Nuestra historia
From Almagro to Pellerin Street
Fugazzeta Club was started by Valeria Iturbe and Tomás Ferraro, a couple from Buenos Aires who spent five years in London looking for a slice of proper fugazzeta and eventually gave up and made one.
Before London
Don Aldo's
Tomás grew up above his grandfather's pizzeria. Pizzería Don Aldo stood on a corner in Almagro from 1962 until 1998, a long room of formica tables, a marble counter and two gas deck ovens that were never switched off between Thursday and Sunday. Aldo Ferraro made muzzarella, fugazzeta and fainá and very little else, and he would not have understood why anybody wanted more.
Valeria grew up ten blocks away in Villa Crespo and trained as a graphic designer. She met Tomás in 2012 at a friend's asado and, in her version of events, spent the first evening explaining that his grandfather's pizzeria sign was badly kerned.
We never wanted a restaurant about Argentina. We wanted a pizzeria in Argentina, just one that happens to be in Hackney.Valeria Iturbe, co-founder
How it happened
Six dates
- 2016
- Valeria and Tomás move to London. Tomás cooks in hotel kitchens, Valeria joins a design studio in Shoreditch.
- 2018
- The first Fugazzeta Club: a Saturday stall in a car park off Mare Street, with one domestic oven, twelve tins and a hand-painted sign.
- 2020
- The stall closes for the pandemic. They sell frozen fugazzetas rellenas from their flat in Clapton to keep the tins warm.
- 9 July 2021
- The restaurant opens at 38 Pellerin Street, on Argentina's Independence Day, in what used to be a launderette.
- 2023
- The old storeroom becomes El Fondo, the back room for private hire.
- 2024
- Delivery starts, with two electric cargo bikes. There are now five.
How we make it
Tins, onions, patience
Pizza al molde lives or dies by the tin. We bake in 84 black steel moldes, 30 cm across, that Tomás carried back from a kitchen supplier in Buenos Aires in two suitcases. They are never washed with soap, only scraped and oiled, which is why the base fries rather than bakes.
The dough is fermented for 48 hours, then rises a second time in the tin for three. The onions for the fugazza are cut by hand every morning, and in a normal week that is around 260 kilos of them.
The cheese question
Argentine pizzeria mozzarella is not Italian mozzarella. It is firmer, saltier and melts into a thick blanket rather than pools. We could not buy it in Britain, so since 2022 it has been made for us by Wellow Vale, a small dairy in Somerset, to a recipe we worked out with them over eleven attempts.
The deck oven runs at 280°C, much cooler than a Neapolitan oven, because a pizza al molde needs fourteen minutes, not ninety seconds.
The sign
Filete porteño
The sign above our door, the menu boards and the mirror behind the bar were painted by hand in the filete style, the scrolling, shaded lettering of Buenos Aires buses, carts and shopfronts. Valeria designed them; a fileteador from San Telmo, a friend of the family, painted them over three weeks in the summer of 2021 while we fitted the kitchen.