A LONGSTANDING BRICK RESTAURANT AND PIZZERIA DRAWS ON THREE GENERATIONS OF SICILIAN COOKING

BY ERIK SCHONING PHOTOS BY ALEX BARRETO

Many restaurants are family businesses, but few can boast they have three generations of the same family working side-by-side. But that’s the case at Nino’s Coal Fired Pizza of Brick, where the Schifilitti clan comes together daily to craft locally famous pizzas, pastas, and classic Italiano dishes.

The recipes belong to owner Anthony Schifilitti’s mother, Francoise Schifilitti, known to most as “Nonna.” Drawing on over a century of Sicilian recipes, the mother-and-son duo launched what would become a lifelong professional collaboration.

“In my first restaurant, I was 18 years old and I just fell in love with it,” Anthony Schifilitti said. “I made a lot of little mistakes, but the excitement of seeing customers happy with the food you create was such a beautiful feeling. Throughout the years, I just kept improving, learning from other chefs and all my experiences. But most of what I learned came from my mother.”

Today, Schifilitti passes on that legacy to three of his children: Paul, Joey, and Sophia, who are as much a part of the restaurant as he is. (And his mother, now 88, still helps out behind the scenes, often joining the kitchen via video call to help devise the week’s specials.

“The restaurants have always been like a second home to us,” daughter Sophia Schifilitti said. “It taught me how to make a work environment fun, and also how to work passionately and put our hearts into everything we do. My family is my world and we have so much passion and love for our business.”

This passion that abiding feeling that what you do is an extension of yourself is laced into the menu at Nino’s Coal Fired Pizza. In fact, one could throw a dart and likely hit an award-winning menu item: the pizza won the People’s Choice Award at the 2024 NJ Pizza Festival, the Bolognese was the recipient of the coveted Boss of the Sauce title, and the tiramasu won a title in the Dessert Wars competition, even against full-service bakeries.

Yet despite the medals, there is a deep simplicity to these recipes. Wings are marinated in olive oil, lemon, garlic, and rosemary, then coal-fired. Arancini is fried to order. Even the Caesar dressing is housemade. In keeping with Italian cooking traditions, there’s little in the way of flashy tricks.

Take the lasagna, for example. It’s a dish with many ingredients, but a great lasagna requires attention to detail at every level. Homemade sheets of pasta are layered with housemade béchamel, mozzarella, and Bolognese sauce, then topped with pecorino romano, fresh basil, and olive oil.

The pizza itself is also an exercise in simplicity: imported Italian flour is shaped into dough, sprinkled with toppings, and slid into hand-built brick ovens that can log temperatures up to 950 degrees. At such high temperatures, the pizza cooks in two quick minutes, yielding a light, fresh pie with a crispy crust. That’s the thing about simple cooking: you can’t cut corners. Every step must be executed flawlessly, at every stage.

The Schifilitti clan goes above and beyond to make the restaurant feel like a second home for guests. On weekends, they bring in a live singer, who Schifilitti said performs excellent Sinatra covers. And with so many Schifilittis on hand every day, it’s hard not to feel like you’re part of the family.

“The gratitude you feel when customers come into your family business and leave satisfied with a smile on their face is unmatched,” said Joey Schifilitti. “When customers come in, they leave as part of our family.”

Nino’s has been at its current location for over 12 years, and in that time has become a fixture of the community; when COVID hit, the restaurant donated hundreds of pizzas to local hospitals and families in need. It’s important to Schifilitti to give back, setting an example for his children. He believes there’s not a single life lesson you can’t learn from working in a restaurant, whether it’s kindness, commitment to what you do, or how most of life’s problems can be solved by a bowl of homemade pasta.

“Nonna’s recipes were the main thing that always brought our family together,” Paul Schifilitti said. “There’s something special, almost like a sacred ceremony, about sitting down around the table with people you love.”

First-time customers, longtime regulars, visitors, and locals alike: at Nino’s, everyone breaks bread together.

Nino’s Coal Fired Pizza

66 Brick Blvd, Brick Township

732.255.7700 / ninoscoalfiredpizza.com