Ask any working chef to pinpoint that particular time of the day when the sense of anticipation, intensity, and madness is at its most frenzied peak and they’ll usually say sometime in the late afternoon, an hour or so before the doors open and service begins. But for Dan Richer, that time is earlier, when the day’s dough, which has been gently rising all night, is first unpacked and made ready for service at his pizza mecca, Razza Pizza Artigianale, which occupies a double-wide storefront across from city hall on Grove Street in Jersey City. There are two ovens to fire up, and ingredients to sort, and there is the sacred sourdough starter to tend to, something Richer began doing several times a day close to two decades ago, when he first started his quixotic quest to produce the most consistently excellent pizza pie the world has ever seen.
“This is my peaceful time. It’s like I’m a conductor standing before the symphony,” says Richer, who is dressed on this weekday afternoon the way he is every day, in a black cap, short-sleeved J.Crew henley, and pair of black jeans dusted here and there with white flour. Even in a discipline filled with quirky perfectionists, Richer is known as a man of obsessive routine and ritual. Over the years, he has drawn up charts on how to evaluate the perfect tomato (the “Tomato Evaluation Rubric”) and the perfect mozzarella (“Oh, I could talk to you for hours about cheese”). At Razza, he keeps a large plastic box on hand, filled with esoteric gizmos for measuring things like the sugar content and viscosity of a canned tomato, and when he first began his quest for the perfect pie, he started recording his observations in a notebook that has grown over the years in thickness and heft to resemble the flight manuals that pilots haul around airports.
“Dan’s pizza notebook was about 200 pages when we worked together, and that was 11 years ago. I can’t imagine how big it is now,” says chef Nick Anderer, who had hired Richer to help develop a pizza restaurant called Marta. Anderer and Richer agree that this kind of attention to detail comes in handy in the upper realms of the pizza world, where, like a pilot or a mountain climber, a chef must deal with with all sorts of swirling, ever-changing elements, such as the yeasty dough that mutates in taste and texture throughout the day or the roaring wood fire. As one pizza chef tells me, “It’s like working in the mouth of a dragon.”
Anderer found the seemingly simple process of making consistently delicious pizza so fickle and unnerving that after Marta folded, he vowed to never again open another pizza joint (and his new Italian concept in Union Square, Leon’s, is blissfully pizza free), though for Richer and the new generation of pizzaiolos he represents, the opposite seems to be true. “Everything is in constant motion; we’re always chasing flavor. It’s not exhausting — it’s invigorating!” he cries as the crescendo at Razza slowly builds through the afternoon. Eventually, a few margherita pies are put in to bake, filling the restaurant with a comforting, toasty smell. Richer describes his philosophy as “anti-Neapolitan,” but he considers this ancient mozzarella-and-tomato classic to be the ultimate expression of the pizza-maker’s art. It’s the best seller at Razza by a factor of two to one, and it’s also his favorite pie to eat.
“It’s all part of the magic that you’re not going to figure out in five minutes or even 20 years,” says Richer, crouching down and peering into the flames before taking one of the pies, and then another, from the oven. He runs his fingers around the crust, then lifts each pie into the air to inspect the char underneath before tossing both of them in a nearby trash can. “It’s like making pancakes: The first couple always end up in the garbage,” cries the pizza maestro of Jersey City as he rushes off to roll tomorrow morning’s dough through his fingers and stick his nose into a batch of starter yeast.
If it seems as though the ever-expanding, increasingly global pizza universe — the cooks and bakers and legions of pizza loons who travel the world filling their Instagram feeds with pies fashioned by masters in Tokyo, Arizona, or Copenhagen — is in the midst of a pizza revolution, it is probably because we are in the midst of many. Over the past couple decades, pizza wizards like Richer have been popping up in all sorts of unlikely places, including Phoenix, Arizona; Dana Point, California; and the Lower East Side of New York City, which, as any self-respecting pizza loon can tell you, is the home base to the monastic, famously intense father of the nouveau New York Neapolitan school, Una Pizza Napoletana’s Anthony Mangieri. Unlike many of Richer’s peers in this new generation, however, he has no plans to open other Razzas in far-off places like Brooklyn (“I think I missed my Brooklyn moment”), Manhattan (“Yes, there have been offers”), and Los Angeles, nor does he employ a public-relations team (“I’m sorry, Anthony would rather not talk about other people’s pizza,” Mangieri’s press flack told me when I asked whether he would chat with me for this story). And if you take the PATH train across the river to Jersey City on most any evening, you won’t have to stand on line along Grove Street for close to an hour for a bite of rusty-tasting marinara poured over a crackerlike crust, the way one does at Taylor Swift’s beloved, TikTok-approved Carroll Gardens destination, Lucali.
“Dan is the Le Bernardin of pizza-makers — he doesn’t need to open 20 restaurants to prove himself. He has one, and he does it right,” says the Brooklyn chef and pizzaiolo Frank Falcinelli, who, along with his partner, Frank Castronovo, makes regular pilgrimages to Jersey City to commune with the maestro’s pies. Katie Parla, who met Richer on one of his visits to Rome and is the co-author of his chart- and rubric-heavy book, The Joy of Pizza (“In Praise of the Caliper” is the name of one section), describes Richer as “the pizza-maker’s pizza-maker.” Long before she agreed to the daunting task of working on his book (and before a glowing New York Times review in 2017 put Richer and his restaurant on the national pizza map), she was a regular at Razza, often going directly to Grove Street from the Newark airport after her plane landed from Rome, where she lives, for a furtive taste of Richer’s signature, lightly brittle “eggshell” crust.
Richer achieves this famed brittleness by baking his pies for a minute or so longer than the old masters back in Naples, and unlike those old masters, he also uses three kinds of flour in ever-changing ratios to build his pizza dough throughout the week. He rotates three types of marinara, too, during the bake depending on the heat of the ovens and the toppings he’s using, and several varieties of mozzarella and ricotta are torn or chopped or spooned onto the pie depending on the kind of melt Richer is trying to achieve. In the summer, it’s common to find five varieties of tomato pie on the menu at Razza, decked with crinkly leaves of basil and barely visible slivers of garlic, along with pies dappled with thin buttons of squash or handfuls of fresh corn from the farms around northern New Jersey. Spring brings pies topped with asparagus or garden peas, fall means pies covered with foraged mushrooms, and pies scattered with chopped hazelnuts appear as the weather turns cold in the winter.
“Dan’s pizza has a nostalgic, reminiscent quality while at the same time being very local to his part of New Jersey and also very progressive, which is extremely difficult to do,” says Falcinelli. “You get hints of Naples; you get a hint of John’s coal oven in New York; you get a hint of all of these ancient flavors. But when you look down at the pie, you’re looking at this completely modern thing that he’s created.”
The great New York City chef Wylie Dufresne, who fell down his own self-described “pizza rabbit hole” during COVID and now operates Stretch Pizza on lower Park Avenue, compares the pizza prodigies of today to virtuoso guitarists, each with their own distinctive sound and technique. “You might like Hendrix more than Jerry Garcia, and Dan’s in that conversation without question,” he says. “Lots of people cover tunes in the pizza world, but you don’t see people covering Dan. It’s too hard to play Zappa, if you know what I mean.”
Like many members of pizza’s New Wave, Richer considers himself a baker first and a pizza chef second. He credits Mangieri for sparking his interest in the Neapolitan style along with the mysteries of using mother yeast to enhance the flavor of a classic wood-burning pie — Richer used to visit Una Pizza every Sunday evening to breathe in the magical, yeasty smells of freshly rising dough when he was first learning his craft — but if you ask him to name his earliest heroes and influences, he’ll tick off the names of master bakers like Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and Peter Reinhart, author of one of the bibles of modern baking, The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. Richer often compares his work to plumbing (a difficult, unglamorous job that is mastered through years of numbing repetition), and like more than a few pizzaiolos, he’s a loner by nature, one of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s proverbial “hedgehogs” that toil for years in obscurity to master a single discipline, compared to the versatile “foxes” that are masters of many.
“There are people who have been making pizza in this city for 50 years who have no idea why they’re making great pizza. It’s the tradition — it’s what they’ve been told to do. But Dan is not one of these people,” says Dufresne. “Dan knows what he’s doing at every step of the process so he can say, I want a little bit more crunch, or I want a little bit more acid in my dough. And on top of that, he wants to show a team of 20 how to do it,” he continues. “I love Anthony Mangieri, but Anthony doesn’t even let anyone touch the dough; he does everything himself. Dan is a great teacher — he’s happy to show others how to do what he does — and that’s one of his great gifts.”
Growing up in Matawan, New Jersey, Richer began his pizza studies at a young age, riding his bike from one slice joint to another, often financing his research with coins he’d find buried under cushions in the family couch. At 15, he got a job as a busboy at a red-sauce joint called Dusal’s, where he remembers trading the chef a guitar lesson in exchange for learning the intricacies of making a proper chicken parm. He dreamed of being a guitar player before ending up with a degree from Rutgers, which included a couple of invaluable years at Cook College, the school’s science and agricultural program. He says he gets his love of focused routine and repetition, and a touch of artistic sensibility, from his mother, who worked as a calligrapher, endlessly copying out cards and invitations for hours on end in her office upstairs, and who died after a long struggle with cancer a few months after he returned from a post-college-graduation trip to Italy.
“That was, like, a crack in the earth for me,” says Richer, who during his travels from the Italian Alps down to the Amalfi Coast had already decided to become a chef. After his mother’s death, he began haunting Greenmarkets and bonding with many of the same farmers he still patronizes today. He went through a manic pasta-making phase and worked part time on the line at a French restaurant, where he learned how to butcher rabbits and ducks. He eventually ended up owning a portion of a red-sauce establishment in Maplewood, New Jersey, where the menu slowly evolved with his interests and obsessions to include pasta dishes made from scratch, elaborate “omakase” tasting dinners (influenced by a trip to Tokyo, where he practiced his Japanese and sampled whale meat, among other activities), and, finally, during the late aughts, bread-baking and wood-fired pizza.
“When Dan was in Maplewood, he bought two pizza ovens, which was exactly two more pizza ovens than he knew how to use,” says Parla, who grew up in New Jersey herself. He began experimenting with sourdough yeasts in his dough (the one he uses at Razza is descended from a sprig of New Jersey wheat he first cultivated back in those days). He studied the wood-burning characteristics of different kinds of trees (“We use oak, cherry, and a bit of beech at Razza, but in the end, the type of wood is less important than dryness and size”) and tossed thousands of pizzas into the garbage while wrestling with the delicate art of wood-fired cooking. Like an explorer making the first notations in his logbooks as he sets sail on an ocean journey, he began to jot down observations on different starters, different mixes of flour, different characteristics of the perfect tomato (there are eight, for the record), and the many elements (56 of them and counting) that go into making the perfect pizza pie.
Parla points out that back in those days, American pizza was still largely divided into regional specialties — the hurried slice culture of New York City, the apostate deep-dish school of Chicago, the charcoal-fired clam masters of coastal Connecticut — with each one sunk in their own particular dogmas and prejudices. By the time Richer opened the original Razza in an old theater space on Grove Street in 2012, however, the pizza world had entered a vibrant new era in which, Parla says, chefs all over the country emerged to forge their own styles and were discussed in the kind of hushed reverent tones once reserved for haughty Frenchmen from another suddenly vanished era.
Richer likes to compare the explosion of pizza around the U.S. to the explosion of ramen around Japan. Both began as humble, working-class comfort foods from another country (pizza from Italy, soup noodles from China) before evolving over time into regional specialties and then increasingly elaborate and popular national dishes with a flavor and culture all their own. Ask him to pick a favorite regional style and he’ll tend to talk about different epochs the way a Roman scholar talks about different imperial eras, though the allure of pizza — community, comfort, family memories — has always been the same. Richer considers the 1940s in Connecticut to be a golden age, along with the ’60s in New York City, and if he had to choose a venue for a last pizza meal, like most of us it would probably be an idealized version of the kind of pizza he grew up eating, preferably enjoyed with his wife and son, at the original Patsy’s on First Avenue, up in East Harlem, in one of the weathered old booths under the famous portrait of Frank Sinatra.
It’s another day of chasing pizza perfection at Razza, and the maestro has invited me to one of his blind tomato tastings, something he and the staff do periodically just to make sure that their favorite canned tomato (Alta Cucina plum tomatoes from California’s Central Valley) is still their favorite canned tomato. As he assembles the various implements from his gizmo box — the device that measures sugar content, a slidelike contraption used to gauge tomato thickness — and arranges the samples of canned tomatoes from Italy and the USA in five china bowls, Richer muses in his infectious, wide-eyed way about issues in the pizzaverse that have been occupying his attention lately: whether to bake basil leaves into your margherita in the oven or scatter them on fresh after the bake (“I like both!”), his love of manuals and rubrics (“You can’t build a house without a good set of blueprints!”), his favorite Italian pizza style (“big square Roman”), and the lack of a female presence in the pizza world, an issue that has perplexed him for some time.
“In 20 years of hiring people, I’ve received fewer than ten applications from women,” he says as we begin tasting the different canned tomatoes, some of which are too pulpy, or too rusty-tasting, and one of which, No. 4, the Alta Cucina from Napa, as it turns out, is more or less perfect. Parla says that with the emergence of pizza as a gourmet product (and a very profitable one), more women are going into the business in Italy and the U.S., but the prevalence of what she calls “pizza bro culture” remains an issue, and Richer agrees. He tells the story of one of his favorite employees at Razza, a talented baker in her 20s who was promoted every step of the way until she abruptly left, probably to explore other, more creative aspects of the baking business, and who could blame her: “I don’t really understand it, but this is a repetitious discipline rather than a creative one. It’s messy. It’s tiring. It’s boring.” One must possess a “certain mania for it,” Richer says, and becoming a pizza maniac, he’s willing to admit as we conclude our tomato tasting and he rushes off to another part of the restaurant, isn’t for everyone.
As I puzzle over my voluminous tomato-tasting notes, several freshly baked pizzas eventually arrive at my table in the empty restaurant. There’s a gently cooling pie dressed with melted ribbons of smoked pork jowl and one constructed with two kinds of cheese (milky, sweet mozzarella and the slightly more tart scamorza) and scattered with the last remnants of late-Indian-summer corn and a drizzle of fermented chile paste. There’s a mushroom pie made with the first foraged findings of the fall, sweetened with an invisible scrim of caramelized onion; a classic margherita made with the tomatoes we have just been tasting; and a creation called Di Natale, which means Christmas in Italian, that was inspired, with the help of Parla, by a traditional pasta dish that Neapolitans make using all various leftovers (raisins, pine nuts, extra-virgin olive oil, pitted black olives) from their Christmas dinners.
Each pizza has a lightly charred crust and is shaped in a way that manages to look uniform and original at the same time. The sourdough gives the pies a nutty taste, which you can smell as you break off the slices and begin to eat. The crust has a combination of structure and gourmet lightness that you don’t see in the upscale pizza joints across the river, and each of the toppings enlivens each of the pizzas in different, unique ways without overwhelming them. Richer briefly returns to the table in his cap and flour-dusted black jeans. He says that if you are a daily regular at Razza, you might not notice the subtle changes in these recipes, but if you sample his pies year to year, “you would know our pizza has gotten better.” He takes a bite of his margherita pie, sets it down, and says, “This is the pizza I want to eat all day.” When I ask whether this is his idea of the perfect pizza, the maestro shrugs his shoulders. “We’re working on it, man,” he says with a happy smile. “We’re working on it.”
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