Bigalora, which just opened in Arbor Hills Crossing, is new to Ann Arbor, but then, it’s new everywhere: it’s a rebranding of the former Pizzeria Biga. There are two others in the Detroit area, and all three are owned by Luciano DelSignore, who also owns the white-tablecloth Bacco Ristorante in Southfield.
Happily–for “rebranding” so often means the real brains of the operation are on their way out and the spin doctors have been called in–DelSignore is still very much the hands-on chef/owner. His hands are on in an almost queasily literal way, as his bandaged finger wags in and out of the camera in one of his website cooking videos (he carefully keeps it out of the ricotta-stuffed figs). “Oh, yes,” he says casually, “well, I got that chopping wood at home [for his wood-fired pizza oven], and it took weeks to heal. The nail kept coming off.” Forty-nine-year old DelSignore looks like a six-foot-tall Al Pacino (bearded, early nineties version), and even with a Band-Aid on his finger makes those stuffed figs seem like a pretty good idea.
DelSignore says he felt he needed to change the name because “there are so many mom-and-pop pizza places, and we do so much more.” Pizzas still dominate the menu, but he does seem to like to put things in that wood-fired oven: chicken wings, peanuts, olives, heirloom carrots, sausage, sea bass.
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“Biga” is a starter, like sourdough, and DelSignore’s been feeding his original biga since he started his first restaurant. He says he ferments each batch of pizza dough for seventy-two hours, which partially “cooks” the dough, so a quick blast in his wood-fired inferno is all that’s needed to finish it off. “If you put regular pizza dough in our oven, I guarantee it will burn before it cooks,” he cautions. The thin-crust, delicately scorched “Neapolitan” pizza is not meant to serve a crowd, and it’s best eaten immediately. The classic is the simple margherita (tomato sauce, basil, buffalo mozzarella). Most of his other toppings take considerable prep: “It’s not just cut-up vegetables. I don’t just throw on sliced mushrooms, for instance. I make a mushroom ragu and add wood-fired vegetables.”
DelSignore, whose parents immigrated from Abruzzo, speaks fluent Italian. He grew up in Livonia, where his father eventually owned a banquet hall. DelSignore opened Bacco in the early 2000s and says he has no formal restaurant training. By January, DelSignore says, Bigalora will be open for Sunday brunch.
Bigalora, 3050 Washtenaw (Arbor Hills Crossing) 971-2442. Daily 11 a.m.-11 p.m. bigalora.com
