Photo: Courtesy Il Leone
In 2021, Ben Wexler-Waite opened Il Leone on Peaks Island off the coast of Portland, Maine. The island, which is connected to the mainland only by ferry, was a big change — both geographically and culturally — from Wexler-Waite’s hometown of New York and the Democratic campaigns he worked on in his post-college years. Nevertheless, the seasonal nature of politics left him to explore other interests — including pizza. Now, he’s turned that into a full-time gig and returned home to open a Brooklyn branch.
The space won’t look too different from its previous tenant, Bar Vinazo: A bar still stretches down the middle of the room, while the white brick walls will be decorated with colorful plates and platters painted with sunflowers and cheerful langoustines. One bar seat will always be reserved for Giorgio, a stone lion that Wexler-Waite introduces with a beaming smile. “I found it in a junkyard on Ischia, wrapped it in tons of bubble wrap, and shipped it back,” he explains. What if business is busier than expected, and they need an extra seat? He promises Giorgio will always have his place, and diners waiting for a table can grab a drink in the backyard.
In Maine, the pizzas are wood-fired, but more stringent regulations on live flames in the city mean he’ll be baking his pies in an Italforni Caruso electric oven. What won’t change is Wexler-Waite’s fanatical devotion to ingredients. He’s looking forward to having readier access to things like fresh buffalo mozzarella, which he’s getting from the Il Casolare dairy in Southern Italy. He’s just as particular about his basil, which he will tell you is as tough to source in New York as it is in Portland. So much has too much moisture or just isn’t the same as you’d find in Italy, plain and simple. So he’s had to figure that out, along with finding a farmer to grow his tomatoes. “I’m friends with Franco Pepe’s tomato farmer, Mimmo,” Wexler-Waite says, referring to the famous pizza man from Naples. “He gave me these special seeds for a tomato that Franco uses for his most famous pizza, the Margherita Sbagliata.”
For now, he’s excited about a pie made with that mozzarella and greenhouse-grown cherry tomatoes from Maine. It’s inspired by pizza he loves in Campania, where piennolo tomatoes grown at the base of Mount Vesuvius are often used for the margheritas. The cherry-tomato sauce gives him the best approximation of that sauce. “Of course the dream would be to be able to use fresh piennolo here,” he says. (The jarred variety just won’t cut it.)
He’s importing more from Maine than just tomatoes, like lobster for a cheeseless pie with tomato sauce, white wine, chile flakes, basil, parsley, and garlic. There’s an expanded menu, too, with such appetizers as whole artichokes fried in olive oil and meatballs made with grass-fed beef. Tiramisu is whipped up in-house, while lemons in the sorbet come from the Amalfi Coast.
Handfuls of lemons appear on the blue tiles that decorate most of the tables in the space. Wexler-Waite got them in Vietri sul Mare near Salerno. “I spent three months trying to find real hand-painted tiles here,” he says, sighing. Eventually, he gave up and decided to go directly to the source.
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