POLPO PIZZA
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EVAN SIGMUND
Danni Bleil shades her eyes against the Sarasota sunshine and reaches over to help her husband, Tom Baril, as he pulls a 12-inch Luau Pie out of the pizza oven and places it on a wooden block. The pizza oven is located inside the vintage Ford truck parked here at Nathan Benderson Park. The wooden block is a relic of Bleil’s days as a freelance food stylist in New York. Bleil and Baril are the driving force (pun intended) behind Polpo Pizza, Sarasota’s premiere mobile pizza catering company, and business is booming. We’re at the Florida Scholastic Rowing Association (FSRA) Sculling Championships on a blazing hot Sunday morning, The Sarasota Scullers have just won one of their events, and there’s a hunger in the air for personal pizza pies and fresh basil lemonade. Bleil and Baril hail from Bucks County, Pennsylvania where they were passionate home cooks with careers in the creative field—Bleil, a food stylist, and Baril, a fine art photographer. Bleil has a culinary degree from Delaware Valley College. When she and Baril decided to escape the Pennsylvania weather, they agreed that opening a food-centric business made sense. The idea of a pizza truck was born when they shadowed a pizza truck business owner in New Jersey and knew there wasn’t a similar business operating in Sarasota. Bleil went on to take a 10-day intensive Neapolitan pizza making class taught by famous pizza chef Roberto Caporuscio of Kesté Pizza and Vino in Greenwich Village. Caporuscio teaches 300-year-old Neopolitan pizza making techniques according to the strict practices of the Association of Neapolitan Pizza Makers (APN). Armed with this newfound pizza prowess, Bleil set about perfecting her dough, taking into consideration Sarasota’s heat and humidity. Bleil also tasted over 25 different varieties of tomatoes for use in her sauce before finding organic crushed tomatoes that didn’t taste like a can. Everything at Polpo is made in-house. They have a great relationship with Geraldson’s Farm, who Bleil praises for their community involvement and ability to connect the food community. Dakin Dairy Farms provides the cream that they use to stretch their mozzarella. Bleil is full of praise for fellow members of the Sarasota food community, chief among them are Chef Darwin Santa Maria of Darwin’s on 4th and Chef Steve Phelps of Indigenous, who are themselves big fans of Polpo Pizza. Bleil is grateful for the warm welcome and spirit of camaraderie she and Baril have encountered. “I like to play nice in the sandbox,” Bleil says. “Why compete when we can collaborate?” Baril worked closely with a carpenter to make the tables and design the front of the truck using reclaimed wood from Sarasota Architectural Salvage. The wood-burning oven burns 100 percent oak, efficiently cooking pizzas in a mere 90 seconds. Polpo has a catering menu, but often they work with event planners to gear the ingredients to the crowd. The FSRA is made up of youth rowers from all over Florida, and today’s pizzas include the aforementioned Luau, Polpo’s version of a Hawaiian pizza, and Peppy Roni, for the kids. Bleil asks if I want to try a slice of her breakfast, a bacon and egg pizza. I watch, enthralled, as Baril pulls the pizza out of the oven and breaks the perfectly fried egg in its center, using a spoon to drizzle the yolk over the whole pizza. The dough is thin and crusty, the egg yolk a saucy complement to the bacon, and the tomato sauce is so good that I’m glad Bleil had the patience and passion to try 25 times to get it this right.
ARTISAN CHEESE COMPANY
Louise Converse has an exceptionally subtle British accent and friendly blue eyes. Converse and her husband Parker are the proprietors of Artisan Cheese Company, a cheese shop located on Main Street in Downtown Sarasota that looks like the library of a particularly stylish manor house, but is filled with cheese, and cheese accoutrements, instead of books. The beautiful wood shelves and hand-crafted rocking chair are courtesy of Parker, a former venture capitalist, sea captain and boat builder, who now builds bespoke rocking chairs. Converse is from England and Scotland, which explains the trace of an accent, but she’s lived in America since 1978. Converse attended Hartford Arts School before doing graduate work at Harvard University. This incredibly talented couple met in Massachusetts at a time when Parker was living in Key West. Parker convinced his love to move to Florida, but she refused, feeling that Key West was too escapist. “I wasn’t running from anything in particular,” she says with a smile. The couple lived in Sarasota from 2002 to 2008 before the recession, and an invitation from Harvard lured them back to Massachusetts, but Louise longed to return. They wanted to own a business together and so began a quest to find their niche. Louise noticed that no matter her mood—bored, sad or glad—she found a certain comfort in visiting a cheese shop. Parker pointed out that their fridge contained a problematic amount of cheese, and suddenly the answer seemed clear. Louise began to take classes at a local cheese shop in Massachusetts before enrolling in a boot camp in New York for people interested in getting into the cheese business. Louise and Parker were delighted to find their location at the end of Main Street and have transformed the space into their idea of the perfect cheese haven. Recent pop-up cheese dinners by a talented young visiting chef, as well as a series of popular cheese classes, have introduced even more people to the popular shop. Louise hugs a regular who will soon be leaving to return up North for the summer and she explains to me that she had no idea she would form such close relationships with her customers. Artisan Cheese Company has also partnered with Kelly Drost and Jackie Singleton of Brown Bag Provisions to form a kind of shop within the shop to provide a rotating weekly lunch menu of fresh creative food, which often features some of Louise and Parker’s specialty cheeses. Louise is thrilled to support local artisans like Drost and Singleton, as well as feature small-batch and micro-batch specialty items she curates in her store.
THE DONUT EXPERIMENT
Shawn and Cecilia Wampole shocked their close-knit family in Philadelphia when they quit their respective jobs in November of 2012, relocated to Anna Maria Island and opened a gourmet donut shop. Cecilia had been working as a buyer for QVC and Shawn as a police officer. “Insert joke here,” Cecilia says with a laugh; obviously, she’s heard that one before. The Wampoles met at Temple University, where Cecilia was studying mass communications and Shawn was studying journalism. The couple often spoke of owning a business together. Unbeknownst to their family at the time, Shawn and Cecilia did a lot of research and planning before uprooting their three small children to move to Florida. “It started as a joke, really,” Cecilia explains. “We vacationed on Anna Maria Island and we noticed that there was no donut shop on the island, and we said we should quit our jobs and move here to open one.” Shawn took the joke and ran with it; he did some research and then told his wife their idea was more than feasible. They met Michael Coleman and discovered that Pine Avenue had some retail space interested in featuring food establishments. Shawn and Cecilia penned a letter describing what they wanted to do and why they wanted to do it, and opened Anna Maria Donuts in December of 2012. The shop was an immediate hit, popular with locals and tourists, and at the time of press is currently listed as No. 1 out of 83 restaurants in Anna Maria Island by TripAdvisor, even besting perennial favorite Beach Bistro. The interactive shop is set up like an ice cream store. You watch the donut cook and then pick your toppings. The ingredients are sourced locally and there’s always a daily special. Toppings include such tasty treats as maple icing, sea salt and bacon. Fruity pebbles and graham crackers lend a touch of whimsy and nostalgia. Sometimes the specials are so popular they make the permanent menu, such as the Key Lime Donut and the inventive and strangely addictive Sriracha Donut. Shawn and Cecilia want to open more locations, but they realized that the name Anna Maria Donuts only worked on Anna Maria Island. Instead, they’ve decided to turn their business into a franchise and encourage like-minded entrepreneurs to take part in their dream, and thus The Donut Experiment was born. It took the Wampoles less than three years to turn a wistful joke into a serious business with the potential to become an empire. If you’re looking for a change of pace and can’t decide what your dream might be, consider joining The Donut Experiment and share the sweet smell of success with Shawn and Cecilia.
