In his gripping text “The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations,” the American sociologist Robert K. Merton introduced the idea of multiple discovery. Technological inventions, he argued, often arise at the same time in different places, completely independent of one another. It happened with punk rock, gunpowder and Charles Darwin’s (and Alfred Russel Wallace’s) theories of natural selection.
Restaurants have their own version of multiple discovery. So often, cooks separated by bridges, boroughs and borders arrive at similar ideas, be it salt bread or Mexico City tacos. Another example is the piadina, a flatbread from a mountainous region of northern Italy, which until recently, required a pack of bloodhounds to hunt down. Then, this summer, I blinked and the piadina could be found, in various styles, at multiple restaurants around town.
Coincidence? Let’s find out.
Don’t tell nonna
I started my search earlier last month at Testo, an Italian restaurant open since 2012. (I had a hunch piadina might be on the menu, since the place is named after the clay pan used to bake them.) When I arrived at the bar, I spotted one a piadina, pressed in the style that the owner Massimiliano Barbizzi learned from his mother in Savignano sul Rubicone, a riverside town in northern Italy. He substitutes olive oil for lard — forgive us nonna, we have sinned — and toasts his piadina over charcoal until it’s as malty as a biergarten pretzel. Inside, arugula, mozzarella and pink folds of prosciutto are neatly stacked, like an Italian sub.
When I called Mr. Barbizzi to explain the premise of this column, he was incredulous. “You think this is the first time people heard of piadina?” he said. “I don’t think so.” In fact, after moving to Manhattan in 2001, Mr. Barbizzi’s first job was pulling espresso shots at a West Village cafe named Piadina. It closed years ago, but I was in luck: “The owners have a new place,” he said, and it was less than a mile away in Williamsburg.
Meet Mr. Piadina
And this is how I met Massimiliano Nanni, the grandfather of New York piadina, who pretty much everyone calls “Chicco Piadina.” (It’s even his email address.) Beginning in 1995, with his Manhattan cafe Piadina, Mr. Nanni opened multiple restaurants around town, including Saraghina in Bed-Stuy and Malatesta Trattoria in the West Village, all serving foods from Rimini in Emilia-Romagna, the birthplace of the piadina.
You can find Mr. Nanni at the new Lella Alimentari e Cucina, where piadina are furnished with conventional ingredients (prosciutto, stracchino) and local specialties (tuna salad, capers). On Mondays, he makes nearly 900 piadina, a week’s supply, shaping them into irregular discs that are considerably thinner than those at Testo. “It’s a very hard job,” Mr. Nanni said. “If I get sick, who’s gonna make the piadina?”
Who indeed? Is this why piadina aren’t as abundant as they should be? “There is one new place,” Mr. Nanni told me, “but the owners are not from Emilia-Romagna.” Still, there was no denying: “It is very, very good.”
Et tu, piadina?
I arrived at Casa Piada around 5 p.m., the best or worst time to arrive at Casa Piada, depending on who you ask. On the one hand, it was happy hour, a three-hour block on weekdays when Aperol spritzes cost five bucks. On the other hand, cheap cocktails attract a crowd. Right as I began to wonder if Mr. Nanni had misled me, an employee flew from the kitchen, holding a crisp-looking lavash with cold cuts and hot peppers. Piadina!
Or was it? Despite everything I had seen on the Casa Piada website, social media page and menu, Luca Lewis, an owner, told me these are really crostolo, another variety of Italian flatbread made by adding egg. Each week, they are baked in Pesaro, Italy, (his ancestral home) and shipped to the restaurant in vacuum-sealed pouches. “The bread, the water, the flour,” he said, “everything is from Italy.” Even the lard, which transforms his flatbreads into supremely flaky vessels for burrata, pesto and other latter-day fillings.
Mr. Lewis pointed out that Casa Piada was supposed to open last year, but the opening was delayed until this April. Just in time, if you ask me, for a piadina-packed summer.
- Credits: The New York Times
- Author: Luke Fortney
- Photo: Heather Willensky
