How a skateboard-crazy, tattoo-wearing, punk rock-loving kid from Beachwood grew up to become one of the world’s most acclaimed pizza chefs is a fascinating and improbable story. But to launch right into it at the outset would be, as they say in the journalism trade, to bury the lede.

The real news should come first. Anthony Mangieri, who left his home state for the big city 15 years ago and took the New York and San Francisco food world by storm with his single-minded pursuit of Neapolitan pizza perfection, is coming home.

The latest iteration of his famed Una Pizza Napoletana, which had its genesis in a Point Pleasant Beach strip mall in the late 1990s, could be ready to open in downtown Atlantic Highlands before the end of the summer, Mangieri said.

“I love New York City, I love California, and I love Italy,” Mangieri, now 47, told the Asbury Park Press in an exclusive interview at his current restaurant in New York’s Lower East Side. “But, you know, everywhere I’ve been I am always proud to say that I am from New Jersey.

"My plan was always to end up back in New Jersey and do what I love in the place that I love."

Critics awed by Mangieri’s “textbook perfect,” “peak” and “hypnotic” pizza mention him in the same breath as Thomas Keller, Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Daniel Boulud. (One even compared his airy, thin crust compositions to Chopin’s.)

Pete Wells, the restaurant critic for The New York Times, has called Mangieri “the Mies van der Rohe of Manhattan pizzaioli.” Jersey translation: This dude is the Springsteen of artisanal pizza makers.

If Mangieri is the pizza pope (yet another title) then 91A First Ave., formerly the site of Julia’s restaurant, is the new address of his Sistine Chapel. For some in the food world, including Wells, Mangieri’s move to a relatively obscure hamlet of 4,400 residents, just a 40-minute ferry ride away but a world apart from the Center of the Culinary Universe, is a lot to digest. You can hear Mangieri explain why he's returning to his roots in the video below.

“It’s a small town. Can I say that?” asked Wells, who has visited Atlantic Highlands twice and plans on coming back.

Others are simply overjoyed by the news, which has been printed in plain view for a few weeks now on an inconspicuous poster outside the new restaurant, where a major renovation is well underway. One of the Shore’s most notable chefs, Nicholas Harary, who happens to own an ice cream shop called Nicholas Creamery directly across the street, calls Mangieri’s pending arrival a “game-changer” for the up-and-coming borough.

“I’m not sure everybody knows how lucky we are,” said Harary, whose own career began in a pizzeria at age 11. “Those in the know are freaking out about it.”

"For that caliber of chef to move to the heart of Atlantic Highlands — holy cow!" says borough resident Marie Jackson, the past owner and founder of The Flaky Tart bake shop in town and a 2015 James Beard Award nominee.

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‘The best bread’

Anthony Mangieri grew up in an Italian-American family in Beachwood, just south of Toms River. His father, William, who died in 2007, was a union electrician. His mother, Cathy, who died three years after her husband, worked as a deputy clerk of the Ocean County Board of Chosen Freeholders for more than 20 years. His grandfather ran Mangieri Brothers, a gelato and candy shop in Maplewood.

In his formative years, Mangieri gave serious thought to becoming a Catholic priest, a jazz bassist or a janitor in an Atlantic City casino. Instead, he got into baking.

Not just any baking. In his early teens, Mangieri developed a passion for the ancient baking and pizza-making traditions of Naples, Italy, the region where his maternal forebears are from. Mangieri actually moved in with relatives there for a while and studied from some of the old masters.

By 1995 he was putting his newly acquired skills to the test in a little Neapolitan-style bread shop he opened on Monmouth Street in downtown Red Bank. He called it the Sant Arsenio Bakery, an homage to the town where many of his relatives live.

“I did everything by myself. My mom would drive me to work because I didn’t even have a car,” Mangieri recalled. “I would start working at like 10 o'clock at night and I would work until two or three in the afternoon the next day.”

Mangieri’s idea was to hew with religious fervor to the same techniques and standards that Neapolitan bakers had passed on for centuries, making all the dough by hand with the best and most authentic ingredients he could find, baking his breads and rolls in a wood-fired oven as hot as Mount Vesuvius. And when that eventually failed — as Mangieri was sure it would — well, working as a janitor wouldn’t be so bad, he thought.

That fallback loomed as a real possibility one particularly bleak day in the winter of ‘96. As Mangieri remembers it, the roof of his shop was leaking and his bank account was bone dry. “I had a couple of loaves left and was about to close,” he recalled. In walked Andrea Clurfeld, then the food editor and restaurant critic for the Asbury Park Press. Already a regular customer, she introduced herself and told Mangieri she planned to write about him in her foraging column.

“(E)ven though I go to fairly serious lengths to get good bread, I never had bread in this country that stopped me dead in my tracks,” she wrote. “Without question, Mangieri’s is the best bread I have ever tasted." The morning the column published, Mangieri had 30 customers waiting outside his door when he opened the bakery.

“I literally never had 30 customers in one day,” he said. "I was like, ‘Oh, my god, what is this?'”

Even with that burst of interest, Sant Arsenio was not long for the world. After shuttering it later that year, Mangieri quickly pivoted to pizza, borrowing money from his family to open Una Pizza Napoletana along Route 35 in Point Pleasant Beach, a block from the ocean.

He limited his offerings to just four pizzas, made with the finest tomatoes, basil, mozzarella cheese, olive oil and other basic ingredients he could lay his hands on. His handmade dough, made with the best Sicilian sea salt available and premium Italian flour he bought from a guy who was selling it out of the trunk of his car, was naturally leavened by whatever wild yeasts happened to be passing through the neighborhood.

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The funny thing about Mangieri’s uncompromising approach was that it looked, from the outside, an awful lot like a sure path to ruin.

Obsessed with controlling every detail of the fledgling operation (and too short on cash to hire any help at first) he did everything himself: waiter, chef, busboy, cashier and dishwasher.

When he ran out of dough — enough for about 70 to 80 pizzas a night — it was Ciao, baby, see you tomorrow. Open just three or four days a week, he sometimes shut the place down if he wasn't totally satisfied with the quality of the dough that day, no matter what the sign out front said.

He was so orthodox he was almost heretical. He wouldn't sell slices, nor would he let you pick your toppings. Regulars like Bernard Maisner, now a close friend, used to cringe when they’d overhear a new customer request pepperoni or sausage on their pie. As Wells later observed in the Times, “You would have better luck persuading the driver of the M5 bus to pop a wheelie on Fifth Avenue.”

Plus, Maisner recalls, he was charging like 13 bucks for a 12-inch pie back then — a relative bargain compared to the $25 he'd later command in New York (“THAT’S A LOT OF DOUGH!” splurted a headline in the New York Post.)

“You either liked it or you didn’t,” observes Maisner, an artist and calligrapher from Bay Head who designed Una Pizza's logo.

A lot of people didn’t. On at least one occasion, a heated dispute with a customer turned comically physical, as Mangieri relates in a recent podcast interview with Brian Koppelman, a close friend, filmmaker and screenwriter who has featured Mangieri and his restaurant in his hit Showtime series “Billions.” You can hear Mangieri talk about his approach to pizza-making in the video below.

Few people grasped what Mangieri was up to better than Clurfeld. A kindred spirit, in the late ‘90s she was getting blowback herself for championing the then-nascent food revolution in a touristy part of the state where Clams Casino was still revered as haute cuisine. In a 1997 "Dining Out" column she called Mangieri's old-school pizza "the ultimate gastronomic bliss.”

It was Clurfeld who, several years later, persuaded a dubious Ed Levine, a leading pizza authority and friend who served with her on the Restaurant and Chef Awards Committee of the prestigious James Beard Awards, to take a North Jersey Coast train down to Point Pleasant Beach shortly before his book “Pizza: A Slice of Heaven” was set to go to press.

All it took was one bite to convince him that Mangieri ranked among the best of the best. “He just shook his head and said, “I’ve got to get him in the book,” Clurfeld recalls.

He did, somehow, and it sent Mangieri's star rising. But to follow it, he moved Una Pizza Napoletana to the East Village in Lower Manhattan in 2004, after flirting with the idea of relocating up the coast to Asbury Park or Atlantic Highlands. Five years later, he moved again, this time even farther away, to San Francisco.

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Undeterred, a bunch of his original Shore fans followed him wherever he went. That's what they dug the Lincoln Tunnel and invented airplanes for, they reasoned.

"One thing about his pizza," says his friend and fellow tattoo enthusiast Robert Leecock of Red Bank, "as soon as you bite into it, it really does bring me back to Point Pleasant."

Before Mangieri left, another longtime friend, Brett Beach, of Middletown, predicted his eventual return.

"Anthony," he told him, "you know you're going to come back to New Jersey.

"One year, 10, 20, whatever it's going to be, it's going to come full circle."

Now, at long last, it has.

Born to return

Mangieri almost changed his mind about going out West.

At the eleventh hour, he called the shipping company transporting his new pizza oven from Italy and asked them to contact him when it reached the East Coast because he was thinking about keeping it there. We're not going to the East Coast, they informed him, we're going through the Panama Canal.

Mangieri and his wife, Ilaria, who is from Italy (they now have a soon-to-be 8-year-old daughter, Apollonia) went through with the move, after all, and Una Pizza Napoletana 3.0 won rave reviews and a loyal following. But after a seven-year run in San Francisco, Mangieri, his crisper edges now smoothed by marriage and fatherhood, felt the pull to be closer to family and friends in Jersey.

So a year ago he returned to New York. This time, Mangieri partnered with two of the city's hottest young chefs, Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra. The creators of nearby Wildair and Contra, they augmented Mangieri's tried-and-true pizza lineup with an ambitious menu of chic appetizers, desserts and natural wine.

Wells, for one, was disappointed. Though he praised Mangieri's "extraordinary" pizza as possibly better than ever, his one-star review called the new UPN "a pizzeria at war with itself." A subsequent shakeup among the partners placed Mangieri back at the helm.

It was during this upheaval that Mangieri got serious about returning to New Jersey. An avid mountain biker fond of the rolling hills of nearby Huber Woods Park, he says he's been eyeing Atlantic Highlands for years. He's drawn by the town's scenic beauty, its artsy vibe, and the fresh energy that Harary's Creamery, Carton Brewing Co., Jus Organic and other recent arrivals are bringing to town.

"I'm so pumped to just go back and say, 'If you want my pizza, this is where I'm at,'" he said.

It won't be easy; nothing in the restaurant business ever is. Mangieri wouldn't say what his plans are for his current location in the city, but he's never operated more than one restaurant at a time, nor did he ever aspire to. As someone who still makes all his dough each morning and virtually every pie that comes out of Una Pizza Napoletana's glistening, tiled oven, splitting his time between two sites in different states poses a steep challenge.

There was a new development this week. In a highly unusual move, the Times' Wells re-reviewed Una Pizza Napoletana less than a year after taking it to the woodshed. He told the Press that it felt like the right thing to do, since so many of the changes he'd suggested last year had come to fruition, and seemed to be working well. This time he awarded the restaurant two stars, calling it "the finest sit-down pizzeria in the five boroughs."

"It's a rare case of a restaurant getting less creative and less ambitious and seeing its rating go up," Wells said. (Among other changes, the prices were tweaked downward, to between $19 and $26 per pie.)

In his review Wells confesses to be "unnerved" by a "rumor that Mr. Mangieri was thinking of leaving the city and taking his pizza with him." Wells vowed not to stand idly by and watch that happen, not "without a fight," anyway.

"There is a place for people who are as obsessed with pizza as Mr. Mangieri," is how the review concludes, "and the place is New York City."

'Somewhere special'

Don't worry, Jersey. Mangieri hasn't changed his mind about coming home, even if he hasn't figured out all the details about how it's all going to work.

"I plan on making every pizza that's served there, so that kind of tells you where I'm going to end up," he said.

Dan Richer, for one, is counting down the days.

A native of Matawan and a Rutgers grad, Richer is the celebrated chef-owner of Razza, an American artisanal pizzeria in Jersey City. In 2017, before Mangieri's return from the West Coast, Wells set off a tsumani in the pizza world when he dubbed Richer's free-spirited, Jersey-sourced pies "New York's best pizza."

There's no rivalry there. Richer reveres Mangieri and the two are friends. Though both use wood-fired ovens, their pizzas belong to distinct genres.

Richer says no one he knows has mastered the nuances of dough-making better than Mangieri. There are countless variables involved — the humidity, the fluctuating temperature of the water pipes, the season the flour was produced — and conditions change not just from one day to the next but from one hour, even one minute to the next.

"It's more like surfing, right? It's that ability to stand up and just deal with what comes your way and ride that wave to the left or the right," is how Richer explains it.

"The flavors just in the crust alone that he's able to extract from the wheat through fermentation are unlike any pizza that I've had in this country," Richer says.

"As soon as you walk through the front door, you can smell the difference," he says. "That's when you know you're somewhere special." And since Richer lives 15 minutes away in Middletown, he'll be able to follow those wafting aromas to First Avenue whenever he wants.

Richer can't wait, and neither can Mangieri.

Up to his elbows in flour and dough, he rattled off a string of ideas to showcase the iconic flavors and traditions of the Jersey Shore in the new location.

"I never really wanted to leave," he said. "The only real reason that I left and started this whole journey was because I had to prove to myself that I could make it, and I wanted to show the world what I thought was the best pizza."

Mission accomplished. Now it's Jersey's turn again to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

Shannon Mullen has worked at the Press for 32 years, specializing in in-depth investigations and narrative feature stories. He can be reached at @MullenAPP, shannon@app.com or 732-643-4278.