Pizza Taglio in East Liberty to close for good
Pizza Taglio — the acclaimed Neapolitan-style pizza restaurant in East Liberty — will close for good at the end of service on July 11, pizzaiolo and owner Anthony Giaramita announced Wednesday evening.
“This has nothing to do with COVID or lack of support from Pittsburgh,” he said, citing unrelated business issues.
“We’re not struggling. This has been a lot of fun. I’ve loved having a pizzeria in Pittsburgh. We brought Jidori egg yolks and guanciale to Pittsburgh pizza. My goal was to stay here and help build a new generation of pizza-makers,” but he said that he has decided to step away.
Mr. Giaramita grew up in the restaurant business — his family owns La Tavola on Mount Washington — but he wanted no part of it, opting instead to attend the University of Pittsburgh School of Law after college. He clerked under a judge, then worked at a major Downtown firm — an experience he grew to detest.
He went back to work at a small firm, and “on the day I hit the snooze button 14 times, I decided I better start thinking about something else,” he said in a 2017 interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Mr. Giaramita reached back to his roots and developed Pizza Taglio, which was to be a Roman-style pizzeria in East Liberty inspired by an episode of “The Layover,” in which the late host Anthony Bourdain visited the famed pizzeria of Gabriele Bonci in Rome.
Mr. Giaramita went to New York to attend seminars led by Mr. Bonci on the dough-making and baking processes.
“I thought it would be easy — I figured, I’m a lawyer,” he said. It took months for him to get it right.
He opened at 126 S. Highland Ave. in early 2015 and ultimately shifted to a classic Neapolitan style
of pizza-making, which earned praise in both local and national publications — including being featured on the cover of Pizza Today, which is the industry’s largest publication.
He has eaten pizza on three continents, in 10 countries and nearly every U.S. state, and loves to wax poetic about pizza and his process, which he describes as the sweet spot between an artist and a technician.
“Here’s the thing: You can be a scientist and understand the basics and fundamentals of making dough and making cheese, cooking dough, fermenting and all this, and it’s not gonna come out the same as a pizzaiolo making it. And in Italian they have a great phrase for this — la mano — or ‘the turn of the hand.’ ”
Mr. Giaramita left the door open to pursue pizzamaking again in Pittsburgh but summed up his experience without hyperbole: “This has been the best five years of my life.”