More Pizza in Bushwick!

I’m always saying what Bushwick needs is more pizza. Especially the part of Bushwick between Myrtle Avenue and Flushing. Around there, you can only catch a slice or a pie from Roberta’s, Ops, Artichoke, Rosie, Sauce & Soda, Tony’s, Tony’s By Joe & John’s, Sal’s, Singas Famous, the recently-opened Bushwick outpost of Williamsburg Pizza and I think I’m forgetting whatever new name OMG! Burger Pizza!, those brilliant, diligent purveyors of late night drunken traffic, have pivoted to. What a rich cultural tapestry of combining sauces, cheese and bread.

Thankfully, in the last few months, two more of these have moved within blocks of each other on Irving Avenue. Last month, a former chef at Roberta’s set up a Detroit-style shop as Turbo Pizza, with the backing of the owners of 101 Wilson. A month before then, Nino Coniglio opened up his latest pizza outfit down the street, a longtime dream of his called Lucky Charlie.

“Coinkydink?” Coniglio suggested to me the other day outside Lucky Charlie. If there was anywhere in the western hemisphere that a pizzeria belonged, it was here and if there was anyone who should be operating it, it was Coniglio, a tall, elder statesman of the Brooklyn pizza world who has built a miniature empire of pizzerias around Brooklyn and Northern New Jersey. By his own count, he now owns a dozen of them, including all those Williamsburg Pizza spots and Coniglio’s Old Fashioned, over in Morristown, New Jersey. He’s planning on opening a second Coniglio’s in Williamsburg when he’s done setting up this place, which he’s been doing in a pretty hands-on way, living in the back of the restaurant and working in the kitchens at all hours of the working day. It’s not too bad, he tells me, there’s an enormous fig tree in the back from which he pulls fresh figs every day. They’ll be on the menu soon.

In various past lives, Coniglio had been involved with the United States Pizza Team, a traveling troupe of acrobatically-sophisticated pizza makers; a profile in the Times describes Coniglio in the act of handling the dough like a Harlem Globetrotter. Underneath where we were standing was the oldest working coal oven in the western hemisphere, built into the foundation of the building in 1890 according to something he wrote on the menus. He named the place after Charles Verde, a construction contractor who dipped into the pizza business with the short-lived Verde’s Coal Oven Pizza, after discovering the century-old oven in the basement of one of his construction offices. A kitschy spot called Pizza Party took over the oven for a period, though a fire cut its pizza-making operations short by the time Verde gave Coniglio a call.

The sense of history appealed to him. A century ago, they were making pizzas right here.

“What we’re trying to do over here is the closest thing possible to a coal-fired pizza that would have been in the 1920s. It’s simple,” he says. He laughs when I ask how he thinks these stack against, you know, Roberta’s.

He goes on: “No, Roberta’s, Paulie Gee’s [in Williamsburg] we call that hipster woodfire pizza… [We’re] less full of shit, you know what I mean?”

The pizza he makes comes on a thin crust and is only available in three, 16” inch varieties: classic, red & white, served on large sharable discs. The slices fold easy until you get to the crust, a sort of charred mountaintop of bread that holds the landscape together. It’s rough and chewy.

“The pies here are like no other pie I’ve ever made in my life. Probably will not be like any pie I’ll ever make for the rest of my life” he says. “Because the oven is so big, there’s different heat zones, so we play a dance where we start the pie at 650 [degrees], bring it over 500 [degrees] and then bring it back to finish it off. It’s a weird thing. It’s something you wouldn’t want to do anywhere else. It’s a char you wouldn’t be able to get in even the old New York coal ovens. Those ovens just aren’t big enough to do what we’re doing.”

Elsewhere on the menu are other rotating ideas, like a seafood plate anchored by equally charred octopus. He’s got Rob Hoffman, an old buddy of his who ran the bar once at the Standard, assembling drinks like an ice cold calabrian martini, which comes infused with calabrian chili brine and the chili itself propped next to an olive.

It’s Coniglio’s spot through and through. Outside, he’s laid out cartoon-green lawn chairs to evoke the semi-suburban Brooklyn world of Gravesend, where Coniglio was born and where he started off, as he likes to say, as a dishwasher at the age of 12. On the walls, he’s splattered everything from old menus to photos of his family to the moon landing newspaper from Dumb and Dumber. The effect, he says, is to also evoke a 1900s, 1920s type of feel. Or at the very least Goodfellas. He’s even bought a toilet in the back like the kind they had in the Godfather.

“This is an Italian old man bar,” says Coniglio, knowledgeably.

Lucky Charlie is located at 254 Irving Avenue. Keep up with its hours on Instagram.