Photo by Jason Koster

Although asthma took Chris Bianco away from his wood-burning oven, the pizza maestro still has plenty of irons in the fire, with plans for a new
restaurant in London, a line of canned organic
tomatoes and a local revival of crop grains.

In a quiet nook behind the kitchen of Pane Bianco in central Phoenix, sitting at a wide table brightened by a single sunflower in a Mexican Coke bottle, Chris Bianco reaches into a bowl of worn wooden alphabet blocks, grabbing a couple to fiddle with as he talks about his award-winning Downtown Phoenix restaurant.


The chef doesn’t want to take all of the credit for Pizzeria Bianco’s success. There are many fingerprints on the plate, as he puts it.

“Making pizza was always a metaphor. It is a full circle,” he says. “Where does it begin, and where does it end? In the spring? In the fall?”

He speaks with gratitude about the farmers who grew the wheat, the tomatoes, the herbs. The people who made the soppressata, the cheeses and the cured olives. He praises his brother, Marco, who makes all the dough and bread, and his employees, some of whom have been with him for nearly 18 years. He’s just a player in the process.

While his pizza has gotten rave reviews in the national press for years, Bianco makes it clear that he never asked for the attention.

He grabs one of the colored pencils sprouting from an empty San Marzano tomato can. Rapidly sketching out bold lines and geometric shapes, he explains that the more he’s accomplished, the more he feels he has to prove. The competitive nature of the restaurant business – especially when it comes to pizza – strikes him as “destructive.”

“There’s always a place for great music and art and expression,” he says. “And you know what? The best pizza is the one you love best.”

The subject of being a media darling seems to agitate him, and he says he wishes he didn’t care what people write. When it comes to his fame, Bianco seems much more at ease sharing the spotlight with the people who’ve helped him along the way.

He’s even more comfortable – blissful, even – talking about pizza itself. It would seem that for Chris Bianco, the best pizza is the one he happens to be making. As he talks about the process, he puts down his pencil and tilts his head back slowly, making a wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair swoosh upward from his forehead. He closes his eyes, breathing deeply, practically smelling the aroma in his imagination. “When I’m in front of the oven, it’s mindless, but it’s mindful,” says the chef, whose pies earned him a James Beard Award in 2003.

“I love the mechanized cadence of the oven. I love to shape the dough,” he says, rocking backward slightly. “It’s a dance.”

His happy place was as a fixture at his famed pizzeria. He was always clad in a short-sleeved white baker’s shirt, his skin faintly dusted with flour. Sometimes he’d have a basketball game on a tiny TV set on the wall next to the mammoth wood-fired oven. He’d look up to greet guests on their way in or out, but he was always moving, always watching the fire, always making pizza.

The wait at the restaurant grew famously, unbearably long, and Bar Bianco, next door, was filled every night with customers who’d wait three hours or more for a table at the pizzeria. Things went on like this for years, seamlessly. The only pause in operations would be the summer hiatus when the entire staff went on vacation.

And then, in late 2009, things changed. No more pizza-making for Chris Bianco. The culinary world let out a collective gasp.

Doctors had been telling him for a dozen years that nights at the wood-fired oven were worsening his asthma, which he’s had since age 5. He’d also developed baker’s lung, an ailment brought on by prolonged exposure to the fine flour dust from his pies.

“Finally, I made the decision that I can’t keep going on this way,” Bianco says.

The pizza chef sells his own line of canned organic tomatoes, available at Pane Bianco in central Phoenix.

He’d been running at full speed for years. Even after getting an almost-perfect Zagat rating (29 out of 30), being named the best pizza in America by Slice of Heaven author Ed Levine, and basking in national accolades, Bianco had continued to work long hours.

He calls pizza-making a young man’s pursuit, and yet he kept pushing forward in his late 40s, pulling long shifts until his hands would creak. Perhaps he coped with fame by working even harder.

Eventually, though, he accepted that his physical body is a teacher unto itself. The lesson? “There’s something greater than I,” he says. “It was comforting making pizza every day, but it was selfish. I didn’t understand what my place was.”

What could’ve been the ironic end to a career as a celebrated pizzaiolo turned out to be the launch of Bianco 2.0, as the chef has discovered that he can use his influence well beyond the restaurant.

“I went from a world of 100 percent tactile to one that’s from the outside in. The reality is totally different, but my intention is the same – good intention,” Bianco says. “My role continues to evolve, like a basketball player who goes on to coach.”

In the nearly two years since he stopped making pizzas full time (he still pulls a few oven shifts, he admits), he’s shifted into overdrive with new projects, as if making up for lost time.

“He’s like my father – he’s always got five things going at once,” explains his older brother, Marco Bianco, 51, who is the only other family member involved. “When he does a project, he sees how it’s going to be from start to finish.”

Marco started working with his brother in 1997, foraging produce for the pizzeria. “There weren’t a lot of farmers’ markets back then,” he says. “People don’t know how good they have it.”

Bianco uses locally grown wheat to make his pasta.

Nowadays, Marco acknowledges that his brother is finally freed up to express his ideas. “When you create your own thing, it’s hard to give it up. But he trained us, and now we carry the torch.”

Can those famous pizza-making skills be taught? Bianco himself admits, matter-of-factly, that they can. “After you really understand a relationship with fire,” he explains, “the physical part, you can teach.”

While Marco heads up dough-making (“the single most important thing we do,” notes Bianco), longtime employee Horacio Hernandez handles the oven and maintains impeccable standards.

And last year, Bianco recruited even more talent. He hired one of the city’s highest-profile chefs, Claudio Urciuoli, formerly of Prado, the upscale Italian restaurant at Paradise Valley’s Montelucia Resort & Spa. Urciuoli now manages the culinary side of operations. Bianco also took on a menu consulting gig at the Wigwam, the West Valley resort bought in 2009 by his friend and patron, former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo, and two partners.

Although he’s not particularly interested in pursuing consulting work, he wanted to see if he could make a difference in an entirely different arena. What if a luxury resort could use local produce instead of getting everything from a corporate supplier?

“In some small way, could you affect the mentality of a place that’s open 24/7? Hotels don’t typically buy local, but I wanted to challenge their ideals.”

While Bianco has long sought out organic ingredients (some of which, like the California olive oil he carries at Pane Bianco, he’s branded under his own name), he’s also become more involved in their production.