Andrew Bellucci, pizza visionary with a troubled past, dies at age 59

Andrew Bellucci, who became one of the first New York City chefs to rise to fame with pizza in the 1990s, then lost his job and reputation when an old crime caught up with him, only to return to a city ​​full of pizzaioli inspired by its artisanal, traditionalist approach, died Wednesday in Queens. He was 59.

He collapsed from heart failure while working at his restaurant, Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria, in Astoria, said Matthew Katakis, his business partner. He was pronounced dead at a hospital a short time later.

Mr. Bellucci’s pizzas first attracted attention when he worked at from Lombardy, a revival of a venerable coal-fired pizzeria on Spring Street in Little Italy. Nancy Silverton, Todd English, and other chefs came to sample his pizza, which was nothing like the foldable, gold-and-orange, and mostly interchangeable slices sold all over town. Mrs. Silverton was particularly impressed with a pie topped with fresh clams, garlic, oregano, and olive oil.

“The glory is the crust: light, thin, crunchy yet stretchy, black and blistered, and full of the smoky flavor that comes from the coal oven,” Eric Asimov wrote in a 1995 review in The New York Times.

New York pizza had long been celebrated, but its origins were obscure, its techniques little understood, and its makers unknown to all but a few regulars. Mr. Bellucci saw things differently.

He had learned the craft of pizza in the East Village, baking pies at Two boots and then Three of Cups, now closed. But he learned the knowledge of pizza in the public library, where he spent his free hours combing through old phone books, newspapers, and advertisements.

Mr. Bellucci’s lecture convinced him that the first pizza in the United States was baked in a coal-fired oven on Spring Street by Gennaro Lombardi, an immigrant from Naples. Transfixed, he began poking around Little Italy until he found an empty bakery with a coal oven on Spring Street. He kept searching until he found Mr. Lombardi’s grandson, also named Gennaro, and persuaded him to put the family name on a pizzeria with the oven he found. Mr. Bellucci would make the pies.

Mr. Bellucci wasn’t just turning dough, though. He told stories of pizza, pizza ovens, pizza families, and pizza legacies, and these stories drew attention to styles and methods that other pizza makers would discover in the decades to come.

“He helped usher in the revival of the classic New York coal oven pizza, which was really a throwback to the way pizza was before it became a staple on every street corner,” says Scott Wiener, a columnist for the trade magazine Pizza Today.

“He brought back things like Neapolitan pizza, which led to the neo-Neapolitan pizza of Roberta’s, Paulie Gee’s, Ops, etc.,” Mr. Wiener continued, citing three leading wood-fired oven pizzerias in the city. “Which led to what we have now” – a diverse pizza ecosystem in which even street corner slices deserve serious consideration.

One day in 1995, two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents walked into Lombardi’s, ordered a pizza, and ate it. They left with Mr. Bellucci in handcuffs.

The charges against him stemmed from a previous job as an administrator at a Manhattan law firm, Newman Schlau Fitch & Lane. Talkative and friendly, Mr. Bellucci had been popular in the office.

He once invited the lawyers and other employees to a party he was throwing at a restaurant on Christopher Street, according to “Untitled Pizza Movie,” a nearly four-hour documentary largely about him. There was an open bar and a live band.

A guest looked around and said to her husband, one of the company’s partners, “He must be stealing from you.”

She was right, though it would take months for the company to determine that Mr. Bellucci had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars. By then he had left the company and seemed to disappear.

Federal investigators suspected he had fled the country. In fact, he was on Spring Street, racking dough and giving interviews. Eventually, one of his television appearances tipped off authorities.

“Why would someone on the run allow their photo to be taken hundreds of times?” said Ed Levine, the author of “Pizza: A Slice of Heaven” and one of the first writers to praise Mr. Bellucci’s pizza. “He was clearly addicted to attention.”

Mr. Bellucci eventually pleaded guilty to 54 counts of fraud and was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

In a phone interview from prison with Mr. Asimov, he dismissed the seriousness of his crime, saying his victims were just a law firm, an insurance company and a bank. “It’s not exactly like pranking an old lady,” he said.

When he was released on bail, the court ruled that he would be drug tested, and his sentencing recommended drug counseling. Mr Bellucci denied using drugs in the interview.

Other parts of his story unraveled. Contrary to his claims, he had never been a partner in Lombardi’s.

He had also led journalists to believe that he had followed Lombardi’s heirloom recipes. But years later he told Mr. Wiener that the dough was the same one he made at Two Boots.

He told people he was from the Bronx. Lawyers for Newman Schlau Fitch & Lane were led to believe that a grandmother of his had survived the Holocaust as a Jew.

In fact, Andrew Thierry Bellucci was born on January 21, 1964, in Jersey City, NJ, to Patrick Basil Bellucci and Jeanne-Marie (Schmiederer) Bellucci, both from Roman Catholic families.

Mr. Bellucci is survived by his mother; his brother, Joel; and his wife, Geetanjali Peter, with whom he was estranged. His sister, Chantel, died of cancer at the age of 14.

After his release from prison in 1997, Mr. Bellucci spent several years driving a taxi and drifting in what he described in the documentary as “pizza purgatory”. He tried to return to Lombardi’s, but the owners wouldn’t have him.

In 2013, an ad on Craigslist led to a position as the founding chef of Mikey’s Original New York Pizza, an American-style pizzeria group just getting started in Malaysia.

He would later say that the job “got me back into the game,” but the hours were long and he had no friends in Kuala Lumpur, where he lived alone in an empty apartment. One night, he said in the documentary, he swallowed what he remembered as 50 Vicodin tablets, chased by Jack Daniels in a suicide attempt. He lived, although he was two hours late for work the next morning.

Returning to New York in 2017, he worked as a driver, chef at Rubirosa on Mulberry Street, and consultant at several outlying pizzerias. All the while he was looking for a lender to finance his dream restaurant, a pizza cathedral where clam pies would take up an entire page of the menu, the clams shelled to order by a worker at a prominent station built to sit on a pulpit. corpses.

No Medici stepped forward, but in 2020 he was hired to open a more modest 3,000-square-foot store in Astoria, Bellucci Pizza. His employer, Leo Dakmak, had a piercing shop on St. Marks Place and a tattoo parlor, but was new to the pizza business.

“He understood my vision and said he would follow me blindly,” Mr Bellucci said told The New York Post. “I told him that might be the dumbest thing he would ever do.”

Baked in a new $35,000 electric oven, the pizza came in 25 varieties, including pepperoni with vodka sauce and ranch chicken bacon. All pies and slices, the restaurant said, were sprinkled with 18-month-old pecorino Romano and crushed aranya peppercorns harvested in Kerala, India.

Less than a year later, Mr. Bellucci resigned. Mr Dakmak said they had been arguing about “repeated high charges on the company’s credit card”.

Mr Bellucci told the food website Grub Street that “the final straw” had been Mr Dakmak’s desire to open a second store “whether I was there or not.” Almost immediately he found a new collaborator, Matthew Katakis. Together they built a smashing, red-and-white restaurant a few blocks from Bellucci Pizza and nearly five times the size.

They called it Bellucci Pizzeria. Mr. Dakmak, who had registered the Bellucci Pizza name, sued.

The legal action, popularly but inaccurately known as Bellucci v. Bellucci, was irresistible to the news media, generate at least as much press as Mr. Bellucci had received during his criminal case. In an amicable settlement, he agreed to name his restaurant Andrew Bellucci’s Pizzeria.

Although he had 18 pizzas on the menu, three types of dough and any number of toppings, Mr. Bellucci was mainly concerned with two aspects of his business. One was what Mr. Katakis called “a borderline insanity” about dough. The other was clam pizza.

“Other people put mussel pie on the menu, but no one is that scrupulous,” Mr. Katakis said. “He found out that the clams went cold on the pizza, so he thought he should make them sous vide,” by heating them in a hot water circulator for 45 seconds before cooking.

Mr. Bellucci was preparing shellfish pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died.

His return to the ovens as a celebrated old hand brought Mr. Bellucci into contact with a younger generation of bakers who are just as obsessed with the details of pizza as he is. He became a mentor to many of them, inviting them to work in his kitchen, sharing recipes and advising them before opening their own pizzerias.

Few were old enough to remember the Dark Ages when Mr. Bellucci first started telling New Yorkers that their city had an important pizza legacy to live up to.

“No one was trying to show respect for pizza,” said Mr. Levine. “It took a convicted felon to do that. That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.”