24-08-2020
«One of our most popular pizzas… It it because burrata, added at the end, is the solution to all of the summer problems?!». These are the words of Daniele Donatelli, two restaurants in San Giovanni Lupatoto (Verona), Donatelli 3011 and Donatelli Pizza & Birra
During the almost three months of forced closure, Daniele Donatelli was one of the few Italian gourmet pizzaioli who didn’t reinvent himself as a delivery place. Born and raised in a take away pizzeria, while acknowledging that it has trained his kneading muscles and nourished his knowledge of all the possibilities offered by raw materials and his daily research on the varied inclinations of the clientele, even when he opened his Donatelli 3011 in San Giovanni Lupatoto (Verona) two years ago – where he pulls out of the oven all sorts of leavened products from dawn to late at night – he chose not to close his other place, Donatelli Pizza & Birra, favouring diversification.
Pizza Bufala
«So when I had to close one, I fully focused on the other», he says given he certainly doesn’t have a lazy meditative inclination, and in fact he used all his energy every single day of the lockdown to put into practice all the new ideas he had had for a while: an evolution of the dough for both the pizzerias, of course, and a line of cocktails in bottle which he’ll launch soon - «because the world of leavened products is not just about pizza» - and a still super-secret project with mozzarella, «the main ingredient in every pizzeria».
Carbonara tartufata
Tonno and cipolla
Daniele Donatelli has thus reopened with plenty of energy, encouraged by the fact that «clients too seem to have overcome their fears and have shown they couldn’t wait to be back» at 3011, whose name refers to the RAL colour of the evocative red bricks.
Translated into English by Slawka G. Scarso
Donatelli on the pages of the Almanacco della Pizza
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Born in 1987, she’s a professional journalist stubbornly tied to Modica. She’s a sommelier on constant training. Every day she travels around “continental Sicily” in search for food and wine stories, people and businesses. She’s convinced every farmer deserves a novel
Luca Doro with his mother and grandmother. The pizzaiolo from Doro Gourmet in Macerata Campania has now landed in Friuli too, with Impronta Doro in Cervignano (Udine)
All photos are by Brambilla-Serrani
The pizza at Mani in Pasta, pizzeria in Milan: three locations in total, the latest in Via Giovanni da Procida 1