New Pizzeria Fires Up Coal Ovens to Burn Competition

Antoinette and Piergiorgio Ceciarelli have brought old-world pizza making to Manalapan.

Located in the Galleria Plaza on Rt. 9 North, Coal, Coal Fired Pizza officially opened on Nov. 1. 

Piergiorgio, which he shortens to Giorgio, has been in the restaurant business for 20 years. Born in Rome, Giorgio has lived in Mexico, California, Florida and currently New Jersey.

His first restaurant endeavor began in South Florida, where he was awarded "Best Restaurant Owner of 2001". In 2005, Giorgio opened Solo Trattoria, a full-menu Italian eatery and pizzeria, located on South Street in Freehold. 

Now, Giorgio has decided to concentrate on perfecting the pizza pie. Coal fired ovens are an essential component in pizza-making history--particularly in the Northeast. Some of the best known pizzerias from New York use coal-fired ovens such as Grimaldi's, Pepe's, Patsy's and Lombardi's, the first pizzeria in the United States. 

The ovens are heated solely by an environmentally-friendly coal called anthracite, which is safe to use for cooking food.

"People have a misconception of coal. Anthracite burns cleaner than natural gas. So there's no carbon, no residue, no anything--but it burns hotter than natural gas," Coal  manager Russell Davis explains. 

Warming up to between 700 and 900 degrees, Coal is able to "cook pizza's quicker than  you would in a gas oven, and by doing that it creates a char on the pizza dough to give it a crisp, flavorful taste," Davis expounded. 

Most typical natural-gas fueled ovens only reach about 300 to 400 degrees and take a while to thoroughly cook a pie, whereas a coal fired oven bakes the pizza in only several minutes.

"A natural-gas oven would just bake the pizza. To get the color in the crust you'd almost have to burn it, whereas this isn't burning this is charring," Davis said. 

Coal only uses fresh ingredients in their pies using fresh mozzarella, plum tomatoes and basil. The menu is simple, concentrating on the ingredients to provide the great flavor.

Alongside simple pizzas, Coal offers Specialty Pies including a potato pizza, eggplant pizza, a white pizza with mushrooms, prosciutto and ricotta cheese, a meatball pie with onions and ricotta.  Coal also serves fresh salads, chicken wings and coal-fired sandwiches.   

Davis insists that Coal puts the best ingredients in their food in order to get the best product out. 

The coal fired ovens do not give the pizza different flavor, the heat and char merely accentuates what the pizza consists of.

 A wood burning stove gets the flavor from the wood, whereas flavor is not a result of the coal, rather it is due to the temperature Coal is able to cook form.  

"A wood burning stove or brick oven does not get as hot as a coal-fired oven," Davis explained.  A brick oven merely means that the oven is made of brick--whether it be gas or coal burning," Davis said. 

Business at Coal has been picking up since it's opening and the feedback has been extremely positive, Davis said. With ten to twelve employees on staff, the business is growing and more and more customers are filing in the doors in the middle of the week and at lunch time. 

Coal does not heat up old slices of pizza for customers. In the same amount of time you would wait for a slice of old pizza to heat up somewhere else, Coal would be able to make a fresh whole pizza from scratch.