Pizza Heaven
Jan Corbett
Metro Magazine
July 2007
It was love that brought Chicklena Rose from the US to New Zealand. She was visiting from San Francisco where she was working as an artisan baker, when she met her partner, Rewa Muriwai, and decided not to go back to San Francisco. She took jobs in a couple of local bakeries, including Il Forno, the specialist Italian bakers, and Mamata, before deciding to become her own boss and take over a pizzeria. That was 10 months ago.
Originally from Buffalo in upstate New York, the daughter of an Italian father and French/Irish mother, Rose learned young from family friends how to make pizza. It was her holiday job from age 13. So it seemed natural that after high school she would train as a baker.
Although she lives in Ponsonby — "I gotta be where the action is", she says sounding like a female Danny de Vito — a food business in Onehunga was a lower-risk investment because rents are cheaper.
She's called it Epolito's, after her great-grandmother's maiden name (Chicklena is also derived from the same matriarch's first name), and started making New York-style (big, with a thin chewy base and pepperoni or sausage on top) pizza for the people of Onehunga.
"I call this corner [of Rawhiti Rd and Oranga Ave] the twilight zone. It's forever having new people moving in. I see more houses for sale in Campbell Rd than I ever see in Ponsonby."
After she won the Peroni Pizza Challenge in February and was photographed for the front page of The Central Leader, business really started to take off. She notices more and more of her customers are well-heeled, well-travelled foodies, A look at her menu probably tells you why. The winning pizza, called Eastside, is topped with artichoke, lemon, parmesan and fresh thyme which she marinates in a Hunters chardonnay.
Other toppings include green olives, feta and roast garlic. Probably the most unusual is the Wall St - apple, walnut, blue cheese and caramelised onion. She hand-stretches every single pizza base - about 30 a night.
Her pizza might be New York style, but she admits she's having to offer toppings for the New Zealand palate that she would never dream of offering in New York. Like Hawaiian. "New Yorkers don't do ham and pineapple," she groans. Nor would she include the chicken option. She doesn't get that but her customers demand it. And she concedes her brother, who owns a pizzeria in San Diego, is offering chicken against his will too.
She's also noticed Epolito's is starting to attract "lots of Americans". "They stick to the basics," she says. "When I hear someone order the plain cheese [which is also her choice five times a week], I think, 'Oh, another American.'"