"There's something about feeding people that's gives you great joy."
John D’Aponte’s an artisan, and, at the core, an artisan is a problem solver. He’s spent years being presented with or identifying a challenge and designing his way out of it. Need some bullet proof gear prototyped? Call John. Need high end barware designed? Call John. That lifestyle doesn’t behave — it slips the leash and roams the grounds while everyone’s asleep.
Shit’s getting too hairy in Brooklyn during the pandemic? Slip out over the Whitestone and put up sticks in Wellfleet. Walk into Bagel Hound for your pizza pop-up to see a very specific type of oven? Make the move to go Roman-style, al taglio. Adapt and prosper.
This is the way his brain works and the way his life has gone. It’s something he’s known about since he was young, “oh, I’m the guy who can make stuff.” That stuff that started out drawing, simple and second nature. That led him to making his own clothes. Keep that film in the soup a little longer and it eventually develops into industrial design - which he conceptualized as Architecture under high heat, same consideration and thoughtfulness, quicker turnaround.
This is where things become interesting … John talks about the joy he’d get from making a chair and seeing people’s faces light up - he was able to knock something like that out in a couple days. That’s maybe not hearing the audience roar doing STREETCAR on Broadway but it’s an appropriately immediate response loop. So it’s no surprise that John & the family cooked up an escape plan in short order (the hits keep on comin) to get out of NYC (where he was born and bred) for sandier pastures, there would be another articulation of his personality.
After the D’Apontes pulled the parachute and they’re hunkered down on the Deep Cape - that’s when the pizza wheel starts spinning. It was a heaven sent carbo-lab to ideate, create, taste, evaluate, and repate. Repeat. (So close.) Taste-test begets taste-test: dial that up, eat a slice, pull this lever down, try it again, stand on one leg, light some sage, add flour, bark at the moon.
And as a reward for their service, what did the gods deign to bestow on the rest of us? A pop-up at the Bagel Hound in Fall of 2022 as the dry run - they opened strong and have since added 4 or 5 more pies:
- Margherita: Italian tomatoes, Fior Di Latte, mozzarella, Pecorino Romano DOP, extra virgin olive oil, Italian sea salt, topped with a generous amount of fresh basil
- Diavola: Italian tomatoes, mozzarella, spicy Italian soppressata, pickled banana peppers, house-pickled red onions, and Kalamata olives.
- Americana: The American classic: Italian tomatoes, mozzarella, cup & char pepperoni.
- Salsicce e friarielli: Fresh Italian sausage, broccoli rabe, ricotta, mozzarella, a touch of smoked provola, Pecorino Romano DOP.
- Sebastiana: Caramelized red onions, Italian soppressata, brie cheese, mozzarella, za'atar, sumac, EVOO.
- Peruana: Yukón gold potatoes, rosemary, extra virgin olive oil, Sicilian sea salt.
But let’s regain the thread: when John was solving design problems, he had the enviable pleasure of making someone’s life more enjoyable: delivering the wonderful gift of something special to line the walls of their life - a chair, maybe, to provide aesthetic satisfaction and creature comfort. He did that for decades. The move into food, while not an overtly direct one, scratches a very similar itch but does so in a far more physical and plainly deeper way.
Not only can John churn out many, many pizzas a day, but the enjoyment of his work is so much more primal and communal, so much more immediate. And, in its purest form, food is the stuff that powers us. The taste and enjoyment of food can literally birth Joy in someone through neural response, through the serotonin and dopamine that’s stimulated & released - that’s tough to beat … your move, Eero Saarinen.
Enjoying his food in the visceral sense, as the customers at Spinello do, seems to have bitten John and it’s not clear if he’s looking for an antidote, assuming one even existed.
Another Island Life & An Italian Enclave
The Mediterranean approach flows in a strong current and far down below the surface. Between John & Jenn there’s enough warm blood on the move to float the prospect of an atmospheric enclave that embraces the passionate and operatic character of the al taglio pie’s forbearers. Given the history already present on the Outer Cape, this is not too long of a road to hoe.
Not to be hoity-toity or get too far over our (Swiss made) skis, but there is a lot to appreciate about the power of a concentrated movement. Jack Phillips & Marcel Breuer had a way they saw houses and how they should be built; Eugene O’Neill, Dos Passos, and Tennessee Williams had sight-lines of measure on the literature of their day. Both of those momentums, really nothing more than firm opinions, wide open space, a collection of like minds, and the stubborn determination to see it realized, gave us Cape Cod Modern Architecture & American Modern Literature.
So I like the odds that the D’Aponte’s kernel of an idea to be part of an emerging enclave of European lifestyle could materialize. It’ll find other folks (like the tough guy heroes at everyone’s favorite imaginary distillery, Bonfini Bootleggers), other leisure life livers who can create this piazza way of life that’s rising closer to the surface with every passing paragraph. Let the molecules loose and they’ll do the job of pulling their friends together in packs - the rest will follow.
•••
There’s a local blog which refers to Montauk & Amagansett in the Hamptons as the Provincetown & Truro of the Cape. The last two towns on their respective promontories, the outermost (Montauk & Provincetown) both sharing big name recognition and a high tourism heartbeat; the penultimate towns (Amagansett & Truro) flying markedly lower and under the radar, pointedly happy to be overshadowed by their counterparts. This idea comes quickly to mind when John talks about Wellfleet’s relationship to Boston through the lens of Sorrento’s relationship with Naples.
Both Wellfleet and Sorrento are third-from-the-edge towns on their respective capes and both face the larger, more well-known, city across the water. The fact that John’s family is originally from Sorrento certainly drives the geographic simile stake closer to the heart - and that romantic notion through which he sees his current station in life is just one of many other windows into his imagination.
“It’s island life, it is what it is. The peninsula is connected by just one road, right? So no pragmatic question, you import the tomatoes.”
This particular conversation was about the tomatoes he uses and how he would use the same ones if he were to be making pizzas in Italy. Along the road to answering that question, he treated us to a glimpse of the world unfolding in real time on a parallel plane, just behind his glasses. This is substantive because one of the most interesting things about John is his approach – to anything. His reply when asked if design training decision making occupies his daily life was clear, “Yes, I’m constantly problem solving, making tiny incremental iterations, borrowing tools and processes from other methods of production.
“I’m always circling closer to the ideal.”
What a wonderful sentiment. Our world is not overrun with folks who identify or even have an “ideal” of very many things, period. But the terse line contains more depth than it does vowels.
To pinpoint the ideal is one challenge; to find the right arc for approaching that ideal - knowing how necessary the circling component is to the process - is another challenge; and knowing when to tighten the turn and seize with a final coup de grace is a gift.
So when Johh D’Aponte says he’d love to be part of an Italian, or Mediterranean-spirited, enclave and bring that vibrance and love for life to your part of the world, best believe he’s already got a running vision in his mind and when he sees the pieces fall into place, he’ll be feeing froggy enough to jump.
A Family Business and Not-So-Secret Weapons
One of the reasons Cape Cod (especially our beloved Lower & Outer Capes) stands to survive any natural catastrophes may be the mass of successful business here that are not only self-sufficient from Mainland Big-Funding but they’re run, largely run well, by families.
For the most part, it’s not the “young generation suppresses their own goals and resents their elder” IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE fuckery, with happy ending TBD … it’s the instiling of work ethic, respect for those that did it before you, understanding what it takes to stay afloat, and a sense of keeping values in the right spot of the toolbox. Put those values back where you gottem!
Many friends of HyperLocal are family powered: Mean Burgers, Alley BBQ + Bowling, Seaside Disposal, Bomb Shelter & The Bookstore, Millan’s, Las Chidas, GFM … it’s a real pallate cleanser to see an 11-year-old finally get a shot on the excavator after begging about it for years, or an 8-year old hustling to bus tables and help her parents out on Taco Tuesday.
Pizza Spinello is no different. Maybe their next generation isn’t up to bat yet but pop in one night and you’ll see Jenn’s smiling Front of House face moving scissors by the handful (soon to be branded!) while John’s in the back - a one man conveyor belt. And there may be a nephew or a cousin or a cousin’s kiddo, back there with him learning the intricacies of the sauce brush.
That’s something John noted in our first conversation - every business owner out here has an alter ego, a secret weapon. Some owners are also electricians so if the AC goes down in July, the show goes on. That’s essential for surviving on this long sandy arm 12 months a year when you’re maybe only working for 4-6 of those. John and Jenn are no different - as they told you in the video above (which I’m sure you just watched, right? I mean, you made it this far …), their secret weapon is they have design & marketing in house.
And that’s not just talk either - John just hung his own Wellfleet designed wallpaper inside Pizza Spinello. He’s got top shelf hoodies, hats, and t-shirts on the racks too. With a history of designing restaurant interiors, bullet proof gear, concept development for museums, and menswear, you have to imagine there’s something you can pick up (if there’s any stock left) to support our local business.
Though it remains to be seen whether a hoodie can fire off serotonin with the same gusto as a Carbonara slice… but hey, have one of each, the world is yours.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
HyperLocal is thrilled to announce our first official food collaboration!
From Wednesday, 18 June through Saturday, 21 June 2025, you can order the HyperLocal x Pizza Spinello Special Pie: Jalapeno & Pepperoni (half Margherita, optional).
As we hit the onramp to our first full season, we couldn’t be more excited to start working with the local folks who inspire us to do what we do.
We hope you’ll find time over the next couple of days to get yourself over to PIzza Spinello and try the pie (pick up some scissors while you’re there), and, please let us know what you think, take a pic and tag us. We look forward to hearing from you.
xo HLCC
