Anthony Giunta is a famous New York City chef, writer and consultant. He is best known for his radio shows on various forms of media including syndicated radio, TV and the Internet. His radio shows were so popular that it was time to make a movie about him. The movie, “Great Santorini” was made and released in 2021 and starred Anthony and his wife, Irina. Other notable actors that have graced the screens of “Great Santorini” are Koolhaas, Emmannuel Chriqi and Gia Cavalari.
According to his credits on the IMDB website, Anthony also is a native of Brooklyn, New York City. Aged forty-one years old, he has been married to the former Marina Zambetti since 1984. He has also worked in restaurants such as Woksoup Inn and Baba Yai. In the film, he plays Pops, the dumb, short-tempered Italian waiter who is ordered by Tony (Gia Cavalari) to clean the restaurant after a customer gets angry with the way it is kept clean. Eventually, his patience gets the better of him and he starts thinking like an Italian, wanting to open up an Italian restaurant of his own. But before he can start, he must first learn how to cook authentic Italian pizza in nine years.
Although Anthony falco’s character is based on an actual person who lived in Brooklyn, New York, people in the general public tend to stereotype every non-American as a native of Brooklyn. The truth is that no one is actually a native of Brooklyn, but many of us have fond memories of visiting the borough when we were younger. We used to go to Coney Island for an afternoon of amusement and fun, but now we know what it’s really like to go to a real pizza kitchen. We can brag about the food and fun we had during our visits. So how did a person like Anthony also end up playing such a role in popular culture?
Well, like many of us, we all know what pizza is and we also know someone who invented it. It was probably Mario Luciano, although most likely he would have been called Tony. Regardless, there was a guy named Alfredo “Eli” Gourmet who was a cook and owner of a pizza shop on Manhattan’s East Side. His shop was called Tony’s Restaurant and was known for their stuffed-crust pies. It is likely that he came up with the easy to make dough balls when he combined the tomato sauce and cheese in a way that was difficult to make dough for. It was also good that he included fresh basil and red onions in his delicious dough recipe dough.
Thanks to the Instagram account of film director Tom Ford, we are able to learn more about the birth place of this incredible pizza chef. It was actually at a school where he taught, along with another young man named Alex Cross, the basics of wood fired pizza. They used olive oil, flour, eggs, spices, and other ingredients to form a pizza that literally could not be reduced to a slice. It was that kind of class that brought Alex and Anthony falco together.
Eventually, both got interested in the food business and joined International House of anthony falco in Sayulita, California. It was owned by Mario Calhoun, who was an Italian living in Southern California. He decided to expand his pizza operations to include both frozen and wood fired pizza as well as a full line of pasta dishes. The rest, as they say, is history. In fact, Anthony and Alex Cross would go on to form their own company, which today is known simply as Anthony falco’s pizza kitchen.
Not only did Mario Calhoun introduce Alex Cross to Anthony, but also gave him the chance to work with his wife, Julia, and two children, Stephen and Allison. This family became famous in the San Francisco area for their amazing wood fire pizza operations. While working with Mario, Anthony developed his own unique sense of humor, which became prominent in his books and on his television shows. After nine years of helping to launch the company, he decided it was time to move on to new things and take his family to a new level, so he bought a parcel of land out in the mountains of California near Palm Springs and began building his dream pizza restaurant.
That’s right, you can have a place to eat with your family in the San Francisco area just minutes from San Francisco. A place where there is no chain restaurant that even remotely resembles what he had in his kitchens with his wood fired ovens, and his original pizza style that people loved so much. The name of the restaurant that were to be built, and which was to be named after Anthony and Alex Cross, was “The Restaurant at Point Diano.” It is so simple a concept, yet so difficult to execute in a town with high real estate costs, that it was a real challenge. But, in the end, it worked out very well for everybody concerned.
