PROFILE
PIZZA professional FIRST STEPS Having gained his all-important first steps in the ‘white art’ via his grandfather as a youngster and working in his hometown for a few years, still being very young, Marco Fuso moved away from home in order to travel, as well as gain experience working elsewhere. Then, when he was 18, his dad announced that he had bought a restaurant, which was a shock to the family, Marco recalls, as they had no experience of running a restaurant as such. However, it resulted in him doing a pizzaiolo course, using his bakery experience as a foundation, and being excited about the prospect of a new restaurant, but scared as well, he remembers. At this stage, he also had the benefit of a pizza maker mentor – Osvaldo - who he says he must thank for teaching him so
many things so early on. When they started the restaurant, this mentor never let him use fresh dough (normally, at the start, you don’t make pizza for customers straight away, but for yourself, he says). Thus, his learning curve involved making pizza from the oldest dough to be found in the fridge, and which did not always have much stretch left in it! After complaining to his dad about this - that it was difficult to learn and that Osvaldo wasn’t teaching him properly - his dad told him “don’t speak to me, speak to him!”, and when he went back to the pizza chef, he was quickly told that he would have to continue working in such a way if he wanted to learn from him, and that he would be using such dough until he was making a rounded shape… It was this situation, says Marco, that made him knuckle down and accept the learning process - a technique he now uses with his own customers and clients today. “When you’re working in a family restaurant everything is easier in a way, but there are also lots of challenges too,” explains Marco Fuso. “For example, my mentor pizza chef had only been working with us six months when he left, so we had no pizza chef to run the pizzeria, but something happened to me in that I had to step up as a new pizza chef and meet the challenge, even though I was slow in making pizzas at the start, with customers having to wait! But I was determined not to give up, whereas others might have, at which point I found that I started to get better and better each day.” COMPETITION CALLING After five years working as a pizza chef, he joined a group of pizza chefs working in Lecce, and that’s when he discovered there were pizza competitions. For the first five or six years, he
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Marco Fuso comes from Lecce, Italy and is the eldest of six. After first learning about the ‘white art’ from his baker grandfather on his mum’s side, he then went on to work in his father’s restaurant before a series of competition wins raised his profile in the sector, leading him to being invited to become a pizza judge himself, as well as start his own pizza consultancy business (www.mfpconsultancy com).
entered many competitions but never won anything. In fact, he didn’t get anywhere, as such, but again, he never gave up. Then, in 2013, he finally got his first accolade in an Italian competition held in Tunisia, North Africa, and it was a great time for pizza chefs, their families present too, he says. At which point something changed again for him, he recalls, in 2014, when he went to the World Pizza Championship in Parma, winning a bronze medal in the Neapolitan style category. Then, in 2015 and 2016, he continued to win more Italian competitions, as well as some international competitions. In 2015 and 2016, he also entered the PAPA Awards’ Pizza Chef Competition, although he did not win at this stage. However, in 2017, he finally won the Pizza Chef of the Year Competition, going on to win again in the margherita category the following year. Then, in 2018, he was invited to be part of the judging panel. Although a struggle and a fight at times, winning competitions can be a game-changer, he says, he having learnt so much along the way and gained so much experience to take on elsewhere in his career, and which has, he points out, spurred him on to win and achieve more. “At this point, you are able to make everything perfect so that you are able to win again,” he says. December 2021
