Sicilian Street Food Takes Hold In Nashville

Update: As of July 2021, St. Vito Focacciaria is now operating only as a Sunday pop-up at the Hathorne, a restaurant on Nashville's west side. Reservations are available on the Hathorne website.

Michael Hanna had perhaps the ultimate focus group to test his Sicilian street food concept, St. Vito Focacceria. Since moving to Nashville from Memphis about six years ago, he worked with some of this great food city’s best chefs, including Philip Krajeck at Rolf & Daughters, who in turn became his taste testers as he developed the pan-style pizza from Sicily known as Sfincione. During the pandemic, he made pizzas as a sort of calling card to reach out to these and other esteemed chefs in the city.

The chefs’ reactions gave him the confidence to grow his budding business from his home kitchen, where he was selling pizzas to Nashvillians who’d form a line down the street in their cars, to something else entirely. At St. Vito Focacciaria, he is channeling Italian forebears to make serious Sicilian-inspired Sfincione and starters.

Over the phone on a recent morning, he tells La Cucina Italiana about the strange journey that led him to open his first solo venture, and describes the pivotal moment when he brought a pizza he’d been trying to perfect to chef friends Trevor Moran of Locust and Andy Little of Josephine. “I hit the nail on the head,” Hanna explains, adding that he’d been talking to Moran about working at Locust. “I made it as perfect as you could make it. I brought it over to [Moran] and Andy. We cut it and started eating it, and Trevor was like, ‘You don’t need to work for me.’”

Little’s advice was even more direct: “This is it,” Hanna recalls Little saying. “You have something. You’ve got to run with this.”

Hanna’s pizza was no fluke. Italian on his mother’s side, with family that immigrated to New Orleans, and then Tampa and Dallas, Hanna himself grew up in Memphis, then worked in Dallas. He came back to Memphis to work with two of the South’s most successful Italian restaurant chefs, Andy Ticer and Michael Hudman, at their acclaimed Italian Kitchen. At the same time, Hanna started growing vegetables to service area restaurants on a 5-acre plot of his father’s farm in nearby Arkansas.

Ticer and Hudman tapped the young chef to help run the kitchen at Hogs & Hominy, a pizza and small plates concept with “Italian Cooking. Southern Roots” as its slogan. There, Hanna said, he learned to make pizza and expanded his knowledge through collaborations with pizzaioli from Marc Vetri’s Philadelphia restaurants.

Hanna says he enjoyed his time there, but started to feel conflicted. “I don’t think I saw myself as a pizza guy,” he says.

Brought up as a chef’s chef, Hanna read the Relais & Chateaux books and studied fine dining. When an opportunity came up at The Catbird Seat, Nashville’s avant-garde, haute cuisine spot, he moved across the state. Soon enough, though, he’d end up back in front of the pizza oven. His heart just wasn’t in fine dining.

“My family is Sicilian,” Hanna says. “I always had this deep affinity for a real rustic way of doing things. And I love the idea of your nonna cooking and not all the tortellinis are perfect, not everything is exact. That’s a great representation of the human aspect of things. We’re not all perfect. There can be deficiencies in you and me and our food. Obviously, I’m not going to serve something that’s complete garbage and call it great. But if one of the pizzas isn’t perfectly shaped I’m not going to throw it away. That’s silly. A piece of cheese is not a perfect triangle.”

From The Catbird Seat, Hanna went to work first at Rolf & Daughters, the restaurant that, along with Tandy Wilson’s City House, established Nashville as one of the most intriguing cities for Italian food in America. When Rolf’s Krajeck opened his pizza-focused follow-up, Folk, Hanna went along for the ride.

“Phil taught me how to be efficient and that your attention to detail matters, especially with dough practices,” Hanna says of Krajeck.

Next up was a stint at Gerard Craft’s Nashville offshoot of his St. Louis-based Pastaria, but the pandemic led to its extended closure. It has since reopened, but Hanna lost his job there in the early days of the crisis, which led to him cooking pizzas out of his home kitchen.

“When the pandemic hit, I was trying to read the tea leaves about where this industry is going to move forward, and I realized that comfort food is something people are always going to want,” he says.

Laughing at the memory, Hanna recalls that the word-of-mouth success of his pizzas led neighbors to question why a line of cars stretched down the street on certain nights. “I was selling 15 pizzas out of my 1,500 square foot house every Wednesday to Sunday,” he says. “If the neighbors didn’t know what was going on they would think I was selling drugs or something.” When they found out, they instead became customers.

Another customer, City House’s Wilson, also encouraged Hanna to continue making his Sicilian-style pizzas. Still other Nashville culinary figures, the husband-wife team behind Grilled Cheeserie, Joseph Bogan and Crystal De Luna-Bogan, offered Hanna the use of their commissary kitchen on afternoons and evenings, so he moved out of his home and created a ghost kitchen, taking orders on Instagram and wheeling 40 pizzas a night to a parking lot to sell them to hungry customers.

“I have this crazy loyal cult customer base,” he says, adding that one of these customers introduced Hanna to the owner of the Vandyke, who was looking for a new restaurant tenant. Hanna balked at first, feeling that his Sfincione concept was perhaps too niche to be the anchor restaurant in a hotel.

Hanna became convinced it could work if he kept it simple. He’s making three Sfincione options Wednesday to Sunday from 4-10 p.m., and serving Sunday brunch from noon to 8 p.m. The Sfincione menu always features the Classic Vito, with fontina, milled tomato, fresh oregano, and breadcrumbs; the Potato, with fontina, potato cream, and breadcrumbs; and a special, such as a recent mortadella pie with pistachio cream and Sicilian olives. There are also seasonal salads, shrimp arancino, anchovies, and Sfizio & Speck. For dessert, Hanna offers a Sardinian bread pudding and a torta fragela, or strawberry shortcake.

Now more than a month in, St. Vito Focacciaria is going strong. Hanna credits the community in Nashville, particularly its chefs, for encouraging him and helping get his first restaurant open.

Hanna says that the nights of him wheeling pizzas into a parking lot to sell them during a pandemic paid off. “The community saw that and said, We gotta support this guy.” The rest, as they say, is history.