Elio Pizza on Fire joins the Restaurant Pop-Ups in Mexico City
Elio Bartolotta learned to make pizza long before opening his restaurant in the Chicago suburbs. His first experience came in Sicily, his homeland, and later continued in New York, where he worked for several years before bringing that same approach to Elio Pizza on Fire in Addison, Illinois. ABC7 Chicago described his style as distinctly old school, built around handmade dough, long fermentation and a custom wood-burning oven.
That approach has remained central to the restaurant. Elio still works the dough by hand and gives each portion its own pan while it rises, because fermentation is one of the parts of the process he pays the most attention to. The oven is equally important. He cuts the wood himself and works with hickory, apple and maple, learning how the different areas of the oven behave so that each pizza cooks evenly in just a few minutes.
The ingredients follow the same direction. His tomato sauce is made exclusively with San Marzano tomatoes, while the pizzas use fresh mozzarella such as fior di latte. ABC7 highlighted the Margherita as one of the clearest ways to understand his style because there is very little to hide behind: dough, tomato, cheese and the heat of the wood-fired oven have to work together.
Pizza remains the best-known part of Elio Pizza on Fire, but the restaurant has always gone beyond pizza. Its cooking stays closely connected to Italian and especially Sicilian traditions, with dishes and recipes that Elio has carried with him through the different stages of his career. The restaurant is family-run, and its Sicilian identity has remained part of the way it presents both its food and hospitality in the Chicago area.
That broader side of Elio’s cooking is exactly what he will bring to Wines Experience & Fine Food Mexico City as part of the event’s Restaurant Pop-Ups.
After joining the Wines Experience journey in London, Elio will be back with us in Mexico, this time with a menu centred on some of the dishes that best represent his Sicilian background: caponata, pasta al forno, arancini and cannoli.
The choice makes sense for the format. Pizza may be the star of his restaurant in Illinois, but a pop-up also gives him the opportunity to show a wider part of the cuisine behind it. Caponata brings together vegetables, acidity and sweetness in one of Sicily’s most recognisable preparations; arancini carry the island’s street-food tradition; pasta al forno brings a more familiar home-style side of Sicilian cooking; and cannoli close the menu with one of its most recognisable desserts.
Elio’s presence also fits naturally within what the Restaurant Pop-Ups are meant to bring to Wines Experience & Fine Food. The food is prepared by people who work with these recipes every day, while exhibitors, buyers and hospitality professionals can experience the products in a real service context rather than only discussing them at a stand.
In Elio’s case, that context comes with a personal history that connects Sicily, New York and Chicago, but the cooking has stayed remarkably consistent throughout. Handmade preparation, attention to fermentation, wood fire and ingredients remain the basis of his work, and in Mexico City the focus will simply expand beyond the pizza oven to the rest of the Sicilian table.
