By Alexandra Mortati | Photos courtesy of Mel Fucilla
Mel Fucilla, co-owner of Peace of Pizza in Livermore, California, always loved to bake, but she never thought she’d make meals for a living. “My husband and in-laws have a restaurant in our hometown, but the back of house never interested me,” she says. “I’d worked in restaurants before, but it wasn’t until I started growing close to my mother-in-law that I started to have more curiosity. She works in the back of the house making bread and desserts, so I started helping her. I had worked every part of the restaurant, but this was my real transition to the back of the house.”
Over time, Fucilla and her husband, Giovanni, who was always passionate about bread-making, started cooking more at home. “We would have pizza parties at our house and make a ton of food. The boyfriend of one of my good friends told us, ‘I would totally pay for this.’ Having been a vegetarian for the last 10 years and now vegan, I am very passionate about being plant-based and want to share it with others. We started tinkering with the idea of having a no-meat business and how that would be received. There are so many things you can do with plants and so many interesting flavor combinations, so things just blossomed from there. I wanted to translate my passions into great food.”
Born in the Pandemic
The Fucillas were working with one of Giovanni’s childhood friends, Giacomo, from Italy, at her in-laws’ restaurant when they started to strategize. “We bought our first pizza oven in 2020,” she says. “When everything shut down [during the pandemic], it gave us an opportunity to focus on it.
“Things were really hard for us in the restaurant industry with all of the restrictions, so we started tinkering around with making pizza at home. My husband and Giacomo are very serious about the cuisine of Italy and the practices and rituals around food. They bring those modalities and the understanding of quality, minimally processed ingredients and meet my passion for food and what I eat. My husband and I have always worked together, even when we’ve moved. We are incredible partners. He’s taught me so much, and we complement each other really well. Giacomo is the other piece to our puzzle. We started messing around and thinking, ‘What can we do when we are not working?’”
And thus, Peace of Pizza, a catering and pop-up operation, was born. Luckily for them, Fucilla’s in-laws have a commissary kitchen where they prep and do R&D. Fucilla describes their pizza as “classic Neapolitan with a new age twist.”
“When I came up with that slogan,” she says, “it was to highlight taking the classic Neapolitan pizza from Naples and the practices and authenticity and applying funkier combinations you wouldn’t necessarily try or have on pizza. One of our most popular pizzas is called the Drew Barrymore. It’s blackberries, goat cheese, rosemary and a balsamic reduction. We have five core pizzas that we usually keep on each menu, and then we rotate other pizzas.”
The Ringo Starr and the Funky Fungi
Fucilla seeks inspiration from other chefs. “We come up with new pizzas by eating out at restaurants all the time. We had Thai one night and thought, ‘What if we did a pizza called The Thai Dye? How could we make these elements work?’ It was something I had never done before.”
“I’m inspired by other people and what they are doing in their restaurants,” she adds. “It always blows my mind how creative other chefs can be. At the beginning of summer, we had a pizza I was really proud of. We were doing a Beatles event, so we called it Ringo Starr. We grilled and caramelized peaches on the BBQ and paired them with a mozzarella base, burrata, crushed pistachios, and basil. Our No. 1 of all time is the Funky Fungi, which has a mushroom pate base with white truffles and then fresh mozzarella, pecorino and green garlic sauce.”
Having a fully plant-based menu has proved to be a huge success for Mel, Giovanni and Giacomo. On Peace of Pizza’s website, they call it “a peace offering from the earth to your plate.”
“We’ve gotten far less push-back for being plant-based than I ever would have imagined,” she points out. “We are vegetarian and find that more people are open and receptive to vegetarianism than veganism.”
“We try to stay away from faux meats and focus on using simple things that are good for our health,” Fucilla says. “Pizza can be healthy. Ninety to 95 percent of the time, when we say we don’t have pepperoni because we are vegetarian only, people ask us for our most popular pizza. Good food is good food, it doesn’t matter what it is. It all comes back to having a good crust and a great sauce. It’s really nice when it’s noticed and appreciated.”
Talking to Your Inner Child
For others out there looking to follow their passion, Fucilla’s advice is to remind yourself that you can do anything. “Just this morning I said to my husband, as we were getting our dough ready, that I always have imposter syndrome, but now I can do this in my sleep. I am way more prone to doubting myself and thinking I can’t do it compared to my husband and counterparts. Maybe it’s that I didn’t believe in myself. We’re still very small, just a little pop-up business, but the people we reach and the things we’ve done I never, ever would have imagined that I could do with my partner and our friend. We created something, and we share it with the world.”
“When you talk to your inner child, hype them up,” Fucilla advises. “You can do anything. No matter how cheesy it is, if you care about it, you will make it work. Imposter syndrome is so real. Does anyone actually know what they are doing? I feel like you wing it and roll with it. You’ll be scared not doing something, and you’ll be scared doing something so you may as well just do something if you’re going to be scared anyways.”
Personal experiences can be a huge contributing factor to that “impostor syndrome” feeling. “I’ve had negative experiences where I’ve felt like I’m looked at as less than, but now it doesn’t bother me,” she says. “I know my value, and I don’t have to be like, ‘This is my business, and I started it.’ People come up and ask us questions about our oven or our dough, but they ask Giacomo and Giovanni, even though I’m the one making the pizza. Giacomo takes orders and payments, and my husband loads and takes out pizzas. Giacomo is more the front of house, and Giovanni and I come up with the recipes and do the prep. It’s ironic and frustrating when they don’t ask me, but I feel very fortunate. I say this all the time, but I’m so thankful to live in this day and age where it doesn’t matter who you are because everyone is just as important as the next.”
Is A Brick-and-Mortar Store in the Future?
The popularity and success of Peace of Pizza has the Fucillas and Giacomo thinking about the possibility of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. “We’re about 45 minutes from San Francisco, and we talk about opening a restaurant where we are now. I feel like, in the last few years, things have become more about health. There’s this documentary on Netflix called The Bad Vegan, and the whole beginning talks about this woman who opened a raw vegan restaurant in New York in the 1990s before plant-based culture was mainstream and she became the most popular restaurant.
“There is no way we can keep going with the way things are going. Even from a health standpoint, if you don’t do it for morality, think about your health. Everything comes back to food and what you are eating. [In the] modern day, we are fortunate to realize health really centers around what you put into your body, and people are starting to take health into their own hands. What are these crazy chemicals I don’t even know the names of? What’s being injected into livestock? Animals’ cortisol levels spike before they are slaughtered, and, as we ingest that, research has shown it impacts our health.”
While Fucilla’s hopes for the future are changing all the time, one thing remains set in stone: She wants to share her passion with others. “Our end goal was always to have a brick-and-mortar. It’s very scary to open a restaurant because it’s a very volatile business. As vegetarians, we are cutting our customer base, and we aren’t going to be available to everyone. We are in talks with a location being built right now, but we lost my father-in-law in January [2024], so our focus has been on family and helping run my in-laws’ restaurant. That restaurant is my in-laws’ legacy. Whether we someday incorporate our business into our family’s restaurant and combine the two is a possibility.”
“I would love, love, love to have a brick-and-mortar,” she continues. “I would love to share everything I’m passionate about. I can’t take as much credit—my husband is taking the brunt of it, so we put Peace of Pizza on the side. We’re doing events and pop-ups, but focusing more on the business that is in front of us and making sure it keeps going the way it is. Eventually, when things calm down a little, Peace of Pizza will take more priority.”
Fucilla is passionate, innovative and driven by creativity. Her dedication to plant-based cooking and creating unique pizza flavors shines through her enthusiasm to share her lifestyle. She values partnership, respect, and shared vision, and has created a supportive and dynamic team with Giovanni and Giacomo. While she experiences imposter syndrome, she acknowledges her own growth and abilities, reminding herself and others that they can achieve anything. Her love for family drives her work and future plans, balancing the legacy of her in-law’s restaurant with her own aspirations for Peace of Pizza.
Alexandra Mortati is the marketing director for Orlando Foods and founder of Women In Pizza, a not-for-profit organization that empowers women in the pizza industry to share their stories, display their talents, inspire innovations, and connect with one another and the world. This article originally appeared on the Instagram account for Women In Pizza. Click here to learn more about the organization.
