Owners of South Tampa’s Viva Napoli restaurant open Spacca Napoli in Carrollwood

When Simona and Andrea Sarpa, a husband-and-wife team, arrived in Tampa from Naples, Italy, almost a decade ago, they brought along a high pedigree in Italian food and the high standards well established in Italian culture.

It wasn’t long before they realized that if they wanted a taste of home, they would have to do it themselves. Now, the couple is leaning on decades of restaurant experience and generations of family recipes to bring a taste of Naples, the birthplace of pizza, to the Carrollwood community.

“We live here now. We didn’t know where to eat, and we wanted to bring true Italian food and authentic Neopaltian-style pizza to Carrollwood,” Andrea told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay.

Andrea, Spacca’s head chef, has 20-plus years of restaurant experience and cooked all over Europe before coming to America. On the other hand, Simona is the daughter and granddaughter of restaurant owners back in Naples. Together, they owned and operated Viva Napoli restaurant in South Tampa before selling it and opening Spacca Napoli in Carrollwood last May.

Spacca Napoli —at  12913 N Dale Mabry Hwy, tucked within a sprawling plaza in between W Fletcher Avenue and Stall Road—serves more than 20 different Neapolitan-style pizzas, all hand-tossed and cooked by Andrea in the restaurant's Italian-imported hand-built brick oven. It also serves a variety of homemade pasta.

“I like the Montecristo pizza. It has ham and burrata in the middle,” Simona said.

Still, Simona recommends the rigatoni alla bolognese, which has a beef and pork ragu cooked for 24 hours, or dishes featuring the restaurant's pistachio cream sauce, both passed down generations from Andrea’s grandmother.

“They’re his grandmother’s recipes,” Simona said, gleaning at Andrea.

Andrea tacked on that “everything I learned I picked up from Sunday dinners and being around my grandparents and family in the kitchen.”

For Andrea, he recommends the classic Margherita pizza, which he told CL is “the best,” or the rigatoni alla carbonara, which he described as “original,” meaning that his carbonara is made with pancetta, egg yolk, and pecorino romano, and that there is “no cream” in his carbonara.

“Everything here comes from Italy: the food, the products, the people in the kitchen, and us,” Simona told CL.

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