Home Grown: A celebration of local culinary enterprise

Joe Fugere, Prince of Pizza

Call him Viceroy of VPN (Verace Pizza Napoletana), VPN being the "official" pizza of Naples. Joe Fugere is a homegrown entrepreneur who launched the Tutta Bella pizza chain ten years ago in Georgetown. But not just any pizza. He flew to Miami and spent a week in the company of a pizza master, Peppe Miele, who had signed on with VPN as its director for North America. Before then, to be sure, there was plenty of pizza in Seattle, but none that followed the strict VPN standards for flour, for tomatoes, for mozzarella. Nor were there any authentic southern Italian ovens. Fugere had a pair custom-made and shipped from Naples, and when he opened he was rewarded with the first VPN certification in the Northwest, "Attesta Numero 198."

By late 2013, Tutta Bella had opened its 5^th store, this time in the Crossroads Shopping Mall in Bellevue. In March 2014, another ceremony. The three top officers from the VPN are in attendance, along with the CEO of the family-owned company that supplies Tutta Bella's flour, and a rep from the company that provides its tomatoes. (They'd all spent the previous week hanging out with Fugere at Pizza World, the industry's annual trade show in Las Vegas.) Every store has two 7,000-pound ovens, and follows minutely-detailed standards for the elasticity of the dough, for the number and dimensions of burnt bubbles of crust, and so on. Over the course of its 30-year existence, VPN has certified fewer than 500 authentic Neapolitan pizzerias worldwide.

One key question: is there an "official" way to eat an authentic margherita? Do you pick it up with your hands, or use a knife and fork? The "official" answer: if the pizza is served uncut, use utensils; if sliced, you're allowed (but not required) to pick it up. On the other hand, pizza is the street food of Naples, where it's often picked up whole and folded over, not once but twice, in a style called al' libretto, like a book.

Nothing against his legion of competitors, though Fugere is clearly on the side of thin-crust. "In Naples, they say there are only two kinds of pizza: VPN and imitation VPN." And when President Obama had a hankering for pizza during the 2012 campaign, Fugere and his crew set up shop at Paine Field in Everett and delivered two dozen "Il Presidente" pizzas to Air Force One.

Eric & Sophie Banh: Vietnamese with a French accent

If you live in Seattle, you no doubt recognize pho, a dish of rice noodles in a clear stock with thinly sliced beef brisket (or tendon, or tripe, or even oxtail). Sauces (sriracha, nam pla) on the left, basil and bean sprouts tucked under the bowl to the right. Elsewhere in the country, this would be considered exotic; here, it's as local as hot dogs and apple pie. Elsewhere, they call it "foe;" Seattle knows it's "fuh." In any event, it's the signature dish at Ba Bar, a spot on Capitol Hill's 12^th Avenue.

Eric and Sophie Banh, brother and sister, fled their native Vietnam in 1978 while young teenagers; the family settled in Edmonton, Alberta. (This explains the poutine on the menu at Ba Bar.) In Seattle, the siblings started Monsoon restaurants on Capitol Hill and in Bellevue, two Baguette Box sandwich shops, and then Ba Bar.

Eric trained as an accountant and sold real estate for seven years, but had worked as a busboy in a classical French restaurant in Edmonton called Bentley's where he cleaned the ashtrays and loaded the table-side salad carts. When he moved to Seattle in 1996 to start a restaurant, his parents were furious. "We didn't risk our lives to leave Vietnam so you could become a cook," they said, though they relented a bit when Sophie joined him.

Ba Bar is in the mold of French-Vietnamese bistros in Saigon that open early for pastries and stay open past 10 o'clock at night. The building once housed Watertown Coffee on 12^th Avenue, across from the Seattle University campus. It's on the east end of Little Addis Ababa, a bit isolated from the rest of the Capitol Hill buzz. Eric especially loved the cloudy-hazy glass windows on the north side and the floor-to-ceiling windows in front. "There's nobody upstairs, so nobody's going to complain about kitchen odors or noise, the way they did when we opened Monsoon East in Bellevue." Except for the windows, he gutted the space. There's new insulation, and a whole new kitchen. "It was unbelievably expensive; we had to sell Baguette Box to raise the money."

Vietnamese food appeals to maybe five percent of the public, not the broad base of people who enjoy Italian or French; it's not even in the top ten of ethnic cuisines. He and Sophie do a lot of charity events, but they don't advertise. "We tried one coupon program at Monsoon East (Living Social), to let people know we were there, but we won't do it again. Good honest food at an affordable price, that's the best advertising."

Eric thinks the hardest part of running a restaurant is finding good people, which requires a skill set of its own. What he looks for are team players, not prima donnas. "A restaurant has a lot of moving parts, and you can't run it on so-called passion alone."

May 2014

Ronald Holden is a Seattle-based journalist who specializes in food, wine and travel. He has worked for KING TV, Seattle Weekly, and Chateau Ste. Michelle; his blog is www.Cornichon.org