The Divine Lorraine Is Getting a New Pizza Restaurant Later This Month

A pizza from Sorellina and The Divine Lorraine / Photographs by Joe Cicala and Kae Lani Palmisano

If there’s a short list kept somewhere of American pizza savants, I don’t know where his name would be, but I know Joe Cicala would be on it. He takes pizza seriously. He studies pizza, researches pizza, travels to Italy to eat pizza and Vegas to win awards for his pizza. He built his own custom pizza oven in his backyard to experiment with pizza and has done innumerable pop-ups and opened restaurants focused on pizza.

And after four years running Cicala, Joe and his wife, pastry chef Angela Cicala, are going to do something new at the Divine Lorraine. They are opening a whole second restaurant inside the same space — a spot for bitter Italian cocktails, aperitivo, snacks and pizza.

The new place will be called Sorellina. It will live inside the Divine Lorraine the same way Cicala does — his original restaurant on the right of the main lobby, Sorellina on the left. On a recent phone call with Joe, I asked him what kind of pizzas he would be doing.

“Neapolitan pizza …” he said, and paused. Considering his words, he added, “Neapolitan pizza may not be the best pizza in the world.”

At which point, an entire body of assumed knowledge shifted. A thing that was once considered to be absolutely true by almost everyone became less true. And being the intrepid food reporter that I am, I immediately asked the hard-hitting follow-up question.

I said, “What?”

“Yeah. It might not be. I think there’s something else.”

He told me about young chefs in Naples, about pizzerias where pizza anarchists have been messing around with high-hydration doughs producing stronger flavor — “almost like sourdough” — and a huge crumb. These are light crusts, he explained. Very light. But with bottoms that stay crispy. And he’s been seeing it happen for some time now, right in the heart of the Pizza-verse.

Now he’s bringing it here.

Sorellina / Photograph by Robyn Muse

Sorellina, Joe explained it to me, was a restaurant born of necessity. “It came about because the concept of Cicala has evolved,” he said. “Divine Lorraine became a hotel in the last year, so we became kind of a hotel restaurant.” More than that, the theater rushes from The Met were just killing him. Cicala had gotten so busy that “it was getting in the way of the restaurant we wanted to become.”

He uses risotto as an example. In a perfect world, risotto takes about 25 minutes to do right. But a theater crowd isn’t willing to wait 25 minutes. Their primary concern in the dining room is not that the risotto (or anything else) be perfect and authentic and done according to time-honored tradition, but that it arrives within a space of time that allows them eat, drink and make it into their seats before the curtain goes up. And that’s not a mentality that’s conducive to Italian fine dining.

So the way Joe looked at it, there were two choices: make the food faster (and therefore worse), or find a way to make something excellent within the time frame that the customers demanded. Option one was a non-starter. Option two meant pizza.

“Plus,” he added, “the hotel asked us for a lunch concept.” Which is how I found out that Sorellina was also going to be doing lunch service.

“It’s not going to be like Brigantessa,” he told me, referring to his pizza-forward restaurant on East Passyunk that, along with his turn behind the line at Le Virtù, ended badly a few years back. “Not so serious. The point is to have fun, you know? There’s been this huge change in the market. People want cool, casual, fun places to go now.”

And fun, in this circumstance, means a 20-seat circle bar, a pizza counter and 40 seats on the floor, a kitchen with no line and no hood pushing out meats and cheeses and small plates to pair with a curated list of Italian cocktails, Angela supplying three or four desserts, and an electric pizza oven.

“Wait, an electric pizza oven?”

Joe says yup. Electric. Another inspiration from those young chefs in Naples. He tested one out during a recent trip to a pizza conference in Vegas and decided to go electic after building engineers at the Divine Lorraine told him that his traditional stone oven from Brigantessa was too big.

Joe Cicala’s electric pizza oven in Sorellina. / Photograph by Robyn Muse

“It was too heavy for the historical joists in the building,” he explains, laughing. That oven is out on the patio at the DL, ready for summer and outdoor events. But the new electric import is already in place at Sorellina. “It’s good,” Joe says. “It works. And it still gets to 1,000 degrees, so …”

“Jesus, Joe. How many blasphemies is that now?”

“I know. I can’t believe that I’m the guy who’s saying all this.”

And neither can I. But that’s the way the world works sometimes. Change happens. You just gotta roll with it. Make the best of things. Maybe figure out a whole new way to make pizza. And even if the first tasting was a disaster, according to Joe (a breaker popped at the DL on the night before, killing his coolers and ruining almost all his dough, meaning he had to cancel half of the reservations that’d already been made), he’s still got a little time to make everything work.

Sorellina will be opening for real in late March. Before then, there’ll be some more pop-ups, a soft open, experiments and probably some failures. But that’s fine. That’s just the way this stuff works. But Joe’s not worried. He’s been making pizzas for a long time. And, heretical as it may sound, he thinks this is the way to get closer to making the best pizza in the world.

At least for now, I’m going to take his word for it.