The Pizza Monk

Meet Al Santillo of Santillo's Brick Oven Pizzeria in Elizabeth. Of all the excellent pizza we tasted for our upcoming pizza issue, none was better than his...

Santillo works with his wife and sons in a small kitchen in a small house (with a side entrance; the front doors are locked and don't lead to the pizzeria anyway).

But, really, his life's work has been the tending of a gargantuan brick oven, 20 feet deep by 14 feet wide, and nobody on Earth knows it better, every square inch of it, than Santillo.

(His father, Al Sr., who died last month, knew it that well. As Santillo is proud to say, "He taught me everything I know.")

Tomorrow: a long, fond look at Santillo's version of a Sicilian pie (which he calls "The Grandpa") as it emerges, in all its toasty, burnished glory, from the oven.