Party Report: The F&F Pizza Sessions Night #2

Throwing it down with Chris Bianco and the Sisters Santoro

Photos by Poupay Jutharat

I grabbed dinner on Sunday night with Chris Bianco at F&F Restaurant in Carroll Gardens. It was for a Take Me To Your Spot shoot, alas, not a social call. Still, the conversation flowed easily, and frequently veered into the philosophical. Or as philosophical as one can get about pizza — which, if you're Chris Bianco, aka the Yoda of Pizza, is often (minus any pretense).

What I wanted to talk about, specifically, was genre. I kept coming back to the subject. As a writer, genre fascinates me. Rather than be a dirty word, genre is something that appeals to a great many writers, filmmakers, and other storytellers, many of whom might otherwise be considered too serious an "artist" to write or make, say, something as formulaic as a detective story. But, as it turns out, that's not the case. Instead of limit one creatively, genre—its rules and parameters and tropes—can actually be liberating. With the aperture narrowed and the territory clearly laid out, a storyteller is left free to experiment within those set boundaries. Look at Raymond Chandler, who elevated hardboiled pulp fiction to literature, or Tony Gilroy, the director behind seminal Star Wars series Andor, to name just a few.

I wanted to know if Bianco felt that way about pizza. Did working in something as straightforward as dough, so to speak, free him up creatively? Bianco had an answer, delivered, as always, in his circuitous way of speaking, drenched in that streetwise Bronx patois that, if you're not listening carefully enough, belies a serious mind at work. But I'll save what he had to say for the episode — dropping next week. It's going to be a banger.

In the meantime, there was Monday's second installment of the F&F Pizza Series, which served as the real answer to my question. Judging by the pies dreamed up by Bianco, sisters Carola and Victoria Santoro of Argentina’s Ti Amo Pizzeria, and the Franks' home team, pizza is indeed a genre that allows its most skilled practitioners to play, to experiment, to game-change — just ask the 330+ ticket holders who collectively had their minds blown (this writer included). There was Bianco’s subtle Amalfi slice, with lemon, anchovy, green onion, fontina and a perfectly crisp, zero-flop crust. The Santoro sisters’ margherita, zhuzhed up with chimichurri, and their revelatory mascarpone slice, floppy and fluffy in all the right ways (to say nothing of the 400 handmade empanadas their mother made). Team Franks? They held it down with clam, Sicilian, and the joint’s unmissable veggie slice. There were drinks! There was crudo! There were pizza heads as far as the eye could see.

“We have a very classic style,” said Victoria Santoro, rolling dough in a corner of the Franks’ back garden. “But now, we started playing with our roots. That’s why we have chimichurri. That’s why we have empanadas. In Argentina, on a Friday night, if you’re six people you order six empanadas before your pizza.”

The Santoro sisters drew quite a crowd. So did Bianco, who worked the dough and the ovens inside F&F Pizzeria as the trainspotters gathered tight and craned their necks to watch the legend do his thing. “He is our idol,” said Victoria.

“We’re gonna have 300 people tonight,” said Bianco, taking a brief pause and wiping the sweat from his brow, a bushel of grey hair crowning his head like a cumulus cloud. “I can’t do this everyday anymore, but, I mean, you know, I’m addicted to the rush. I love, love, love it. It’s like, you can’t do 100 push-ups anymore, but if you can still knock out 20, to remind you of your old days, I mean, why not?”

Amen to that. We’ll take any reps these masters can still muster. Want in for the next Pizza Session? We’ll be back at it on July 15th with Frank Pinello of Best Pizza, and Ryan Gray of Elena. Get your tix here.