Spacca Napoli

A soft center, carried uncut

The Margherita leaves the Italian wood-fired oven uncut; Jonathan Goldsmith, chef and founder at Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood, Chicago, keeps the pizza intact until the table. The decision is practical, not ceremonial. A Neapolitan pie carries a soft center, crisp edges, San Marzano tomato sauce, fior di latte, and the smoke of yeast and fire; cutting it too early asks the dough to give up what it just earned in the oven.

Goldsmith has worked this station since 2006, after a route that did not begin in restaurant school. Before Spacca Napoli, he worked as a clinical social worker, spent time as a janitor at his wife Ginny Sykes’s school in Italy, worked in real estate, and volunteered at Inspiration Café in Uptown Chicago. Italy supplied the grammar. Chicago supplied the room. His own account of the turn is direct: “It’s crazy, right? But I focused on what I could put together to try make a great pizza.”

The oven sets the method

The program is built around traditional Neapolitan pizza and the heat of a wood-fired oven imported from Italy. That oven is not background equipment here; it is the working instrument. The crust should come out golden and honey-colored, with lift at the edge, a giving center, and the faint bitterness that wood smoke can leave when the dough has fermented well and moved quickly through the fire.

The menu stays close to that discipline. Margherita gives the bench its measure: tomato, milk, dough, heat, salt. Diavola brings chile and cured meat into the same frame. The pistachio pizza turns toward cream and richness without leaving the soft, foldable structure that marks the house style. Pizza con pulpo sits among the signatures, and the current collaborative Pizza alla Nerano uses zucchini cream, mozzarella di Agerola, provolone del Monaco, fried zucchini, fresh basil, and EVOO, with part of its proceeds supporting Lurie Children’s Hospital.

In 2025, Spacca Napoli won Best Pizza in Chicago at the Jean Banchet Awards. The award belongs to this pizzeria, and to the long repetition of dough, fire, and service that made it legible to the city.

Yellow walls, mosaic fire

The room holds the work close. Warm light comes from the open mosaic-tiled wood-burning oven, and the yellow walls keep the place from feeling hushed. It is small, rustic, and conversational, with the counter and the pass close enough that the making remains part of the meal rather than something hidden behind a door.

Ginny Sykes’s presence runs through the house in artwork and in the sustaining partnership behind the business. The atmosphere is welcoming without losing the discipline of the bench. A pizza lands whole, the center still soft, the edge carrying smoke, and the table has to finish the gesture that Goldsmith began at the oven. If the next movement here is not a new dining room or a public handoff, it is the daily return to Margherita, Diavola, and the pistachio pizza at Spacca Napoli.