Q & A with Tiella's Peppe Castellano

If you’re from the Boston area, you’re probably familiar with Gran Gusto’s terrifically thin-crusted pizzas.  Peppe Castellano not only made a name for himself with his pizzas, but also his flair for seafood.  But if you come to New York peddling pizzas, they better be exceptional.  “In New York, it’s the war of the pizza,” says Chef Pepe Castellano.  Instead of pizza, Castellano is focusing on Neopolitan cooking, minus the trademark pizzas, at Tiella, his new restaurant located on the Upper East Side.  Instead of pizza, you’ll find stracciatella with truffles, spinach flan with a sweet gorgonzola sauce, and butternut squash risotto with shrimp and mint.  While most chefs are buying local Castellano imports 80% of his ingredients from Italy.

Single/Married/Divorced

Engaged.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I always
wanted to be a chef.  My big brother is a big chef in
Italy.  My other brother is a General Manager. I started  working for my
brother when I was very young, so I learned my passion at a young age. 

 

What was
your first job in food and what did you learn?

My first job was in Rome
with my brother when I was fourteen. I started by washing dishes and
cleaning potatoes for two years, so I didn’t get to cook anything for a
long time, but I was so excited when I got to cook my first dish.

 

What are some of your
favorite Italian restaurants in New York?

New York has a lot of
nice Italian restaurants, so I can’t possibly pick one.

 

What were some
of your favorite dishes that you ate growing up? Did that food
influence the kind of food that you cook today?

To be a chef you need to
be creative and I’ve always liked that.  I grew up in
Naples, so my favorite food was always fish because it was so fresh and
from nearby. Now I mix a lot of fish with vegetables. At Tiella, we have
an Orata filet in a potato crust that reminds me of home. I really
enjoy what I do, so I enjoy so many foods. 

 

Tell us about
your time cooking at San Domenico and it effected the rest of your
career.

It’s one the best Italian
restaurants in the city.  Tony May runs an amazing
restaurant. You don’t see Italian restaurants like that often, and he
inspired a lot of what I do for Tiella.  I was a sous chef in a
five-star hotel in Capri and Tony May came to vacation there and I was
excited to see him.  He passed by the kitchen, so I stopped
him and introduced myself. I told him I wanted to have an experience in
New York.  I came here in the winter time and worked for
him, and then eventually I moved to San Domenico.

 

How have your
experiences as a hotel chef differed from your other restaurant
experiences?

I started in a restaurant
in Rome and then I went to a restaurant in Naples. And then, in 1996, I
had my first experience in a hotel and I really liked it.  The
restaurant is really local.  When I worked for hotels it
was another world. It’s national. You learn the dishes from the north to
the south. If you are making Neapolitan cuisine, you have to learn all
the Neapolitan cuisine, not just the pizza, or the this or the that.  

 

You have an extremely
successful restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Gran Gusto. Why
did you decide to come to New York?

I always loved New York
and wanted to be here.  But everyone in Cambridge understands my food
and loves it. I gave Boston what it was missing.  I have
celebrities who come to Gran Gusto and I don’t tell anyone because
that’s not what I learned in Capri.  They come to enjoy the
food like everyone else.  Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner and
so on.  New York is a little different because Tiella is
smaller, but I want to bring people something new.  I work
with one big market and I can tell them what I want. They have great
choices and quality.  For me, quality is the first thing. 
The people need to stand up from the table and feel great.

 

 How do you
split your time between the two restaurants?

In this moment, it is
hard.  I try to set up a couple days to spend there every
ten days or so.  In the hotel ,I learned a lot and I never
saw the chef working behind the line.  He tried to teach us
and that’s what I try to do. I left one really great team in Boston
because I believe in my kitchen. They have learned over many years. 
Food is like art and the kitchen is live and die in the same
moment.

 

 Do your pies
follow standard, Neapolitan pizza guidelines, like using 00 flour, San
Marzano tomatoes and fresh mozzarella?

In Tiella I don’t do the
Neapolitan pizza because I feel that in New York it’s the war of the
pizza.  I don’t want to be rude, but I’m not a pizzaiolo. 
I’m a chef.  There are many very talented
piazzaiolos doing wonderful Neapolitan pizza already, and there is much
more, more new food that I can create and introduce to New York for the
first time.

 

What’s
your favorite thing about cooking in a wood-burning oven?

I love it because I
worked in a lot of places in Italy with this oven and I know how to work
with this oven. It’s 800 degrees and you can cook fast.  It’s
hard to reach this high temperature with anything else. What I created
is like a fast food product with a great quality. You don’t have to
wait. It’s so fresh. The flavors come out right there because you eat it
right away.

 

Your Risotto All¹Aragosta
combines lobster and pink grapefruit. How did you come up with that
pairing?

I created another risotto
a few years ago with orange and lamb and no one ordered it, then a
magazine did a piece on it and everyone buys it!  I’m good
with flavor and I know what I do. It’s a nice combination to have the
sweet lobster that I use and then have the bitterness in the grapefruit.

 

Do you import a lot of
your ingredients and poultry from Italy?

More than 80 percent are
imported from Italy. I’m very picky. I use six types of different
flour.  Actually seven. I know the way I like things and I taste
everything.  I like the freshest ingredients.  

 

Any plans for
additional restaurants?

I think about
it all the time. Yeah. One problem. My fiancée. She keeps saying I am
more invested in the restaurant than her.  She says no more
restaurants until I marry her!  I always have new ideas. 
I work in the city and then I see a spot for rent and I have the
imagination to say “I can see it like this!”  I believe a
lot in the area too.  I hope to come here and see this area
and give the people what they want.

Tiella
Address: 1109 1st Ave nr. 61^st St.

Phone: (212)
588-0100