From the makers of popular Aioli bakery comes new Pizzaioli in West Palm Beach

Phillip Valys, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
·4 min read

The first thing customers should know about Pizzaioli is that chef-owner Michael Hackman wouldn’t necessarily call it a pizzeria. Even though it technically is.

Yes, there are pies at Hackman’s dinnertime shop in West Palm Beach, located a pizza stone’s throw from his popular Aioli bakery cafe within the same plaza. The takeout-only menu features six pizzas that rotate weekly, with cheffy toppings that are undeniably hearty: spiced pork sausage and cherry peppers, fried eggplant coins and fermented chili-infused hot honey. (Asking for topping substitutions is verboten.)

But that’s where the pizzeria comparisons stop, Hackman says. This fall, Pizzaioli will begin offering more noodle-based dishes, including ramen, gnocchi and spaetzle, served during multicourse sit-down meals curated by the chef.

“I don’t want to be labeled as a pizzeria, because Pizzaioli is going to evolve well beyond pizza in the future,” says Hackman, who operates both eateries with wife and business partner Melanie Hackman. “I wouldn’t even call it ‘Italian.’ I’m going a bit against the grain here.”

For now Pizzaioli, at 7402 S. Dixie Highway, is a humble pizza counter with a rabid following and no indoor seating, selling 240 pies a night, Thursdays through Saturdays, to customers craving its rich, easy-to-digest blend of sourdough and whole-wheat crust.

For Hackman, pizza is a natural extension of his sourdough prowess at Aioli, the 9-year-old daytime scratch bakery cafe in West Palm Beach’s SoSo (south of Southern Boulevard) neighborhood, where hundreds of customers stream in daily for trays of cinnamon buns, chocolate babka, pumpkin-blueberry muffins and rustic sandwiches. Pizzaioli began its life as a pandemic pizza pop-up in late 2020, as a way to diversify income and “avoid laying off employees” when customers felt skittish about indoor dining, he says.

“We already had the mixers and the dough, so my wife and I, we put our heads together and decided, ‘OK, we can do pizza.’ It helped us retain the entire staff,” Hackman recalls. “The neighborhood was extremely supportive, sellouts every night, 60 pizzas and 30 pasta dishes, and it was growing.”

It was growing too fast, he says.

So the Hackmans signed a lease at the former Pizza Mambo space, infamously known for once storing an 80-pound iguana in a chest freezer. (Hackman says his family considered putting iguana decor in the restaurant as an homage to Pizzaioli’s predecessor, but that hasn’t happened, he recalls with a laugh.)

To pull off the opening of Pizzaioli’s brick-and-mortar, the Hackmans put all their dough into southern West Palm Beach, even shutting down Aioli’s downtown bakery outpost on Olive Avenue in late 2021 to consolidate workers and prepare for the pizza counter. Hackman has also — literally — moved Aioli’s sourdough bread operation into Pizzaioli’s new kitchen to boost pizza production and ease crowding at their flagship bakery. The counter keeps nighttime hours, where daughters Abby and Maddy work the pizza lines, to avoid conflicting with Aioli’s breakfast-lunch business.

In October, Hackman plans to expand Pizzaioli’s nighttime hours from Tuesday through Saturday, and add 10 indoor seats for five-course tasting menus filled with housemade pastas, noodle-based dinners and wine.

The secret behind the Hackmans’ pizza success may be its high-hydration sourdough, fired between 750 and 850 degrees out of a domed, Italian-style custom oven heated with gas and cherry wood. He creates it with an 8-year-old sourdough starter he feeds daily and has nicknamed Mother “because it gives birth to everything,” adds Hackman, who previously worked in high-end kitchens at The Breakers, Four Seasons Resort Palm Beach and Café L’Europe.

“We wanted the pizza concept to not be like any other pizzeria around us,” he says. “We’re making a Grandma-style with sesame seeds on the bottom. We’re toying with styles, and with sourdough, it’s a bit more uncontrollable and, honestly, more challenging.”

The pies are made with Midwest-grown flours that are milled in Indiantown and ingredients sourced from Swank Farm in Loxahatchee. A recent menu included pepperoni and roasted garlic fondue; roasted corn and poblano pizza; a four-cheese white with ricotta, fontina, parmesan and mozzarella, topped with garlic and local herbs; and “Not Your Grandma’s,” a Detroit-style pie topped with crushed tomatoes.

Hackman’s favorite pie? Easy answer: sausage and pepper.

“Oh, man, you’ve got the fat from the spicy sausage, which we made ourselves, the vinegar from the pickled peppers that cuts the fat, and then we add hot honey into the pickling liquid, so you have salt, acid, fat and heat,” he says. “It’s this umami wonderfulness happening in your mouth.”

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Pizzaioli, at 7402 S. Dixie Highway, West Palm Beach, is open from 5 to 9 p.m. Thursday through Saturday for carryout only. Visit PizzaioliWPB.com or call 561-508-6958.