Food & Drink | in the kitchen •
By Jenna Pelletier
Award-winning pizza chef Pasquale Illiano
Pizza Perfect Pasquale Illiano grips the handle of a pizza peel in his hands while staring into his volcano-shaped, wood-fired oven. Its glowing embers heat pizza dough so fast that it chars, rises, and is ready in roughly a minute. The red-tiled oven, custom made in his home city of Naples, is a focal point in the back dining room of his South Kingstown restaurant Pasquale’s Pizzeria. On this summer Friday evening, Illiano and his cooks are continuously moving
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Neapolitan-style pizzas in and out of the roughly 900-degree forno to satisfy the after-work crowd and hungry vacationers. Not far from where he’s cooking, Illiano displays his framed certification from Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN). It illustrates his aptitude and faithfulness to the association’s rigorous pizza-making standards. The AVPN guidelines describe everything from the diameter of the thin-crust pizza to the
placing of the mozzarella, which “should appear in evenly spread patches, with the green of the basil leaves slightly darkened by the cooking process.” In fact, Illiano is not only certified – he’s the organization’s designated trustee and consultant for New England. If the AVPN learns that a restaurant is struggling to stay true to its pizza-making guidelines, “I go in and I help them out,” Illiano says. “And you know, that’s pretty neat.”
Photo courtesy of Pasquale’s Pizzeria
The award-winning chef behind some of the best pies in South Kingstown
