An iconic New Hyde Park pizzeria and restaurant will be coming to Plandome Road in late summer or early fall.
New Hyde Park’s Umberto’s Pizzeria and Restaurant will be opening its second location on Long Island at 429 Plandome Road, said Anthony Lopez, project manager for the restaurant opening.
“Manhasset seems like a busy area and it’s our type of customer base,” Lopez said.
The restaurant will open its location opposite the movie theatre next to Joseph’s Haircutter.
Called by some the “pope of pizza,” Umberto Corteo, the owner of Umberto’s Pizzeria and Restaurant, has run his Jericho Turnpike restaurant and pizzeria for 50 years.
Lopez said although Plandome Road already has three pizzerias, he knows people are always looking for authentic pizzeria cuisine and that’s what Umbertos offers.
Lopez said the restaurant will occupy 2,500 square feet and seat about 40 people.
“The design of the restaurant is going to be a take out and sit down area,” Lopez said. “There’s going to be a brand new look and it’s going to be something conducive to the area.”
Lopez said the design and finishes of the restaurant has already been picked and that they’re just waiting for contractors to get started with work.
“It’s a much smaller and abbreviated place than our New Hyde Park restaurant,” Lopez said. “But you’ll still get our full authentic menu offered at our other restaurant.”
Lopez said everything at the restaurant is made from scratch.
“We make our own our own mozzarella, our own cheese balls and every other thing on the menu is 100 percent made from scratch,” Lopez said. “You will never find anything refrigerated.”
He said what is unique and differentiating about Umbertos is the fact that customers can order out or decide to sit down to eat with the family.
“I don’t think there’s any one in the area that’s doing that,” Lopez said.
When Corteo launched Umbertos in the mid 1960s, it occupied half the space of its current restaurant in New Hyde Park.
In those early days, Umberto’s supplanted a shoe repair shop.
Corteo told Blank Slate Media in 2010 that he and one of his brothers put in 15 hour days six days a week and lived upstairs in the same building.
The restaurant has since gone through two major expansions over the years, and is expanding again.
Corteo said Umbertos typically sells more than 400 pizzas of all varieties on a Friday night including the “grandma pizza” that he claims he invented. It’s a flat square pie with sauce made from the San Marzano tomatoes he exclusively uses and a modest amount of mozzarella that Corteo first made for himself and his family before deciding to market it.
Cortero learned his trade in Brooklyn, starting as a dishwasher in a pizzeria where the owner agreed to let him learn to make the pizzas.
He and his brother Pepe briefly ran a pizzeria in Broolyn before starting the business in New Hyde Park.
He said he came to this country, where his older brother Michael already lived. He still remembers the day in 1962 when he and his two brothers – he is the seventh of 11 siblings — sailed by their home town of Monte Di Procida on an island in the bay of Naples.
The original restaurant has spawned spinoffs run by family members in Wantagh, Garden City and Lake Grove. And there are three more Umberto’s in Florida as well.
“I think our food and hospitality will speak for itself,” Lopez said.
