For Chef and owner Luciano Delsignore, running a restaurant like Bigalora Wood Fired Cucina is all about the food. He grew up in the restaurant industry with his father owning an Italian restaurant in Livonia.
“My traveling back to Italy to visit my family in Italy, who all reside in back in Abruzzo Italy, and being immersed in that culture really made me appreciate and want to become a chef, and recreate what was true Italian food that I got to experience,” explains Delsignore.
Bigalora is Delsignore’s second concept, his first was the very popular fine-dining restaurant Bacco Ristorante in Southfield.
“I wanted to create an Italian restaurant that was more casual, and create a true Italian Neapolitan-style pizza, that this market had none of in 2010,” says Delsignore.
The hallmark of a Neapolitan-style pizza is its fermented dough that’s stretched thin and cooked in a balmy 900-degree wood-fired oven until it’s crisp yet chewy in texture. The name of the restaurant came from the dough itself.
“We spent a year developing this dough, and there’s only three ingredients,” says Delsignore. “It has no commercial yeast and is fermented for 72 hours... and that comes from making dough the way it was created in the mid to late 1800s, which was a naturally leavened dough, which is really a biga, hence the name Bigalora.”
Since starting in Southfield, Bigalora has expanded to three more locations in Royal Oak, Plymouth, and Ann Arbor.
Though pizza is their main focus, they also have a variety of appetizers, salads, desserts, and pasta. The pasta and sauces are all made fresh, from scratch, including making the sausages to put in the pasta sauce. here, they like to feed you like you’re family.
All of their food is also available for carry-out. For the full story watch the video above.