Copycat Lucali Pizza (Brooklyn’s Hardest Reservation, Made at Home)
Prep time: 30 min active (overnight to 72 hr ferment) Cook time: 12 min Servings: 2 pizzas (serves 4)
Lucali opened in 2006 at 575 Henry Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Mark Iacono had no restaurant experience — he rented the space that had been his childhood candy store, bought a wood-burning oven, and taught himself to make pizza. The menu has exactly two items: pizza and calzone. The restaurant is cash only, seats about 30 people, takes no reservations, and asks you to sign a waitlist at the door and come back when your name is called. There is no alcohol license — bring your own bottle. The nearest wine shop is a five-minute walk.
New York magazine has named it the best pizza in New York. Jay-Z and Beyoncé are regulars. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were spotted there in 2023. The wait on a Friday night is frequently two hours. None of this has changed in nearly twenty years.
The pizza itself is very thin — reviewers consistently describe the center as “wafer-thin, like a saltine” — with charred spots on the bottom and a crust that crunches before giving way to a slightly chewy interior. The sauce is a cooked San Marzano tomato sauce simmered for 30 to 45 minutes before it touches the pizza. The cheese is a three-variety blend, not just a mozzarella layer. Fresh basil goes on after the pizza leaves the oven.
This recipe is adapted from Mark Iacono’s own published dough formula (he shared it on Good Morning America in 2023) and uses the techniques that define the original: a long cold ferment, wine bottle rolling, and a baking steel preheated for a full hour.
The Three Things Most Copycat Recipes Get Wrong
1. They say the sauce is raw
Many Lucali copycat recipes online instruct you to apply uncooked, hand-crushed San Marzano tomatoes directly to the pizza. This is not what Lucali does. The sauce is cooked — simmered in olive oil for 30 to 45 minutes until the excess water evaporates, the raw acidity mellows, and the tomatoes reduce into something concentrated and sweet. The cooking step is what turns good tomatoes into a great pizza sauce. Skip it and the sauce tastes bright and acidic in a way that clashes with the cheese rather than supporting it.
2. They use only mozzarella
Lucali uses a three-cheese blend. The fresh mozzarella is the primary cheese, but Pecorino Romano is grated over the top, and ricotta may appear in small amounts. The Pecorino adds salt and sharpness that mozzarella alone does not deliver — mozzarella melts beautifully but has very mild flavor. The combination is what gives the pizza a richness that home versions with only one cheese struggle to replicate.
3. The oven isn’t ready
The most common reason a home pizza fails to replicate a restaurant version is that the baking surface is not hot enough. Lucali’s wood-burning oven runs at 700 to 900°F. Your home oven maxes out at 500 to 550°F. That gap cannot be fully closed, but you can get meaningfully closer by using a baking steel — which conducts heat far more aggressively than a stone — and preheating it for a full 60 minutes after the oven reaches temperature. An under-preheated steel produces a pale, soft pizza bottom. A fully preheated steel produces char.
The Dough: From Iacono’s Published Recipe
Mark Iacono shared his dough formula on Good Morning America in 2023 — one of the very few times the recipe has been made public. His published batch is 3½ lbs flour to 33.6 oz water (about 60% hydration), 0.3 oz yeast, and 2 tbsp each of salt and olive oil, kneaded and cut into eight 10-ounce balls. The formula below is scaled down from those 8 balls to 2:
- 400g bread flour or 00 flour — the type is not specified in his original, but 00 flour produces a silkier, more extensible dough; bread flour produces a chewier, sturdier one. Both work.
- 240g warm water — about 100°F; warm enough to activate yeast but not hot enough to kill it. This is the ~60% hydration his published ratio works out to.
- 2g active dry yeast — dissolved in the warm water before adding flour.
- 1.5 tsp fine sea salt
- 1.5 tsp extra virgin olive oil — added to the water with the yeast; gives the dough a small amount of fat that helps with extensibility and browning.
One thing to know up front: Iacono’s published method is same-day and fast. You dissolve the yeast and oil in the water, mix in about 25% of the flour until smooth, add the salt (he dissolves it in a little of the water first), then the rest of the flour, knead roughly 10 minutes, cover, and rest just 45 minutes at room temperature before shaping and baking. There is no overnight rise in the recipe he published.
You have two good options from there:
- Same-day (authentic to his published recipe): knead, rest 45 minutes, shape, bake. Fastest, and exactly what the GMA recipe specifies.
- Cold ferment (what most serious home pizza bakers do for deeper flavor): divide into oiled, sealed balls and refrigerate 24 to 72 hours, then warm at room temperature for 2 hours before shaping. The long, slow ferment develops noticeably more flavor and a more extensible, easier-to-stretch dough.
The step-by-step recipe below uses the cold ferment because it is more forgiving and tastes better — but the 45-minute same-day version is the one Iacono actually published, so use whichever fits your schedule. This dough is deliberately lean and cracker-thin; for a soft, sweet crust built on bread flour and honey instead, our Papa John’s pizza dough recipe goes the other way.
The Sauce: Cooked, Not Raw
In a large number of Lucali-copycat recipes — and in some food media coverage — the sauce is described as raw crushed San Marzano tomatoes applied directly. This is incorrect. Lucali’s sauce is cooked, and the cooking time (30 to 45 minutes) is long enough to fundamentally change the character of the tomatoes from bright and acidic to deep, sweet, and reduced.
The process: crushed San Marzano tomatoes in olive oil with garlic cloves over low heat, simmered until the sauce has reduced by roughly a third and the raw tomato edge has mellowed. Fresh basil goes in for the last five minutes. The garlic is removed before the sauce goes on the pizza.
San Marzano tomatoes matter here. DOP-certified San Marzano tomatoes (grown in the volcanic soil of the Sarnese-Nocerino region near Mount Vesuvius) are sweeter and less acidic than standard canning tomatoes. The DOP label is the relevant marker. Brands: La Valle, Bianco DiNapoli, and Cento San Marzano are all reliable and widely available.
Apply the sauce thinly — 3 to 4 tablespoons spread across a 15-inch round. The restraint is part of the technique. More sauce means more moisture, which works against the crackly, thin crust that defines this style.
Building and Baking
Once the dough is warmed, the steel is fully preheated, and the sauce is cooked and cooled slightly, the assembly is fast. Stretch the dough to about 15 inches (it will not be round — that is fine), apply the sauce in a thin layer, distribute the three cheeses, and slide it onto the steel.
At 550°F with a properly preheated steel, the pizza bakes in 10 to 12 minutes. Cues: the bottom is deeply charred when you lift a corner with a spatula; the cheese has melted, bubbled, and developed gold-brown patches; the rim has visible char spots. Switching to the broiler for the final 2 minutes adds top char without meaningfully extending bake time.
Fresh basil lands on the pizza the moment it comes out of the oven. At this temperature the leaves wilt pleasantly from the residual heat; if you add them before baking they incinerate. Extra virgin olive oil follows. Cut and serve immediately — the thin crust begins softening within a few minutes of sitting.
More Famous NYC Restaurant Copycats
If you’re recreating the impossible-reservation places at home, these are next:
- Copycat Roberta’s Bee Sting Pizza — another famous Brooklyn pizzeria, this one with hot honey and a spicier profile
- Copycat Peter Luger Porterhouse — the other Brooklyn institution with an hour-long reservation wait
- Copycat Rao’s Famous Meatballs — Italian-American comfort from the Upper East Side
- Copycat Carbone Spicy Rigatoni Vodka — the other NYC reservation that takes months to land
