For years, California suffered from a reputation as a pizza desert. Having grown up in an East Coast family with roots in Naples, I was keenly aware of the deficit when my parents moved us West.
“It was just different out here. We still had great pizza,” says Tony Gemignani, the world pizza champion who grew up in southern Alameda County. “But you had to really know where to find it. It wasn’t on every corner.”
As it turns out, Gemignani was one of two chefs, both of whom honed their craft in the East Bay, who were pivotal figures in the West Coast pizza revolution. The other, as with many things culinary, was Alice Waters…