Opinion

Randall Beach: This man’s love affair with New Haven pizza has led to new revelations

The cover of “New Haven Apizza” shows a view circa 1930 of Frank Pepe’s original pizzeria, at what is now The Spot. Left to right: Frank Pepe; his brother, Pietro Alessio Pepe; Frank’s nephew, Tony Consiglio; Frank’s cousin, Tommy Sicignano; and Frank’s nephew, Sally Consiglio, who later owned Sally’s Apizza. less The cover of “New Haven Apizza” shows a view circa 1930 of Frank Pepe’s original pizzeria, at what is now The Spot. Left to right: Frank Pepe; his brother, Pietro Alessio Pepe; ... more Photo: (Courtesy Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana) Photo: (Courtesy Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana) Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Randall Beach: This man’s love affair with New Haven pizza has led to new revelations 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

Colin M. Caplan has become New Haven’s pizza historian.

He has earned this title (which I hereby bestow) through many years of conscientious, painstaking research, especially from 2013 to today.

The first fruit of his labors was released in September with his slim (44 pages), self-published “New Haven Apizza.”

“It’s just a tease,” Cap­lan told me as we shared a grated-cheese pizza and a mushroom and mozzarella at Modern Pizza last Tuesday afternoon.

“I want to do a much larger book, a coffee table-sized one,” he said. “I’m hoping to finish it next year but I have a feeling it’ll take longer. This is going to be a big book! It’s ridiculous how much material there is. I’ve got 15 gigs of files here. That’s a lot of pizza information.”

He opened his laptop and showed me some of his hundreds of files about Italian families who made pizza in New Haven, starting around 1915.

I have chosen that phrase — “around 1915” — very carefully, as does Caplan. He can document through city directories and other data when most of the Italian bakers started doing business in the Elm City. But it’s much tougher to determine when they started making pizza.

“The real challenge is to prove they made pizza originally,” he noted. “Some of these guys go back to the 1890s (as bakeries, usually operating out of street carts). There are myriad pizza places I had never heard of. As I researched this over the past four years, more and more places revealed themselves. The more I find out, the more thick the story is.” (Yes, thicker than a thin-crust New Haven pizza.)

A good historian such as Caplan is always revising his information. In December 2013, while he was promoting his book “Legendary Locals of New Haven” at the New Haven Museum, I asked him why he had not noted in his book that, as many people believe, Frank Pepe made the first pizza in New Haven — and perhaps anywhere.

Caplan gave me a small smile and calmly informed me that the first pizza maker in New Haven was Ignazio Camposano.

What?! Then he backed it up with some facts he had unearthed: Camposano opened his bakery in 1917. In 1924, he opened a restaurant at 98 Hill St.

“If he opened a restaurant in 1924, he would have served pizza,” Cap­lan asserted. “Italians didn’t just serve bread. So he beat Pepe’s by at least one year.” (Pepe’s opened in 1925.)

But hold on. Caplan has new findings for us, and he imparted them to me at Modern Pizza. “Iggy Camposano was one of the first, and he definitely predated Pepe’s. But I believe the first known pizzeria in New Haven was that of Francesco Scelzo, who opened his bakery in 1915.”

Caplan admits he has no forensic evidence, no photograph, to prove that Scelzo was selling pizzas at the time. But during his many interviews with descendants of the original Italian pizza makers, he heard a detailed anecdote about Scelzo hiring a Polish immigrant to paint a pizzeria sign, probably in 1915 and well before 1924 or 1925. Because the Polish man was not too familiar with the English or Italian language, he spelled it “Pozzeria,” which in Italian means a “crazy house.”

“That’s the oldest story I’ve got of anyone opening a pizzeria,” Caplan told me. “It’s way too detailed for anybody to make that up.”

But Caplan has so little documentation about Scelzo that he didn’t even include him in his book, except for putting him in a long list of “bakers and pizzaioli” on the next-to-last page. We’ll just have to wait for the “big book.”

Caplan also made this acknowledgement about his Scelzo disclosure: “When you’re doing this kind of research, there is no definite first. This is the mystery!”

He added, “I would love help!” (Those who have some pizza knowledge are free to contact him at colin@tasteofnewhaven.com.

Those who want the book, for $20, can purchase it through that email address. It’s also being sold at Caplan’s public appearances, the next one coming at 6 p.m. Dec. 8 at the New Haven Free Public Library. He will be giving “a graphic digital presentation on the history of New Haven pizza.” It’s free.

His book is full of evocative historical photos of those early pizza men. On page 13 is a shot of Frank Sinatra, standing outside Sally’s Apizza alongside Tony Consiglio and musician Ziggy Elmore after a 1940 performance in New Haven with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.

Caplan included 25 pizzerias in his book, many of them long gone. Don’t look for newer sensations such as BAR. “The families I included were the bulk of the families that operated pizzerias in New Haven and surrounding towns prior to the 1950s. These were the original pizza families.”

Here’s the nut of it: “Number one, this is the story of Italian immigrants coming to New Haven. Number two, it’s the story of how pizza became an American phenomenon, not just an Italian ethnic food. And I think that happened in New Haven.”

Caplan’s sources for the book: newspapers, magazines, online records, land records, census records, birth records, immigration records, telephone directories, city directories, photo archives and maps. In addition, Caplan interviewed more than 40 people with ties to the original pizza guys.

And get a load of this source: “The Pepe family has home movies from the 1950s that have been put on video!” Caplan has seen them and the resulting still photos, showing the old gang outside the place on Wooster Street.

Caplan’s book outlines how Frank Pepe opened his pizzeria in 1925 on the site of what is now The Spot, operating today behind the present-day Pepe’s.

When Pepe vacated his original location in 1936 and moved to where he is now, Ernesto Boccamaiello took over the old place and renamed it The Spot. When Boccamaiello died in 1977, the Pepe family bought that property and reopened it in 1981, still calling it The Spot.

I asked Caplan a crucial question, given that you always see long lines stretched outside Pepe’s but shorter lines for The Spot: Is there a difference?

“The recipe is the same,” he said. “The difference is the oven. The original (Pepe’s) brick oven is at The Spot! I actually prefer The Spot’s pizza to Pepe’s.”

It was time to pose the biggest question: Pepe’s or Sally’s?

Caplan did not hesitate. “Sally’s. That’s my last meal, if I had to pick one. The sauce, the tomatoes, are so good! They’re tangy, salty and sweet. And the crust is magically spongy, chewy and crunchy.”

“My top five are all very close,” he said. “I have a love affair with New Haven pizza. It’s almost like a serious love affair where I don’t want to talk about one in front of the other. They all have things they do to me.”

He was on a roll. “Pepe’s (by which he also means The Spot) is number two. It’s an experience, like Sally’s. The crust is unbelievable. It has an ancient red taste to it. It takes me back to history.”

Modern Pizza is number three on his hit parade. “Salty, sweet, savory. The crust is chewy.”

He added, “For all of these, it’s about the soot: getting that soot in there from the oven.”

“Those three are masters of keeping the tradition alive,” he said. “They are followed very closely by Ernie’s (in Westville), Zuppardi’s (West Haven) and Roseland (Derby).”

Here’s another historical announcement from Caplan: Pizza was not invented in New Haven. “We believe that the first pizza was created in the 1700s, in and around Naples.”

As we rose, sated, to leave Modern Pizza, Cap­lan told me he is taking his pizza information quest on the road next month. “I’m going to Italy to do research and get married! This story of New Haven pizza is like my life story.”

Contact Randall Beach at rbeach@nhregister.com or 203-680-9345.