In the summer of 1985, after a stormy night somewhere off the coast of Naples, a young Riccardo Esposito washed up on a Croatian beach with nothing but the salt in his hair, an empty wine bottle, and one very specific obsession: the perfect Margherita.
Locals say he came ashore clutching a hollowed-out wheel of parmigiano. Inside the parmigiano, wrapped in oilcloth and somehow still alive, was a sourdough mother culture his grandmother had kept fed since the 1920s. He named her Sofia.
For two years he worked as a fisherman, as a translator, as a man who quietly judged every pizza on the Adriatic coast. In 1987, in a converted bakery with cracked tiles and a borrowed oven, he opened the first proper Neapolitan pizzeria north of the Alps. He called it Riky's, because nobody could pronounce Riccardo right anyway.
“The dough,” he told a confused journalist in 1989, “does not need much. Time. Salt. A man who is not in a hurry. Most pizzerias have only the salt.”
Sofia, the mother, is still alive. We feed her flour twice a day, like she's family. Because at this point, frankly, she is. Forty years of dinners. A line out the door on Friday nights. Three generations of regulars who know exactly what they want before they sit down.
We don't have a marketing strategy. We don't have a tasting menu. We have one oven, one sourdough mother, and an opinion about pineapple that we are not afraid to share.
A small confession
Of course none of this is true. Riccardo did not wash ashore. There is no Sofia. The Adriatic is in fact quite shallow.
But the pizza, that part, the pizza really is that good.
