Giovanni Labbate, an award-winning member of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team and a grand champion in last year’s California Pizza Challenge, built a reputation for serving delicious New York-style pizzas at his Chicagoland restaurant, Tievoli Pizza Bar, in Palatine, Illinois. Now he’s expanding his repertoire to include Detroit-style pies, according to a recent announcement.
Labbate has added Motown’s thick-crust rectangles, famous for their frico edges and crispy corners, to Tievoli’s menu, using a 72-hour fermented dough that rises for eight hours at room temperature to achieve its signature texture.
Prices range from $20–$30, depending on style.
With more than three decades of pizza-making expertise under his belt, Labbate, a former Billy Bricks franchisee, and his wife, Adrianna, launched Tievoli Pizza Bar in early 2023. “I wanted to bring back what my father was doing in Chicagoland in the 70s, because there’s not really a lot of New York artisan pizza in Chicago,” he told PMQ earlier this year. Tievoli’s menu offers 13 types of wood-fired pizzas, along with salads, pasta, sandwiches and panzerotti, catering to a variety of tastes.
In the meantime, Labbate keeps elevating his craft and will take center stage at the World Pizza Championship (Campionato Mondiale Della Pizza) in Parma, Italy, this April.
Labbate’s wins at the 2024 California Pizza Challenge qualified him to compete in the World Pizza Championship. At that USPT-hosted event, held at the California Restaurant Show, Labbate emerged as the grand champion in in the Secret Basket Face-Off. His winning entry featured New York artisan dough, a garlic and oil sauce base with fresh spinach, roasted white sweet potatoes, blueberry bacon, peach bacon jam, Wagon Wheel cheese, mozzarella, red onions and shaved Asiago cheese.
He also won first place in the REAL California 3-Cheese Challenge with his 3-Cheese Pizza topped with fresh mozzarella, shredded mozzarella and ricotta.
And he captured first place again in the Non-Traditional category for his California Peach Perfect Pizza: New York-style dough topped with a garlic and olive oil base, peach bacon jam, fresh and shredded mozzarella, burrata, prosciutto, cherry tomatoes, basil, grilled peaches, honey, flaky salt and fresh lemon juice.
Labbate explained the latter entry’s origins to PMQ. “It was a big focus of ours to go out to that competition…and come home with a win,” he said. “In typical fashion, one day my wife came home and threw a bunch of ingredients at me and said, ‘Let’s come up with a pizza.’ So we came up with the Peach Perfect Pizza featuring grilled peaches. We actually put it on the menu, and it did really well. Fast-forward a little: We said if we’re going to California to compete, we have to do this pizza, and we did, and we actually won with it.”
Additionally, Labbate captured first place in the Plant-Forward category at the 2024 Real California Pizza Contest for his “Sunset in Sonoma” recipe, featuring a garlic-confit cream sauce, sharp California cheddar, purple potato slices, caramelized onions and mushrooms.
