I n the last golden hour of a late summer day, dinner service is revving up at a hot new pizzeria. Eager diners — young, hip couples snapping pics, chatty groups, parents with antsy kids — queue in anticipation. Once they order their pie, salad or baked shells, they pull up at colorful stools around tables draped with cloth and paper runners. Bubbly jazz drifts from a vintage hi-fi while customers talk or doodle with the Crayons placed next to vases of fresh flowers. Each seat offers a front-row view of the open kitchen, where a cluster of four chefs in matching white, short-sleeved, collared shirts stretch dough by hand and slide pies into the glowing wood-fired oven. This pizzeria, Irma, has a rustic, laid- back charm that speaks to the skill and taste of its chef, Matt Celaya, and his three-man collective, Más Amable. Yet, Irma won’t last. Or rather, it can’t. The restaurant’s dining room sits along the stamped concrete promenade of a quiet, desert-toned shopping center in Gilbert. The improvised kitchen stands on the sweltering blacktop of a couple of angled parking spaces on a triple-digit day. Hours before they started firing pies, Celaya and his crew arrived to transform the patio outside the pop-up’s host, Mythical Coffee Roasters. They unloaded stainless tables to form the skeleton of the outdoor kitchen, undocked the pizza oven from the truck and fired it up. They built their mise en place around coolers filled with toppings and balls of dough. Celaya buzzes from one task to the next, flipping through a collection of records he stashed under the turntable before returning to the kitchen for a final rundown of the menu with the night’s front of house crew, Cole Mills and Shai Gary. He bops back to stretch a disc of dough, moving it in time to the swing of the music. Then he scatters toppings onto a test pizza. Celaya, 32, has the tousled locks and angular features of a young Mark Ruffalo. He uses descriptors like “magnanimous,” “sweet” and “beautiful” with the chill earnestness of your favorite high school music teacher. Chefs Michael Petry and Justin Dean, the other two compatriots of Más Amable, divide and conquer. Petry flits in and out of Mythical’s small indoor kitchen to set up a station to finish pasta and store the night’s dessert: small paper cartons of Cream of the Crop’s Riso ice cream, a rice pudding-inspired treat spiked with cinnamon. The tall, shaggy, bearded 31-year-old, whom the crew all call “Mikey,” will spend the rest of the evening putting the final touches on pies and dishes before they go out to diners. Dean, 29, tends the wood fire inside the nearly 1,000-degree oven. Celaya calls his friend “the greatest pizza chef on the planet.” Sporting a “Top Gun”-era mustache and a black ball cap, Dean slides the tester into the oven. A few minutes later, he coaxes the pie out on a peel. The raw, pale pie has transformed with a golden crust, the bright yellow of roasted corn and the fatty sizzle of soppressata. “Whoa, that looks gangster,” Celaya says at the sight. “Damn, Justin.” Petry finishes the pie with drizzles of garlic oil and peach mostarda while Celaya looks on. Petry debates aloud, “Chiltepin, would that be crazy?” This final hour before service is their last moment for R&D. The chef’s mind rarely stops turning. He slices the pie and hands out pieces. Petry and Bryan Suarez, who has joined the crew to man a second portable pizza oven for the night, clink the slices like Champagne flutes. They both take a bite and nod, agreeing they like it as-is. In a matter of hours, the group conjured a restaurant from what they could pack into a few cars. Celaya and his team are masters of setting up and breaking down with the preci- sion of a traveling circus. “We wanted it to have a magical quality to it, and I think a lot of the guests would remember those things,” Celaya says of these efforts. “Maybe not what they ate per se, but they remember the evening.” They have worked in some of the Valley’s most notable kitchens. That experience — paired with their own dogged support of the local scene, a scrappy DIY ethos and an unre- lenting appreciation for even the smallest touches — has inspired their pop-up. These mobile concepts are the proverbial proving grounds for future restaurants, a format the pandemic only accelerated around the Valley. There’s no sure thing in the restaurant industry. Higher costs have only magnified that reality. It begs the question, will a crew like this, that’s carved out a notable niche in Phoenix’s dining scene as a side hustle, take the next step into their own space? Much like a local band, they’ve ascended to bigger and bigger stages over the last three years. Still, these friends are more concerned with making each ephemeral meal count. “There’s obviously a tremendous amount of passion and heart thrown into this project,” Celaya says. “It’s like, who knows? Chances are we won’t make it. But we got to do it anyway.” Who is Más Amable? While many pop-ups start as one-chef hustles, Más Amable operated as a collective from the jump. Celaya, Petry and Dean met more than a decade ago, slinging pizzas at Fire & Brimstone inside Barnone at The Farm at Agritopia in Gilbert. The trio, all raised in the East Valley, initially bonded over music. They each have taken up an instrument or dabbled in production, and Petry has played guitar in local acts. Fire & Brimstone’s closet-sized kitchen became their personal DJ booth. They’d share artists with each other and keep the energy high. When the tickets felt endless, Gorillaz or Drake or some EDM helped them persevere. “When you’re cooking and music’s involved, it just makes you work better,” Celaya says. “Nothing really gets me super excited the way music does.” Post-shift coffees or beers, and inviting each other to shows, deepened their connections. Celaya has ambition and experience as a co-owner of the Gilbert ice cream shop Cream of the Crop. He has also cooked in such top Valley kitchens as Pa’La and Tratto. He daydreamed about hosting a dinner for friends and family, cooking with the same people who never made working the line feel like work. Eventually, his wife told him he needed to quit talking and start doing something about it. Más Amable hosted its first dinner at the Gilbert pizzeria in 2022. It got hectic. Petry, who has worked at Belly and on the grill at the popular Mesa Mexican restaurant Espiritu, stopped in that night just to check out the event and instead ended up hopping Chef Michael Petry tends the fire of Más Amable’s grill. (Dale Steffen) LIVING Más How a group of friends built one of the Valley’s tastiest pop-ups. BY SARA CROCKER
