'We were surrounded by pizza': Santa Maria's co-founder remembers growing up in Naples

For the latest in our Food Memories series, Pasquale Chionchio tells Victoria Stewart about his pizza-filled childhood and student days

“We were surrounded by pizza,” remembers Pasquale Chionchio, co-founder of the Neopolitan-style pizza restaurants, Santa Maria. “When you grow up, when you’re a kid and when you’re young, it’s the prize - the treat for a good grade at school, your choice for birthdays, and on Saturday or Sunday it was pizza day where you’d go and collect it. It’s a very special thing for us.”

Pizza for Chionchio also signalled teenage freedom; the first night out with his friends was to a pizzeria “because we could afford it. I always ordered margherita - back home, back in the day, there wasn’t much choice for toppings on pizza. There weren’t crazy toppings like there are now.”

This is because pizza’s heritage, he explains, was not exotic. It was meant to be something that everyone could eat:

“Especially after the second world war, pizza was like something that supported you, in terms of it being simply the cheapest thing to fill your belly with. To people in Naples it’s never been a posh thing. It was always a treat - but not high end. It was for the poor people. Basically, it’s bread, so flour and tomato, and then a treat with the mozzarella cheese. But then after a while it became very popular, and people started to be crazy about toppings.”

Chionchio has two favourite memories of pizza. First, the pizza treat: “This might be my parents’ anniversary, or my birthday, and it was always my first choice. Back home there is a difference between a pizzeria and a restaurant - a restaurant is already seen as something more upmarket, but the pizzeria is a very popular thing.”

His second memory is from his student days.

“When I was at university in Naples, we were surrounded by pizzerias in the centro storico and so we’d do a lesson and then have a pizza, and we’d probably have a couple of pizzas a day - one at lunch, and one at the end of the day. It was a cheap thing, something that everybody could afford so it cost maybe around a couple of thousand lire, which is about 1-2 euros.”

This would not have been a whole pizza like many of us are used to today in London, but another category of pizza which, according to Chionchio, “was more like street food, called the pizza portafoglio, which means ‘a wallet to take away,’ and it was like the equivalent of 50p today. So you’d have it proper street food style - you’d have 15 minutes, you wouldn’t sit down, and they’d hand it to you in brown paper and you’d eat it on the go. That was my favourite thing to do. It’s so cheap so I could afford it every day.”

For Chionchio, there are three things that make a perfect pizza. “The first flavour, the first immediate bite, is of the wood; it’s on your tongue, it fills up your mouth straight away, and I think it’s impossible to make pizza any other way. Then it’s the tomato sauce, and the acidity of it kind of stings in your mouth, and then it’s the combination of the mozzarella with the olive oil. And now, when I make pizza for myself, it has to have these three things: the wood, the tomato, and the olive oil mixed with the mozzarella that melts in your mouth.”

Today, the thing that makes him “very proud is that we managed to recreate that here in London - it’s the ultimate satisfaction for me. If you are Neopolitan, those are the things that give you satisfaction and happiness. And if you can recreate that immediate taste in your mouth, you have managed to succeed.”

Santa Maria Chelsea is open now, santamariapizzeria.com

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in