It’s 2 AM on a Friday in the Colonia Americana neighborhood of Guadalajara, and Mezcaleria El Rey is just starting to fill up. The doorman assumes his post at the metal gate that separates the bar, a two-story house bookended by patios, from calle Bernardo de Balbuena. Depending on your frame of reference, it is either late night or very early morning. Here, young Mexicans gather to smoke and plot their next moves, most of which most certainly involve a slice of pizza purchased outside.
Illuminated by the neon glow of the street light and the backdrop of a flickering, wood-burning oven, Peter Boccaccio’s no-name pizza operation catches the outpour of drinkers like a dam in a creek-bed. He has been in the same spot slinging dough on the pavement for just over three years. As he pulls a fresh pie from the heat with a long-handled peel—cheese still bubbling, crust singed with black—patrons wander up to his free-standing counter, pesos in hand.
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For a white guy from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the location might seem unlikely—but in the larger scope of things, Boccaccio is right at home. Born in 1967, his family decamped to Puerto Vallarta when he was 7. The perpetual traveler, he went to school in Mexico, moved to Guadalajara, bounced back to San Francisco, and then to Europe and Latin America.
For a white guy from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the location might seem unlikely.
He returned to Mexico to put down roots, to marry, and to start his business, the inspiration for which he traces back to a trip through Argentina, where a piece of bread changed his world view. “It was the best bread I had ever eaten in my life,” Boccaccino tells me. “The old Italian guy who made it said, ‘It’s just bread.’”
It wasn’t until years later, as he traveled through the Napa Valley, that he discovered the secret. “At one of the wineries we went to, they gave you a little bread with your wine tasting, which had the same flavor of that bread I had tasted in Argentina,” Boccaccino recalls. It turned out to be a simple sourdough baked by the winemaker. “They were selling little books that this guy had made with instructions on how to build a wood-fired oven—how to make old, European-style bread, stuff like that,” he says. “It was $20. They were also selling bottles of their wine for $20, and I only had $20, so you can guess which one I chose.”
Years before, Boccaccino’s mother had moved to the mountains in Mascota, to establish a homestead on a small ranch, so he went up there to try his hand at building an oven. He hand-patted raw brick, mud, and sand into a counter-flow dome, a sturdy but rudimentary cooking vessel, which he placed on a wheeled platform and made it mobile. “It’s pre-Christian technology,” he says.
He started playing around with recipes and baking his own loaves. “I’m from San Francisco, where people basically have sourdough in their blood. But people don’t really buy much [French-style] bread in Mexico. What they do buy is pizza.” So he settled on that—pizza with a well-developed, sourdough crust—found a little house in Guadalajara, and started cooking.
Boccaccino’s street pizza is a hit, so much so that it spawned a competing operation just 50 feet away. It is a bit of a sore subject.
Now Boccaccino spends his days simmering tomato sauce, pre-fermenting dough, and shredding mozzarella from his mom’s ranch, and while his nights are devoted to manning the oven. His street pizza is a hit, so much so that it spawned a competing operation just 50 feet away. “I was going to call this thing Caracol, after the shape of my oven, but that guy took the name before me,” Boccaccino gestures at the operation down the street. It is a bit of a sore subject.
From the size of the crowd collecting on the street, however, it seems as though there is room enough for two pizzaiolos in town. “Sometimes, someone will have a late-night pizza and then come back a couple days later for more, sober,” Boccaccino says. His pies are memorable in that way—the tomato is light and zippy, there’s ample cheese, and resounding flavor in the crust from the sourdough. He also makes a green pesto from basil, spinach, a wallop of garlic, and a Mexican treatment of hot chilis, which hungry diners slather over their pies.
“I try and emulate a Neapolitan style while appealing to Mexican palates. That means more cheese, more toppings—but I draw the line on ketchup,” says Boccaccino. “And no ham and pineapple.”
Boccaccino is in the process of expanding. He plans to put an oven in his garage, a larger bar in the driveway, and additional chairs for a more formalized dining experience, though not a traditional full-service restaurant by any means. “And not too far from the street” he adds. “I can’t be far from the street.”
To find the no-name pizza (it doesn’t have a website), visit Bernardo de Balbuena 107, Guadalajara, Mexico from Wednesday-Saturday 9 PM-3:30 AM.
