The real story of Mike's Pizza in Amityville

The hottest thing to hit pizza on Long Island in recent memory isn't a wild and crazy topping or new style. It's an underground pizzeria that has no address, no owner of record and, up until recently, was only reachable by a covert text number.

Mike’s Pizza uses no third-party delivery services. Customers within four miles of Amityville are served by a platoon of men in sport coats and ties. Out of the delivery zone? You can schedule a clandestine drop at the gazebo in Amityville, the Apple Bank parking lot in West Babylon or the Burns Park handball courts in Massapequa.

Maybe you’re wondering how “underground” this pizzeria is if you’re reading about it here. Well, I chased this story for a few years before persuading “Mike” to talk. And he only did so because, five years after he started, many customers had figured out he is none other than Michael Esposito, owner of Vittorio’s Italian Steak House in Amityville, and he makes the pizza in a kitchen next door.

In 2017, the last thing on Esposito’s mind was coming up with an idea for a cult ghost kitchen; his only goal was satisfying his own unquenchable passion for making pizza. That passion dates from his childhood, much of which was spent in the original Mike’s Pizza, a half block north of Vittorio’s. Mike’s was founded in 1969 by Esposito’s grandfather, Michaele Scotto, and father, Vittorio Esposito. There, from the ages of 10 to 29, young Esposito learned every aspect of making and selling pizza. His grandfather and father were both born in Monte di Procida, a seaside town just west of Naples. They were introduced to the pizza business in Brooklyn before settling in Amityville and converting a Chinese restaurant into a pizzeria.

The craft they plied, Esposito declared adamantly, is an American one. The classic New York pie, 18 inches in diameter and topped with tomato sauce and shelf-stable low-moisture (as opposed to fresh) mozzarella doesn’t exist in Italy. But Esposito believes it is every bit as worthy as its old-country forerunner.

Something kept pulling me back to pizza.

Michael Esposito

“All these Italian Americans in the pizza business,” he explained, “they didn’t make pizza in Italy. They were stone masons or concrete guys. They came here and learned the pizza trade.” What’s more, “I have family still in Italy,” he said. “They come visit and a lot of them like the pizza here better than in Italy, they love the crunch of the crust.”

That’s not to say that the Great American Pizza Tradition hasn’t been tested. Esposito bemoaned the shortcuts many pizzerias take—the premade sauces, the low-quality cheese—but nothing offends him as much as a substandard crust.

Esposito worked at Mike’s until 2002 when he opened Vittorio’s, named after his father. When Vittorio died two years later, his son was too busy with his fledgling restaurant to run the pizzeria as well; he sold it and it lasted under another owner until 2010. (It is now Francesco’s.)

But Esposito never made peace with the fact that Amityville no longer had a Mike’s Pizza. “I couldn’t let my father’s legacy die,” he said. “Something kept pulling me back to pizza. I started fiddling around in the kitchen at home, but I didn’t know how to move forward.” These inchoate pizza dreams came into focus when, in 2017, he had the chance to buy two used 70s-era Blodgett pizza ovens, which he installed in a workroom in a building adjoining the restaurant. “What do I do now?” he wondered. “I started making dough. And I called up a friend—‘I’m making pizza. You want any?’ ”

Although he owned a successful restaurant, Esposito missed cooking. His staff had politely informed him that his services were not needed in their kitchen. “They’d say, ‘Boss, we got this.’ You know you’re management when you just get in the way.” He briefly considered putting pizza on the menu at Vittorio’s but, “I had to admit, Vittorio’s was running really smoothly just the way it was.”

So, he just started making pizza in earnest next door. Not only did he resurrect the style of his youth, he went further back to the artisanal traditions of pre-industrial baking. “I fell through the rabbit hole of dough. I mean, it’s amazing what you can do with wheat.”

Pizza dough, he explained, is nothing more than wheat flour, yeast, salt, water and, usually, olive oil. But, he said, “the most important ingredient is patience.” Mix the ingredients together, form the dough into a round and you’re going to have a crust with no complexity, no chew, no soul. In Esposito’s laboratory, he started experimenting with high-hydration (wet) doughs that used very little commercial yeast and, instead, got their lift from a long, slow fermentation.

Dough, he said, “is all about time and temperature.” After his dry ingredients go into the mixer, he adds ice water to ensure that the mixture doesn’t overheat. After a few minutes, it coalesces into a shaggy dough and he sets his timer for seven minutes. But the ding of the timer is only a rough guide. Esposito wants to see dough that is glossy and pulls away from the bowl in a ribbed pattern he calls “the pumpkin.” The dough should feel as soft and elastic as melted mozzarella. And he should be able to hear the smart slap that the slick dough makes against the metal of the bowl. He takes its temperature: 62 degrees. It’s time for the dough to rest. It will spend two days in “bulk fermentation,” then it will be formed into balls that will rest for another 24 hours before being spun into pizza. “My whole thing is the dough,” he said. “Everything on a pizza matters, but if the vessel isn’t good, what’s the point?”

Esposito got better and better at making dough. And that resulted in a lot of pizza. Initially, he gave it away to family and friends, but before too long, one of his friends posted a photo of a pie on Facebook.

“People in town started saying ‘Hey, is Mike’s open again?’ Word got around. I thought, why don’t I do this three days a week—Wednesday through Friday—from 5 to 8 p.m.?” Esposito had an old cell phone that still worked. He gave a few people the number and told them they weren’t allowed to share it. “But they did.”

“What started as a labor of love now morphed into a business,” Esposito said. Once it was on Facebook, he needed to hire a staff. And once he hired them, he needed a steady source of income to pay them. “I had to decide, if I’m going to do this, I’m really going to do it.”

Initially there were no pizza delivery guys. Esposito would “just pull a Vittorio’s busboy off the floor and send him out with the pizza—that’s how the whole coat-and-tie thing started. But then that started to get traction. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ people started posting. ‘This guy in a suit showed up with the pizza.’ ” Nor were customers undeterred by price: Plain pies started at $20 and topped out at $40 for one topped with shrimp scampi and arugula.

By late 2019, business was brisk. Then the pandemic hit, and Esposito closed both businesses for 40 days. When he reopened Mike’s, “It blew up. Everyone was home, everyone was on their computers but there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. People needed something fun and Mike’s Pizza was it. On the Tri-State Restaurant Club [a Facebook group with almost 80,000 members], it seemed like every other post was about us or Robke’s.”

Soon, he expanded his hours of operation from noon to 8 p.m., Wednesday to Sunday. Mike’s now employs two full-time pizzamakers and 10 delivery drivers. On a good night, they might do 250 pies, more than half of which are classic rounds. The most popular topping is pepperoni.

Last year saw the introduction of a deep-dish Detroit pie to the menu. It boasts shredded mozzarella on top and Jack cheese around the edges so that, during its second stint in the oven, it develops the characteristic “crown” of almost-burned cheese. In fact, Esposito liked the crown so much, he started using a similar technique to create a crunchy “halo” around his Sicilian pie.

His latest creation is a rectangular Roman “pizza al metro” made with a super-high-hydration dough and baked directly on the floor of the oven. This pie, chewy yet full of air holes, can be enjoyed naked or split and filled like a sandwich. But Esposito also tops it with a luxurious amalgam of porcini cream sauce, mushrooms, pancetta, mascarpone and mozzarella.

He believes his pizza continues to get better. “Just when I think I have it, I learn something new. It never ends,” he said. And the better it gets, the more it pains him that the pies cannot be enjoyed hot, straight from the oven. That, of course, would require him to open an ... above-ground pizzeria.

That could happen, Esposito said. “I’m never going to say never.”

Mike's Pizza, 516-589-2523, mikesofamityville.com