The first thing people should know about Pizzaioli is that chef-owner Michael Hackman wouldn’t exactly call it a pizza. Even though in a way it is.
Yes, Hackman’s dinnertime shop in West Palm Beach has pies. It’s in the same mall as his famous Aioli bakery cafe, which is a pizza stone’s throw away.
On the takeout-only menu, there are six pies with toppings like spicy pork sausage and cherry peppers, fried eggplant coins, and fermented chili-infused hot honey that change every week. (It’s against the rules to ask for a different filling.)
But Hackman says that’s where the pizza parables end. This fall, Pizzaioli will start serving more foods with noodles, like ramen, gnocchi, and spaetzle, as part of the chef’s multicourse sit-down meals.
“I don’t want to be called a pizza place,” says Hackman, who runs both restaurants with his wife and business partner Melanie Hackman.
“Pizzaioli is going to grow into much more than just pizza.” “I wouldn’t even use the word ‘Italian.'” I’m going against the crowd a little bit here.”
For now, Pizzaioli at 7402 S. Dixie Highway is a simple pizza stand with a devoted following and no indoor dining. It sells 240 pies a night, Thursdays through Saturdays, to customers who want its rich, easy-to-digest mix of sourdough and whole-wheat bread.
For Hackman, pizza is a natural extension of his skills with sourdough at Aioli, a nine-year-old scratch bakery cafe in West Palm Beach’s SoSo (south of Southern Boulevard) neighborhood, where hundreds of customers come every day for trays of cinnamon buns, chocolate babka, pumpkin-blueberry muffins, and rustic sandwiches.
He says that Pizzaioli started out as a pandemic pizza pop-up in late 2020 as a way to make more money and “avoid laying off employees” when people were afraid to eat inside.
“We already had the mixers and the dough, so my wife and I put our heads together and said, ‘OK, we can make pizza.'” “It helped us keep the whole staff,” says Hackman. “The neighborhood was very helpful. Every night, all 60 pizzas and 30 pasta dishes were sold out, and the business was growing.”
He says that it grew too quickly.
So, the Hackmans signed a deal for the place that used to be Pizza Mambo, which was famous for keeping an 80-pound iguana in a chest freezer. Hackman says that his family thought about decorating the restaurant with iguanas as a tribute to Pizzaioli’s boss, but that hasn’t happened yet.
To get Pizzaioli’s brick-and-mortar store open, the Hackmans put all of their dough in southern West Palm Beach. They even closed Aioli’s downtown bakery on Olive Avenue in late 2021 to bring all of their workers together and get ready for the pizza counter.
Hackman has also moved Aioli’s sourdough bread business into Pizzaioli’s new kitchen to make more pizzas and make the main bakery less crowded. So that Aioli’s breakfast and lunch business doesn’t get in the way, the counter is only open at night, when Abby and Maddy work the pizza lines.
Hackman wants to make Pizzaioli open at night from Tuesday to Saturday in October. He also wants to add 10 indoor seats for five-course sample meals with homemade pastas, noodle-based dinners, and wine.
The success of the Hackmans’ pizza may be due to its high-hydration bread, which is baked between 750 and 850 degrees in an Italian-style handmade oven with a dome and is heated with gas and cherry wood.
He makes it with an 8-year-old sourdough starter that he feeds every day and calls Mother “because it gives birth to everything,” says Hackman, who has worked in high-end kitchens at The Breakers, Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach, and Café L’Europe.
“We didn’t want the pizza place to be like any other nearby pizza places,” he says. “We are making a Grandma-style with sesame seeds on the bottom. We’re trying out different styles, and bread is harder to control and, honestly, more difficult.
The pies are made with ingredients from Swank Farm in Loxahatchee and flour from the Midwest that is ground in Indiantown.
On a recent menu, there was pepperoni and roasted garlic fondue, roasted corn and jalapeño pizza, a four-cheese white with ricotta, fontina, parmesan, and mozzarella, topped with garlic and local herbs, and “Not Your Grandma’s,” a Detroit-style pie topped with crushed tomatoes.
Hackman’s best pie? The answer is simple: sausage and peppers.
“Oh, man, you’ve got the fat from the spicy sausage that we made ourselves, the vinegar from the pickled peppers that cuts the fat, and then we add hot honey to the pickling liquid, so you’ve got salt, acid, fat, and heat,” he says. “Your mouth is filled with this wonderful umami.”
