Max Lewis has a tattoo on each of his forearms. On his left arm is the image of his beloved English bulldog Lenny, a faithful likeness of his pet of four years. On the right, however, is something a little more left-field - an drawing of New Haven pizza chef Ray Santiago. As Lewis says on his Instagram account: “If you don’t know who Ray Santiago is by now, do you even apizza?”
To the New Haven pizza amateur, of which I admit I am one, there’s a lot to unpick here. Santiago, so Lewis tells me, is a bit of a Connecticut legend having worked at New Haven pizza institution Sally’s Apizza since high school (he’s now in his 60s), Sally’s being one of the founding fathers of New Haven pizza when it was opened by Salvatore ‘Sally’ Consiglio back in 1938. Apizza - pronounced ‘ah-beetz’ - meanwhile also traces its roots to New Haven and 1925 when Italian American Frank Pepe opened his Pizzeria Napoletana selling simple tomato pies.
If you’ve not heard of apizza, which is based on an old Neapolitan/American dialect of pizza, then consider yourself in good company. Dave Portnoy, the American social media star of the hugely popular One Bite Pizza Reviews (where he says ‘one bite, everybody knows the rules’ before proceeding to take numerous bites of pizza) hadn’t heard of it either or knew how to pronounce it when he first paid a visit to Sally’s back in 2019 and gave its wares a score of 9.2, one of his highest to date.
Six years on, and while Portnoy’s star has risen on this side of the pond, the notion of apizza hasn’t.
Or at least not yet. Enter Lewis, a self-taught pizza chef who is looking to change all this and who is introducing New Haven apizza to Londoners via Lenny’s Apizza, his pop-up pizza restaurant located within Finsbury Park’s Bedford Tavern. Lewis, who refers to himself as Mr Apizza, is on a one-man mission to spread the gospel of ‘ah-beetz’ and make the ‘crispy, chewy and charred’ style of pizza as well known in the capital as its floppy Neapolitan counterpart - and you wouldn’t bet against him.
A New Haven calling
I meet up with Lewis at the Bedford Tavern in Finsbury Park on a Tuesday afternoon, just as demand for his pizzas start to come in. The 38-year-old is a breath of fresh air: like his pizza operation, that he gleefully describes as being ‘unpolished’, Lewis has the slightly ruffled appearance of someone who doesn’t have a care for convention. There’s been no media training, and he is happily indiscreet about the industry into which he has thrown himself headlong, tossing out lines about his online beef with certain pizza influencers and other restaurateurs and generally happy to rabble-rouse.
Making apizza is first and foremost a passion - possibly even a calling - and Lewis is doing it his way.
“I’m shouting into the void and people are turning up,” he says of Lenny’s. “It’s a dream, it doesn’t feel like real life. Every day I wake up and realise something incredible has happened.”
The story of Lenny’s Apizza is slightly more conventional. Having run a software company for over a decade, Lewis had grown disillusioned with where his life was going and, like many before him, turned to the cut-and-thrust of the restaurant world for some excitement. He recalls his time during lockdown when he discovered Portnoy’s video pizza reviews, and the rest is history.
With my headphones on I’m not with you in this room, I’m with the pizza and we’re dancing.
“I sat at home during Covid and ate lunch every day with Dave Portnoy,” he says. “I think everyone lost their mind in some way during Covid and the way I lost mine was this.”
His apizza epiphany came when Portnoy reached Sally’s, concluding in his review that New Haven had a good claim at the title of pizza capital of the world, and booked a flight to Connecticut on the back of it.
“I was at a stage in my life where I wasn’t too happy,” he recalls. “I felt like a lot of time had passed and I’d just been watching it happen, and I wanted to commit myself to the process of getting better at something. I saw this pizza and it spoke to my soul.”
Taking the first of what have now been three trips to the US, Lewis and his friend Dan visited New Haven in December 2023 to immerse themselves in its singular pizza scene. It was during this trip that he saw the signs that he should open Lenny’s Apizza.
The first sign, he says, was that he discovered that the mascot for Ivy League Connecticut university Yale was a bulldog called Handsome Dan, which bore more than a passing resemblance to Lenny. The second, is that an area code for Connecticut is 203, which are the last three numbers of his phone number. As Lewis says: “It was written in the stars.”
As for the Bedford Tavern, Lewis was introduced to the pub’s landlord Can by Craig Taylor, co-owner of LA-based Ozzy’s Apizza who had opened a site in New Haven and who had heard about Lewis’ plans to bring apizza to London. Taylor, a self-confessed New Haven Gooner, would come to London each year for a football-based pub crawl and the Bedford Tavern, an Arsenal home matchday pub that is just round the corner from where Lewis lives, was part of the crawl. The Bedford Tavern already hosted regular pop-up kitchens and food events and seemed the perfect fit.
Apizza at the pub
Fast forward to the summer of 2024 and Lewis has not let the grass grow under his feet. In August he kicked off a long-term residency at the Bedford Arms slinging pies from a small area to the side of the bar that is no more than a service counter, a pizza prep area, and a double-deck electric Pizza Master pizza oven.
Pizzas are dressed directly on the peel a la New Haven and cooked in the oven before being slid onto a metal tray and haphazardly cut so that no two pieces of the slightly oval-shaped pie are the same. A proper New Haven Apizza, so Lewis tells me, will typically feature a good topping of tomato sauce, Pecorino Romano and sometimes ‘mootz’ - a slang term for mozzarella also used in Connecticut - and should be crispy, chewy, and charred.
“Those three words go together beautifully. Crispy and chewy is my favourite combination. A great bagel is crispy and chewy, so is a great baguette. If it’s one and not the other it’s not right. If it’s crispy and not chewy it’s brittle, it’s a cracker; if it’s just chewy then it’s a Neapolitan.”
“This is the best style of pizza in the world,” he continues. “I cannot understand for the life of me how people have gone to America, have had all these different pizzas and not gone ‘New Haven is the one were going to bring over here’. In that respect that was where I was coming from - no one is doing this [in the UK], but I know people are going to love it.”
All pies on Lenny’s menu are 14 inch (prices start at £10.50 and top out at £16) and include classics such as a tomato pie, made with tomato sauce, garlic, and Pecorino Romano; a pepperoni pie; and a sausage and onion pie alongside specials such as The Lenny - a half cheese, half tomato creation; and Handsome Dan’s Potato Pie that features mootz, sliced potatoes, red onion, rosemary, and Pecorino Romano.
Crispy and chewy is my favourite combination. If it’s crispy and not chewy it’s brittle, it’s a cracker; if it’s just chewy then it’s a Neapolitan
Toppings are often deliberatively sparse, (cheese is considered a topping in New Haven and less is more is a maxim many pizza players adhere to), and Lewis admits that he has been accused of being stingy with his pepperoni. That said, following a detailed (and good-natured) critique of his pizzas by pizza fanatic Jim Brandolini that called him out on the lack of pepperoni, he created The Jimmy B in his honour - a pie loaded with ‘a shit tonne of pepperoni’ on it, as it is described on the menu.
Then, there’s the aforementioned Ray Santiago, whose name has been put to a pizza made with sausage, bacon, and hot peppers among other toppings. So, what’s the deal with Ray Santiago?
“Ray Santiago is the human embodiment of everything I love about New Haven pizza,” says Lewis, talking about his idol as a football fan might of Messi or Ronaldo. “He started working at Sally’s at 13 years old and never left.
“He’s a legend but people don’t know who he is. I’m going to have an image of an adult man from the other side of the world on my right arm for the rest of my life, but I’m proud of that.”
Santiago has played a pivotal role in Lewis’ mastery of apizza, with Lewis watching him at work and absorbing everything about what makes New Haven pizza so special. Beyond that, his success at the peel can be attributed to good old graft and trial and error.
“I knew my first pizza wouldn’t be as good as the tenth, and my tenth wouldn’t be as good as my hundredth,” he says of his progress. “I look at the pizzas I was making in early August and it’s night and day to now. A part of that was revisiting New Haven and talking to the guys there.
“I felt strongly it that was something I could get better at by repetition. It wasn’t until more recently it occurred to me that this was something I was actually good at and instinctively understood what this food is meant to be.”
Repetition is something that Lewis will continue to embrace. In the beginning he never made more than 1.2kg of dough at any one time but now is making 50kg batches every day. His record is around 200 pies a day and he believes that that number will soon be a realistic on a daily basis. This means he will make 1,000 pies a week, and 50,000 pizzas a year, he says, doing some quick rudimentary maths.
“Made in a two-deck oven, realistically they can’t all be perfect pizzas. But I want them to be.”
Mr Apizza
There’s more to Lenny’s Apizza than simply churning out pies, however. Lewis has become an advocate and vocal mouthpiece for the apizza movement in this country, of which he intends to be at the forefront. From his trips to Connecticut, where he has made appearances on local TV and radio stations and ingratiated himself into the New Haven apizza community, to his sometimes provocative social media posts where he speaks to the camera with large headphones slung round his neck and with his mouth covered by a neckerchief - a look that has become his hallmark - he has created the persona of Mr Apizza.
The neckerchief, he admits, he copied off a guy cooking in Frank Pepe’s kitchen, thinking it looked cool (he later learnt that the chef had respiratory issues) but it does serve a purpose while in the kitchen (“flour goes everywhere; your nose is like you’ve been snorting powders, because you kind of have”). “Very early on everyone asked me about the mask,” he says. “I’m the kind of guy that if people think it is provocative I’m going to do more.”
The headphones play a more specific role in keeping Lewis in the right head space. “With my headphones on I’m not with you in this room, I’m with the pizza and we’re dancing. I can be in a shit mood and start doing that and I’m at home.”
I cannot understand how people have gone to America, have had all these different pizzas and not gone ‘New Haven is the one were going to bring over here’.
Then there’s the notion of apizza itself, which Lewis has taken under his wing and become a champion for. “I knew how I would present it to the UK public,” he says. “There’s an education piece here. The first thing it says on my menu is that it is pronounced ‘ah-beetz’. I saw that as an incredible opportunity. I can almost introduce a word to the national vernacular, and it means something. I’m championing it and also Connecticut as a state.”
He says his goal is to be so closely associated with apizza that it can’t be spoken in London in the same breath without him. “If somebody opens a place with apizza in the name they will get tagged in the comments with people asking ‘what does Mr Apizza think?, which I love. It’s not that I think I have any right to the word but the trend I’ve noticed is a reluctance to name me on social media when talking about apizza over here. At first it pissed me off, but now I love it.”
An evolving sector
Lewis is equally outspoken about the emergence of pizza players he deems to have jumped on the non-Neapolitan style bandwagon in recent months, citing Franco Manca’s Super Club Roma offshoot and Alley Cats as examples.
“You’ve got a very profitable food type here, you can have 12 pizzas on the menu but not do much different, you’re just reaching into a different box,” he says. “All the hard work is done in advance and the margins are great. So, what’s happening is during these difficult times with rent going up and margins being squeezed, businesses are saying ‘we can make pizza, let’s see what we can do’.
“We’ve now got this movement of ‘London pizza’ but it really just gives all these people who haven’t got their own ideas a way to just copy Carl [McCluskey, founder of Crisp pizza] and a few other people. There is no such thing as London pizza. London has a pizza scene, but everyone does a smash burger now. Are we going to start calling it a London burger?
“I see a lot of pizzas that look like Carl’s, but Crisp is in a league of its own.”
Lewis himself could equally be accused of simply copying what his New Haven peers are doing across the pond but is keen to give Londoners a true representation of what he believes apizza is really all about and capture the essence of the New Haven pizza movement.
“The old pizza places over there are all named after families, they are there for their communities. That’s what I want Lenny’s to be. I’ve learnt to have my own opinion on pizza and not just copy New Haven but think about what I am bringing to this country. It should be reflective of where I am.”
There is no such thing as London pizza. London has a pizza scene, but everyone does a smash burger now. Are we going to start calling it a London burger?
To this end he is hoping to appeal to the area’s Muslim population by developing a halal pizza - called the The Muhammad Ali - where pork sausage is switched for lamb merguez, and pepperoni for Turkish beef sausage sucuk. He acknowledges that for much of the Muslim community being located in a pub might be a barrier to entry into Lenny’s but has discussed doing a halal Monday when the pub is typically closed, with no alcohol being served.
“They are not catering for Muslims in New Haven, but I feel like that’s what I’m meant to be doing over here - introducing apizza to this community in a way that is palatable to them.”
As to the future, Lewis is keen to have a restaurant where there are no even potential barriers. “I definitely want a flagship restaurant, and I will have it. It’s a work in progress,” he insists. “But I’m not in a rush to change anything, I’m very happy with the arrangement here. This a is a beautiful community that I’m privileged to be accepted in and add to.”
Where any flagship might be is yet to be decided, but Lewis is confident that he has already made enough noise about apizza for people to have started taking notice of him.
“I feel like any landlord with a brain is looking at me and going ‘I’d like that guy in my place’. But when it comes to Lenny’s I’m not down for compromising too much.”
Until then, the ‘ah-beetz’ goes on.