Anthony Mangieri went back to Jersey and planned on staying there for good. It was 2019. The year before, the latest incarnation of his seminal Una Pizza Napoletana had opened on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to much fanfare, but was ultimately panned.

Struggling to pay the rent, noose around his neck, Mangieri zeroed in on a space with big hydraulic windows near the ocean in Point Pleasant, the area where more than three decades earlier he had decided to devote his life to dough, a young kid with limited social skills and, in retrospect, all the makings of an Italian-American shokunin.