Breadwinner from p 17 you separate slices, and basil leaves. The Sonny Boy, an ode to Bianco’s late father, is topped with dry-cured soppressata and Gaeta olives. Bianco jars and sells his tomato sauce made with organic Northern California- grown tomatoes under the name Bianco DiNapoli, a collaboration with Rob DiNapoli. These days, 60-year-old Bianco, who came to Phoenix by way of the Bronx in New York, is thinking about his legacy. It’s one he hopes to leave for his children Nina, Leo, and Eva, all under 10 years old, his beloved wife, Mia, and the culinary world at large. “My kids teach me so much about everything, but mostly they call bullshit on my busyness,” Bianco says over the phone. “Don’t get it twisted; I was a kid 10 minutes ago.” His humility and honesty are apparent in a conversation punctuated by F-bombs and stories of his resilient staff. When Bianco won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurateur in June, he posted an Instagram photo montage of staff members proudly wearing the silver medal around their necks. “Faces of winners,” the post was captioned. “I hope each and every one of them, and not all pictured, knows any success we have or had is because of them, their hard work and commitment, from the desks of accounting to the dish pit.” Bianco is known to celebrate his staff, some of whom have been with the busi- ness for over 20 years. His restaurants’ social media accounts are filled with posts like a birth announcement for a sous chef’s new baby boy and an emotional farewell to a talented chef de cuisine leaving for a new role. As time passes, staff come and go, and things change. It’s a different game since he started slinging pies in the ’80s, he says, for better and for worse. Bianco and his team access superior ingredients — like burrata from Di Stefano Cheese, a family-owned dairy in Southern California, and heirloom tomatoes from Tutti Frutti Farms, an organic grower in Santa Barbara County — through relation- ships they’ve built over the years. Local ingredients are part of the legacy of his food. Bianco prides himself on making the best cuisine possible using the freshest ingredients around. “My family moved to New York and didn’t have the ingredients they had in Italy. So you use what you have. Like, even pizza started out from old French bread ovens,” Bianco says. As it gained popularity after World War II, “Italian-Americans who had never been there started to get their swag a little bit and build their palates.” He remembers when it was almost 18 impossible to find arugula from a small local grower, something we now take for granted at the grocery store. Though fine ingredients are easier to access, food and labor costs are up. The pandemic only made things harder in an industry where Jacob Tyler Dunn Bianco (above) and his managing partner Seth Sulka (left). social interaction, restaurant atmosphere, and Bianco’s trademark style of found items in cozy minimal settings, are key. Like other restaurant teams, Bianco and his staff changed everything about their service to stay afloat during the worst of COVID-19. They’re still shipping pizzas across the country via Goldbelly, where a cool $130 will get you four of his best- selling pies, albeit frozen. “We’re still reeling from the pandemic,” Bianco says. Seth Sulka, Bianco’s managing partner and chief operating officer of Pizzeria Bianco, raised over $23,000 for the restau- rant through a GoFundMe page during the pandemic. “The negative economic impact from the pandemic is taking its toll on famed pizza innovator Chris Bianco. While he’s pursuing a variety of lifelines to help keep his restaurant group alive and valuable employees on the payroll, the hole that COVID has put his business in is becoming overwhelming,” Sulka wrote on the fund- raising campaign. “If you know Chris, he’s way too humble to make this ask, so I’ve set out to do it myself.” Bianco is thankful for loyal partners and staff like Sulka, who became a managing partner in 2009, but wonders about the bigger picture post-pandemic. “We march the streets because we want Jacob Tyler Dunn to pay people well, give them a good wage and insurance, but we still want a 99-cent JULY 14TH–JULY 20TH, 2022 PHOENIX NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | NEWS | OPINION | FEEDBACK | CONTENTS | phoenixnewtimes.com
