South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Chef wows crowd with pizza throwing
Hollywood chef wows crowds with freestyle pizza-throwing
Massimiliano Stamerra’s pizzeria in downtown Hollywood has been hopping with customers craving brick-ovenfired pies, which are topped only by the chef ’s secret ingredient: freestyle pizza-throwing.
On Fridays and Saturdays at Gioia Eat, Stamerra, 46, exits the kitchen and turns the dining room into a dance hall for his nightly pizza acrobatics. Gioia Eat’s manager Alberto Legnani fires up a bouncy Europop song on YouTube, and Stamerra bursts into the dining room, discs of raw pizza dough spinning like dinner plates in his palms. Customers holler, clapping in rhythm. In one fluid motion, Stamerra tosses both discs overhead, pulling and stretching the dough as he catches it, then twirls it through his legs, around his back and over each shoulder, like a Harlem Globetrotter of gluten.
Then, for his final gravity-defying flourish, Stamerra tosses one disc high and bends forward, and the dough lands neatly on his back. It all lasts three mesmerizing minutes.
“He’s the Bruce Lee of pizza,”
says Hollywood resident David Redmond, on a pizza date with his wife, Line. “When a neighbor told us he threw pizza dough around I didn’t get it, at first. I get it now. His hands move so fast.”
Stamerra has been tossing pizza dough for fun almost as long as he’s tossed pizza professionally. A pizza chef since 2005, Stamerra has won 20 medals at freestyle pizza-throwing contests in Indonesia, Las Vegas, Italy and France while running a restaurant in his native Puglia, the southeastern region in the heel of Italy’s boot.
Now, with such competitions grounded by the global pandemic, Stamerra says treating customers to pizza-throwing tricks has helped lure dine-in crowds at a time when neighboring restaurants struggle with takeout.
“Two people come in, have pizza, and the next week they come back with two more people,” Stamerra, of Miami Beach, says through an Italian translator. “They say they come for my show as much as the pizza, and I believe them. If pizza was bad they wouldn’t come back at all.”
Gioia Eat debuted in late October at 1817 N. Young Circle, across the street from the boutique Circ Hotel. The 2,000-squarefoot pizzeria dishes 48 pizza varieties ($10-$28), from margherita to diavolo to “wurstel e patatine,” a version topped with housemade mozzarella, beef franks and French fries. All pies, which use Italy-imported “00” flour, are fired in a 750-degree Marana Forni brick oven for two minutes. He also carries whole-wheat, low-carb keto and gluten-free crusts.
Stamerra’s dining room is a shrine to his pizza-throwing pizzazz, and decorated with more medals and trophies than an Olympic gymnast. One poster, framed by a brick archway, lists Stamerra’s
20 championship wins in pizza-dough acrobatics: a “Gluten-Free Championship” in Toscana, Italy; gold and silver medals at the Pizza World Games in Las Vegas. A bank of gleaming silver trophies from the World Pizza Championships rest on pedestals above two dining tables near the entrance.
His favorite competition? That would be the
2008 World Pizza Games, when he came onstage dressed in John Travolta’s white disco suit from “Saturday Night Fever” and twirled pizza dough to the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive.”
Stamerra’s restaurant pizza dough is not the same as his pizza-throwing dough, which contains zero yeast, more salt and high-gluten flour. It creates a lighter, more-elastic dough “like chewing gum,” he says. In the cutthroat world of freestyle pizza-throwing, judges grade contestants based
on choreography, rhythm, number of tricks and — yes — points are deducted if the dough tears in competition.
“The lighter dough is less likely to break in competition,” explains Stamerra’s wife, Maryka Venteramo, who travels to each of her husband’s contests. Then she laughs. “When I first met Massimiliano, I didn’t even know he threw pizzas like this for the first six months of our relationship.”
Stamerra cut his teeth in the kitchen of the pizzeria
that his parents, Rocco and Anna, operated in Racale, a small town in Puglia. As a 16-year-old, being a pizzamaker felt unglamorous to him and beneath his ambition, until he resented cooking it, he recalls.
“I wanted to be a chef but my dad needed a pizzamaker,” Stamerra says. “When you’re a chef you have a cap and uniform and money, and the pizzaiolo [pizza-maker] is like a car mechanic. They don’t make any money. But customers liked my pizza so I say, ‘OK, papa, I’ll do it for a little
while.’ ”
He worked there until age 24, when he enrolled at an Italian pizza school called Scuola Italiano Pizzaoli. Then he opened his first pizzeria, Capri New Style, in 2005 in the coastal town of Galipoli. Stamerra moved with Venteramo to Miami Beach in 2018 to open another Capri New Style, which closed in April in the pandemic.
Stamerra never though of pizza as playful until a Capri New Style customer showed him YouTube
videos of acrobatic dough-tossing.
Now, he performs pizza tricks for customers twice a week, and enjoys it as much as cooking.
“I sort of feed off the emotion that audiences give me,” Stamerra says. “When they clap and cheer in the audience, I move faster, I move better.”
Gioia Eat, at 1817 N. Young Circle Drive, is open 11:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Monday-Sunday. Call 954-929-7575 or go to GioiaEat.com.