We first told you about Michael White’s forthcoming East Village pizzeria, which will be called Nicoletta, way back in September (it was officially announced last month). Well, the liquor-license application was filed yesterday and we noticed that the listed LLC is “Letta #1,” leading us to believe there might be a #2 and #3 in the works. So, when Grub Street caught up with the chef at a luncheon this afternoon celebrating Marea’s inclusion in Relais & Chateaux, we asked him if that was the case.
“I have to get this one off the ground,” the chef said. “But I definitely think there will be more locations.” He elaborated, “I would love to have another location, but I want to make this perfect.” So does that mean White, who has a restaurant in Hong Kong, might do something like, oh, say, become the next New York restaurateur to decamp to Miami? “There is a tremendous opportunity in New York City, and I’d like to stay here,” he says. “New York has been good to me. I might entertain doing Nicoletta on the east side one day or something like that, but not going outside New York. Well, never say never, but I’m very much focused New York City right now.”
As for what kind of pizza to actually expect when Nicoletta does open, White dropped some more information on what he’s planning: “We are going to be doing something brand-new, not Neapolitan nor typical New York,” he told us. “It’s a pizza that is crispy, chewy, not too thick and not too thin. A pizza using a middle-grade, high-protein organic flour with a high amount of ash in it. It’s a mix between the pizza I grew up with as a young person in the Midwest, and the pizza I ate starting in my twenties in Italy.”
Earlier: Michael White Is Opening an East Village Pizzeria, Nicoletta
