To hear the owner of Lucali tell it, his humble Carroll Gardens pizzeria was never meant for stardom. “My waitresses used to come here as kids when it was a candy store,” says Mark Iacono, who grew up near the Brooklyn storefront he transformed in 2006. “Now, it’s a pizzeria.”
That’s putting it mildly. Lucali has become a modern temple to New York’s signature dish, with a fanbase that includes Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Selena Gomez, and Taylor Swift. Name a pop-culture power duo, and odds are they’ve waited outside its sage-washed door. A former construction worker who specialized in granite and marble, Iacono personally rebuilt the space, turning a derelict corner shop into a candlelit sanctum for dough, sauce, and devotion. “I ripped everything out,” he says. “I felt like I had to do justice to what came before.”
The design is a love letter to old Brooklyn—unpolished, familiar, and rich with memory. A vintage football helmet on a shelf, a pair of weathered boxing gloves on the wall, and out back, an antique Coke machine from Jay Z, still wrapped. A cardboard box of Bazooka gum, perhaps an ode to the erstwhile candy shop, now sits beside jugs of deep-red sauce, their labels scrawled in Sharpie on masking tape.
In an age of agency-designed menus and branding decks, Lucali is a refreshing outlier. No signage, no reservations, no fuss. “Most of my staff has been with me since day one,” Iacono says. The source of their loyalty? “I make good pizza.”
Watch more installments of our Designing Delicious series, presented by Dorsia.
