Pasquale Cozzolino

Cozzolino was born in Naples. He started learning cooking at the age of 15.[1] He studied at Ippolito Cavalcanti College in Naples, and he was a student of Gaetano Esposito, the great-grand- nephew of the inventor of the Neapolitan Margherita Pizza.[2]

He moved to New York in 2011[3] where he is the owner and chef of a Neapolitan cuisine restaurant.[4][5]

Cozzolino has been the chef for New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio since 2018,[6] and a private chef for U2, Madonna, Muse, Coldplay, Eros Ramazzotti, and Laura Pausini.[7]

He created a diet with pizza, which he experimented on himself. In 2012 he began a diet where he ate a margherita pizza cooked according to the method of Neapolitan cuisine every day for lunch, losing 96 pounds in nine months.[3][8][9] The concept of the diet is based on the long fermentation period of the yeast (more than 36 hours), which removes almost all the sugars from the dough.[10][11]

He also worked as advisor for a project managed by BeeHex, a startup founded by NASA, to produce pizza with 3D printers. The goal of this technology is to duplicate the original recipe of Neapolitan pizza exactly.[12][13]