Company Name: Nicli Antica Pizzeria
Principal: Bill McCaig
Location: 62 East Cordova
Business venture: Crafting authentic Neapolitan pizzas with imported equipment, ingredients and methods
Nicli Antica Pizzeria opened its doors for business February 8 to the kind of success every restaurateur dreams of: a full house every night – often with a lineup spilling out the door, braving the wintry Vancouver night for a taste of piping-hot Neapolitan-style pizza.
“I knew people would want it, I knew there was a desire for it, but we are busy every single night,” owner Bill McCaig said. “The other night, a Tuesday night, it’s raining and we’re packed full – just absolutely jam-packed.”
McCaig said the restaurant is the culmination of his decision in the mid-2000s to leave the family’s waste-management business and attend Cordon Bleu chef school in Ottawa.
“There’s no creative flair in waste management,” he said wryly. “You pick up the garbage, you put it in the truck, you put it in the ground and you bury it.”
With chef’s training under his belt and some entrepreneurial dreams, McCaig moved to Calgary and, working in increasingly successful and upscale restaurants, concluded that only a truly quality product will keep a restaurant busy all week long. He also found inspiration for his own restaurant in Calgary’s Neapolitan-style pizzeria La Pucinella.
“It wasn’t just the fact that they were doing great pizza; they also had a beautiful room.”
Moving to Vancouver, McCaig went about setting up his own Neapolitan-style pizzeria which he hopes will soon be the first restaurant in Vancouver – and just the second in Canada, after Toronto’s Pizzeria Libretto – to carry the Vera Pizza Napoletana designation, granted by the Naples-based Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (VPN) to pizzerias who conform to strict Neapolitan pizza standards.
Laying the groundwork for that designation, he said, involved not just finding and renovating a location and clearing through the usual red tape, but extra training at the VPN’s North American branch in California, and plans to source equipment, San Marzano tomatoes and Caputo “00” flour from Italy.
“[The flour] brings a quality to it that is more European,” he said. “The dough is softer, it’s chewier, it’s almost ethereal.”
The quality of the ingredients, McCaig said, pushes his price point up somewhat, but he said he’s convinced people see the value in top-quality ingredients.
“I look at it as: people will go for better quality, hands down.”
Just finding an appropriate Vancouver location, McCaig said, was a significant challenge.
He’d set two parameters for the space he wanted: a single-storey space and a location that was for sale, as he didn’t want the uncertainty of a tenancy, given the substantial investment he planned to put into renovations.
The quest, he said, took him a full year and several failed real estate deals before fate and road construction caused him and his wife to detour off their usual Gastown route and drive by 62 East Cordova.
“My wife looked up and said, ‘There’s a single-storey building for sale,’” he recounted. “That’s all she had to say; I’d realized that Vancouver real estate is not something to be waited on.”
Once the location was secured, McCaig ran up against a second hurdle: getting the necessary approvals from the City of Vancouver to use a wood-fired oven. With few wood-fired ovens being used, he said, Canada has no standard for them.
“It became very troublesome for the city to figure out what to do with [the oven], and what to do with us, venting-wise.”
McCaig finally overcame that obstacle by rounding up experts who helped him make his case to the city. Never in the process, he said, did he consider eliminating that oven from his plans.
“That’s the first step down the slippery slope of inauthenticity.”
He added that if the city had not come around, he wouldn’t have backed down; he’d have taken his business to a city that wanted it.
A more positive challenge that McCaig is currently facing is accommodating his restaurant’s early success.
It seats 36, and McCaig is applying for additional bar seating.
“It would have been nice if we would have gone bigger, but it’s a nice-sized room and we’re focusing on what’s on our plate at this time,” he said. “I think if we had made it larger, it might have become almost unmanageable.”
The next looming challenge, McCaig said, is developing a plan for the adjoining building, which he also owns. That building, he said, can’t be an expansion of the restaurant without a seismic upgrade. Tentatively, he said, he’s contemplating turning that space into a higher-end grocery store.
“I don’t think I can rest on [our success] too long.”
Targeting the top end of the pizza market was a good way for McCaig to get his business noticed, according to PH Restaurants LP president Mike Cyr, who oversees 44 Pizza Hut restaurants in B.C.
“I think he’s smart to try to break through the clutter in any way he can, and it sounds like he’s certainly staked out the high ground for something unique in the pizza category,” Cyr said.
As to McCaig’s insistence on the wood-fired oven despite bureaucratic hurdles, Cyr said it’s essential for restaurateurs to fight for the best equipment.
“It’s the nature of the business that there’s new equipment being developed all the time that gives the licensing people new challenges to deal with,” he said. “Usually that’s just a matter of education.”
Cyr hesitated to comment as to the likelihood of Nicli Antica Pizzeria’s on-going success.
“Success in the restaurant business is dependent on so many tiny variables that have to get executed well day after day,” he said. “So any restaurant’s long term success is dependent upon how [an owner] executes the 1,001 details that go into a restaurant experience – service, quality of food, speed of service, ambiance, the entire dining experience.”