Among the Neapolitan-style pizzerias opened outside Italy in recent years, few have gathered such swift and steady acclaim as IMperfetto. It began baking in December 2019 in Puteaux, in the inner ring of Paris, a few minutes from the business district of La Défense. In a short time it has collected awards in France and across Europe, becoming one of the reference addresses for Neapolitan pizza beyond the Alps and one of the most awarded Italian venues outside the country. Behind this journey are two Italians who came to Paris when they were young, met while working in the French capital’s restaurant scene, and later decided to go into business for themselves. Front of house is in the hands of Simone Lombardi, from Ceprano, in the province of Frosinone, who has lived in Paris since 2010, when he moved there straight after graduating from hospitality school. At the counter and the oven is Tonino Cogliano, from Irpinia, Neapolitan pizza world champion in Las Vegas in 2015.
The oven they chose for
IMperfetto is the
Neapolis by
Moretti Forni, the electric oven designed specifically for the Neapolitan style, capable of working with precision at up to 510°C. The decision to go electric was dictated first of all by the location. “We are in a newly built building with no gas connection,” explains
Cogliano. “We would have had to submit a special request that would never have been approved, so the only way forward was an electric oven. There are plenty on the market, but I wanted to rely on a leading company like
Moretti Forni, which immediately convinced me of its absolute reliability.”
His story with pizza begins in the family, long before it became a profession. “I come from a family of bakers. My grandmother and my mother made bread at home and sold it at the village markets, and as a child I always had those gestures before my eyes,” he recalls. “Then there was my uncle, who ran a pizzeria for many years, where as a teenager I lent a hand to earn a little money. For a while I wanted to move away from all that and tried to do something else. Then, around 2010, life brought me back to the pizzeria, and I realised that the work I had watched as a child was what I had always wanted for myself.” He was taught Neapolitan pizza by his future brother-in-law, who at the time had a pizzeria in the Avellino area. About two years abroad followed, between Toronto and Dallas, and then the return to Italy. “After so long away I wanted to go back to Naples for a while,” he remembers, “but an offer came from Paris that took me away from home again, and I have stayed here ever since.” It was 2014.
The French capital is also where he met his future partner. “We met years ago in a Paris restaurant where we were working together, and we hit it off immediately, from the very first days,” says
Cogliano. “We wanted to do something of our own in the restaurant business, to grow together, to build a place with our own idea and our own vision. For a long time that project stayed on hold, because life had taken us down different paths. Then, years later, we found each other again just as the offer of this space came along, and we jumped in straight away. It was a meeting that wiped out all the time that had gone by, and
IMperfetto was born just as we had imagined it.”
His relationship with the Neapolitan tradition is the starting point of all his thinking about pizza. “I love Neapolitan pizza, I still enjoy eating it and I love the concept behind it,” he explains. “Working with it, though, I realised that as the world changes, so do cooking, flours, machines and techniques. So I wanted to bring a few developments into the classic recipe, in the flours and in the leavening, choosing for example not to work with a direct dough, while always keeping my eyes on the tradition as much as possible.”
Bringing that culture to Paris has required patient explanation from the very beginning. “Abroad you are dealing with a culture that seems close but remains far from ours. In Italy we are born with certain products and take them for granted, just as we take it for granted that we can eat a good pizza, while elsewhere it is much rarer. Everywhere I have been, I have noticed that for people pizza is the one they knew as children. Our job has been to set ourselves apart and help the French understand how a pizza is made and how it is eaten, and why certain products are used. Here they don’t know
fiordilatte, they call it mozzarella, and just explaining the difference tells you a lot about the context. At the beginning we even clashed over the fact that we were only a Neapolitan pizzeria: for a French customer a place that serves nothing but pizza makes no sense, because they are used to sitting at a table where one person orders pasta, another meat and another pizza.” On this point
IMperfetto has not given in. Today the menu offers pizzas, divided into authentic, traditional and creative, alongside starters,
montanare, focaccias,
panuozzi, calzoni and a dessert list, but no pasta or main courses.
It is in daily work that the oven shows its worth. The
Neapolis at
IMperfetto bakes six pizzas at a time, and
Cogliano also uses it to dry the
montanare after frying and to bake the
panuozzi. “A wood-fired oven can give a traditional identity, but for me the pizzas are equivalent, and the one baked in the
Neapolis has no limits as a Neapolitan pizza.
Moretti Forni worked on electric ovens earlier and for longer than anyone else, arriving at an oven that turns out consistently perfect pizzas with unmatched baking precision. In everyday work it makes things much easier for us: the bake is stable and even, perfectly managed between the deck and the top, and there is none of the hassle of wood. In a cold, rainy country like this one, with the space we have, we wouldn’t even know where to store it.”
The most popular pizza at the moment is the Margherita pop, a provola and pepper that Cogliano has reinterpreted in his own way. “We use a finer tomato, San Marzano, a 100% Italian provola, smoked pepper and smoked oil, and we finish it with Parmigiano Reggiano aged 60 months,” he explains. “It has a much more robust aroma, which enhances the fragrance of the oil and the provola.”
Despite the results they have achieved, the two partners continue to focus first and foremost on the place where it all began. “We are still very focused on
IMperfetto, because it has always been our jewel,” says
Cogliano. “From day one until today we have been in here carrying this project forward and trying to improve it day after day. We realise, though, that this place has already given us a great deal, and to keep growing it is right to think about other things too. The desire to do something bigger is there, even if at times the fear of stepping away from
IMperfetto holds us back.”
