Craft Pizza: Three Days of Patience, Sixty Seconds of Fire

The charcoal oven glows orange through the granite bar, throwing heat across the narrow dining room like a furnace door left open on purpose. A cook slides a pale disc of dough onto the stone floor, and within a minute the edges blister and char, the mozzarella pools and browns, and the marinara darkens to a concentrated ruby. This is Craft Pizza on Shlomtzion HaMalka Street, where every pie represents three days of fermentation and roughly sixty seconds of fire. The math is absurd. The results are not.

David Kaplan's path to pizza making was anything but linear. A Manhattan native who ran cinema chains and then moved into construction, Kaplan became newly orthodox and relocated to Jerusalem, where kitchen experiments with his wife Miri gradually turned serious. He sought out Tony Gemignani, the American pizza master and instructor at the International School of Pizza, for technical guidance and recipe development. Gemignani's signature email sign off, "Respect the craft," became both the restaurant's name and its operating philosophy.