Dinner and a throw: Hollywood, Florida pizza chef, Massimiliano Stamerra, 46, wows crowds with acrobatic pizza tossing.
The following written content by Phillip Valys from an earlier post
Massimiliano Stamerra’s pizzeria in downtown Hollywood has been hopping with customers craving brick-oven-fired pies, which are topped only by the chef’s secret ingredient: freestyle pizza-throwing.
On Fridays and Saturdays at Gioia Eat, Stamerra, 46, exits the kitchen and turns the dining room into a dance hall for his nightly pizza acrobatics. Gioia Eat’s manager Alberto Legnani fires up a bouncy Europop song on YouTube, and Stamerra bursts into the dining room, discs of raw pizza dough spinning like dinner plates in his palms. Customers holler, clapping in rhythm. In one fluid motion, Stamerra tosses both discs overhead, pulling and stretching the dough as he catches it, then twirls it through his legs, around his back and over each shoulder, like a Harlem Globetrotter of gluten.
Then, for his final gravity-defying flourish, Stamerra tosses one disc high and bends forward, and the dough lands neatly on his back. It all lasts three mesmerizing minutes.
“He’s the Bruce Lee of pizza,” says Hollywood resident David Redmond, on a pizza date with his wife, Line. “When a neighbor told us he threw pizza dough around I didn’t get it, at first. I get it now. His hands move so fast.”
Stamerra has been tossing pizza dough for fun almost as long as he’s tossed pizza professionally. A pizza chef since 2005, Stamerra has won 20 medals at freestyle pizza-throwing contests in Indonesia, Las Vegas, Italy and France while running a restaurant in his native Puglia, the southeastern region in the heel of Italy’s boot.
Now, with such competitions grounded by the global pandemic, Stamerra says treating customers to pizza-throwing tricks has helped lure dine-in crowds at a time when neighboring restaurants struggle with takeout. Read more from Sun Sentinal.
