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After almost exactly two years, revered pizza shop Una Pizza Napoletana is finally reopening its Lower East Side outpost at 175 Orchard Street, near Stanton Street. Pizzamaker Anthony Mangieri has announced that the NYC shop is back in business — with some upgrades — starting on March 3.
Ahead of the reopening, Mangieri refreshed the menu with a couple of new additions, including a pecorino romano-strewn cosacca pizza, sorbettos, and almond cremolata for dessert. The restaurant will also launch a fancy, blowout meal called Una Pizza Tavola, starting at $750 for up to four people. Diners can reserve a booth in front of the pizza oven on Friday nights, where Mangieri will serve up an endless parade of starters, pizzas, and desserts. “We’ll make you on- and off-menu pizzas until you stay ‘stop’,” a description on the website declares.
The restaurant’s interiors were renovated during the downtime, too, with new tilework and a Bay of Naples mural installed near the wood-fired pizza oven.
A few weeks after the restaurant has reopened for dinner, Mangieri plans to convert the space into a coffee shop from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Caffè Napoletana will sell espresso, orange juice, olive oil cake, and other Italian pastries, according to a press release.
“I’ve spent the better part of my adult life running toward a finish line, wondering when are you truly the best you can be at something? When have you reached the point of mastery? Now I know that the finish line doesn’t exist, but I’m driven by the pursuit,” Mangieri said in an email statement on the reopening.
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Mangieri first started slinging Neapolitan pies at Una Pizza Napoletana in Manhattan in 2004, at a shop in the East Village. After an interlude to San Francisco, the restaurant returned to NYC on the Lower East Side in 2018, when Mangieri formerly partnered with Contra and Wildair duo Jeremiah Stone and Fabián von Hauske Valtierra to revamp the pizzeria. Mangieri is known for a strenuous, exacting approach to pizza-making, sourcing high-quality ingredients to layer over naturally leavened dough that is made on-site on a daily basis. Eater critic Robert Sietsema dubbed the pies “perfect” at the LES revamp; while Eater critic Ryan Sutton was more skeptical in a later review.
Mangieri closed down the LES shop in March 2020, amid the larger citywide shutdown due to the pandemic. In the interim, Mangieri has been making pies out of a Una Pizza Napoletana shop in New Jersey, although he closed that location last fall.
