By Christian Kallen
The recent North Bay Pizza promotion called attention to many local pizzerias, from Geyserville south to Marin County. But it doesn’t take a promotion to get people to take a slice: According to Food & Wine magazine, Americans eat pizza three times a month, 288 pieces a year and the most popular day to eat pizza is … Super Bowl Sunday, of course. That’s just over a week away.
Surprisingly, several local pizzerias have an unspoken bond running between their kitchens. Geyserville’s Diavola, the Matheson restaurant, Journeyman Meat Co., PizZando … even Big John’s Market. (And, behind closed doors, quiet and cold on the back patio of Molti Amici, the former Campo Fina …)
The common element is that they all purchased their pizza ovens from Mugnaini, a wood fire oven manufacturer in Healdsburg.
Ah, the romance of Italy 40 years ago. Andrea Mugnaini so fell for the bright flavor of the food and flexibility of the sturdy wood-fire oven, with its high temperatures and durable heat, that in 1989 she set up an arrangement with the Valoriani family of Florence, Italy, to bring their ovens to America.
Their innovation was to make a prefabricated wood-fire oven kit, essentially, of four nesting arcs, with self-supporting domes and other structural innovations to increase stability and simplify the process of assembly. Mugnaini effected an exclusive contract to import the parts, and began building Valoriani ovens in America—using Watsonville as a base.
The popularity of the sturdy, attractive, functional Mugnaini ovens grew, and soon they were found in such esteemed kitchens as the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) in Hyde Park and Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
But – Watsonville?
In 2015 Mugnaini and her husband moved the operation to Healdsburg, had a factory built on Grove Street and staked their claim to the Wine Country experience. It provided a clear competitive advantage to well-to-do foodies, said Jason Clay.
“To be able to come visit the Wine Country, cook with us for two or three days to learn how to use the oven and then just enjoy the Sonoma County area,” Clay said. He purchased the company in 2023; Mugnaini died of cancer in 2021, at the age of 66.
Clay is a big, animated guy from Texas—though he’s sacrificed his Stetson for a Mugnaini trucker’s cap. He worked with Pappas Brothers in Houston for 20 years, one of the country’s largest steakhouse and barbecue restaurant operators. He looks a bit like Woody Harrelson, but the resemblance probably ends there.
The Grove Street location has a sizable classroom with two ovens to educate new or potential buyers. A large, attractive poster of Andrea Mugnaini still dominates a wall. Her cookbook, too, The Art of Wood Fired Cooking, is available at the shop (or on Amazon).
“The quality of the product, the build of the product, the integrity, has stayed here,” Clay said. “And we haven’t moved on in any way from Andrea’s vision. The brand is intact, and I have no desire at all to ever move away from her vision. The idea is just to continue it.”
Andrea’s World
Inside the expansive, brightly illuminated, high-ceilinged factory, steel and stone and mortar and tile work together to mold 350 ovens a year, almost one a day. It takes from three days to a week to make a single oven, as it needs time to cure at every stage, but the crew of a half-dozen or so—though small by factory standards—is efficient and practiced.
One employee is employed simply to build sturdy wood boxes to ship the completed ovens across the country and even overseas in, without damage. One crate per oven, 350 of them.
The key to the wood-fire oven—or more exactly the refractory oven, which builds heat up inside the dense walls of stone, more like a furnace than a traditional oven—is the floor. Made of a proprietary composite that Valoriani developed, the floor is built onsite, perfectly level, perfectly uniform in density. It holds heat up to 700 degrees or even higher: A commercial kitchen will heat theirs hotter, since every time a pizza goes in or out some precious heat is lost.
The basic idea is probably quite close to the birth of civilization: a pile of stones over a fire. Roast beast followed, then baking bread.
Emission Control
Despite the name, using wood in the ovens is no longer the only possible source of heat. Natural gas or propane elements are also available, though all Mugnaini ovens hold true to the concept by being built for a wood-fire source as well.
“The techniques and some of the technology has changed a little bit, but the overall concept’s been around for hundreds of years,” Clay said. “You know it’s one of those things we just haven’t been able to improve on too much.”
Culinary geeks might swoon over a Wolf or a Viking; but the wood-fire oven has a greater deal of flexibility than just for pizzas. Some restaurants cook almost all their dishes in the oven, from vegetables to main courses to dessert. And bread as well, of course.
Remarkably, once the floor and oven are warmed up, a pizza cooks in just 90 seconds. It’s hot enough that the crust gets that perfect char, “leoparding” or spotting of dark, almost burned discs against a paler dough, while the cheese and other toppings are cooked at an intense sear.
Ninety seconds. The wait at Pizza Hut is much longer (although the industry is abuzz with the news that the Domino’s outlets in Dubai are awaiting the delivery of Mugnaini ovens).
But cut to the chase: The romance of the ovens is their biggest selling point. “It’s because you’re in the back, you’re working with fire, everybody’s gathered around and there’s this kind of festive gravity to it,” Clay said. “You’re doing pizza and then later on you’re bringing out a brick chicken or a roasted duck.” You can even bake a cake for the next night.
“And we’ve sold houses because of them,” he added. “If a house has one, it’s more likely to sell. And if it doesn’t, installing one can close the deal.”
Mugnaini Wood Fire Ovens, 1530 Grove St., Healdsburg. mugnaini.com.
