that they've never lied to me… especially when it comes to pizza.” 

Sal steadied the ship and started to build a reputation: the guy selling increasingly great pizza out of his parents’ back garden, with their input on the perfect recipe. A friend, Richie Quarto, began to regularly drop by. He had grown up eating at Papa Leone after meeting Sal and his friends on Rockaway beach during long New York summers. “Sal took me under his wing,” says Richie, a fast-talking showman who has since joined the Lucia business and can reliably be found on Canal St, jawing with customers and enthusiastically manning the oven. 

“I was working at a print shop in Queens and I felt like I had hit a ceiling,” he says. “Sal had the opportunity to change my life and bring me into the business and he didn't hesitate. It’s crazy, it's beautiful, it's good to feel like a mom and pop shop in a neighbourhood that doesn't have that.”

Before the Canal St business, the first Lucia’s opened on Brooklyn’s Avenue X in early 2022, a serendipitously short walk from where Papa Leone stood for 40 years. Sal revived a vodka tomato sauce recipe created by his father and baked pizzas topped with clams sourced from the Avenue fish market on Fridays, another family tradition. Having built an organic following, he was visited by critics from both The New York Times and The New Yorker, the sort of high pressure column inches that can decimate a restaurant. “Salvatore does his home town proud with a restaurant that feels rooted in history while keeping up with the times,” wrote Hannah Goldfield at The New Yorker. Lucia is a “restaurant likely to become an institution,” offered New York Magazine.

The queues got bigger.

On the opening night at Canal St, surrounded by friends, patrons and, somewhere in the melee, his parents, Sal was approached by his mother and handed a photo. He’d never seen it before, a picture of him as an infant—no older than one—wearing a Micky Mouse t-shirt, sat on the counter of Papa Leone, the restaurant’s pizza oven framed behind him. On the back of the photo was a hand-written message, “You can’t escape destiny.”

“I still get chills thinking of that moment,” says Sal. “She gave it to me and then just walked off, back into the crowd, and I had to hold it together in front of all these people. I went back to making pizza and talking like it was normal.” 

“You can’t escape destiny… how about that?”