The Man

Luciano “Lucky” Sibilla

Founder, Maestro & Oste

Born in San Giorgio Ionico, a town in Puglia about fifteen miles from Taranto, in the part of Italy the puccia comes from.

I left to travel Europe, playing music and cooking in restaurants along the way. I came to Austin in 2007 meaning to stay a while, and I stayed.

In 2010 I started making puccias out of a trailer downtown, outside the Tiniest Bar in Texas on West Fifth, baked to order in a wood-fired oven. Nobody in the city was making the bread. Nobody knew the word.

The trailer built a following on word of mouth and drew national press and television. In 2015 Zagat named it one of the best sandwiches in the country, which put us on the map in a way nothing else had, and that same year we became a brick-and-mortar on West Fifth where I added pizza. Hiring, training, inventory, vendors, all of it.

The last years were hard on small restaurants in Austin, and in 2019 I had to close.

The years after took me into other people's kitchens at a scale I had never worked at: Juliet Italian Kitchen, East Side Pies, then DeSano Pizzeria Napoletana, then Ciccio Bomba. Just under a decade of craft, and finally the systems to go with it.

Now I am back at my own oven, under my own name, on Electric Drive.

What I do best is great spontaneous hospitality. The bread is the reason people come, but what happens at the window is the reason they come back. Lucky

What is a puccia? POO–CHA

The puccia comes from Salento, the olive-growing country at the southern tip of Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot. Bakers there pulled a handful of dough from the weekly bread and fired it into a small round loaf. Harvesters carried them into the groves and filled them at midday with whatever was on hand. It has been peasant food, and perfect food, for centuries.

Nothing about it has changed. The dough is stretched by hand and slid onto the floor of a 600-degree wood-fired oven, where it goes in pale and comes out charred, blistered, and hollow. Then it is split open and filled.

Most bread is baked in the morning and waits for you. A puccia does not wait. It goes into the fire when you order it, and that is the whole difference.

Farm to fire

Farm to fire is the shortest line we can draw between where something was grown and the oven it ends up in. Where we can buy local, we buy local. Where organic is available and genuinely better, we buy organic. Where the real thing only comes from Italy, the meats and most of the cheeses, we import it rather than substitute something nearer.

Our produce is sourced locally where the season and the supplier allow. Our sauces and spreads are made in house. The dough is mixed and stretched by hand here, not delivered frozen. That is the whole of it: buy the best version of each thing, from as close as we can get it, and do not pad the middle of a sandwich with something that has not earned its place.

This is a buying preference, not a certification. We are not an organic kitchen and we do not claim to be one. If you want to know what came in this week, ask Lucky. He will tell you.

Our mission is to make the world fall in love with the puccia.

Away from the oven

Native Italian, fluent in English and Spanish, conversational French, and he understands German and Flemish. WSET Level 1 in Wines. He still plays music. He keeps a garden and grows bonsai, which teaches the same patience the bread does, and he travels when he can with his partner Brittney and their daughter Sophia.

And he still thinks the bread is the whole point. If you have a minute, he will tell you the difference between a puccia and everything else people mistake it for.