From Rome to Singapore: The 30-year road to Daniele’s Pizza

At Daniele’s Pizza, a pizza takes about two and a half minutes to bake, from start to finish. The raw dough goes in, and a puffed and blistered crust comes out. 

It’s a deceptively simple process, but before those two and a half minutes start, the dough will have already fermented for 24 to 36 hours. And the hands shaping them have spent 30 years perfecting that craft across kitchens in Rome, New York and London, before settling in Singapore. 

Those hands belong to Daniele Colaiacomo, 50, the owner and head pizzaiolo of Daniele’s Pizza. The pizzeria is quietly tucked away at Plaza 8 in Changi Business Park, a small commercial development frequented primarily by office workers, but has a cult following amongst those living in the east.

It is Daniele’s three-decade-long experience that allows him to move swiftly at his workbench, shaping the focaccia, panuozzi and pizza bases with precision and ease. He turns the dough in the oven to ensure the crust browns evenly on every side, watching until it puffs up into something golden and blistered. 

“A lot of people think that this is an easy job. Just open and stretch a pizza, make a dough, and that’s it,” he said. “But it’s all together. If you want to make great pizza, you have to know how to manage the dough. You must use the right tools. You must use the best ingredients. You must cook or bake the pizza well. If one of these things is missing, you don’t get the same results.” 

That instinct wasn’t built overnight — it all goes back to a pizzeria in Rome run by Daniele’s brother.

From his brother’s pizzeria to the world 

Growing up, food was a big part of Daniele’s life. 

“I know everything about Italian food, especially because Italians, we grew up watching our mothers and our grandmothers cooking. It’s natural to know about food, but to make it into a profession, you have to add that kick,” he said. “For me, it’s passion and knowledge. Combined, they are unstoppable.”

Those days ignited a curiosity in him that led him to join his brother’s pizzeria in Rome in the late 1990s, at just 22. 

At the start, his knowledge of the craft was thin. Once the internet became widely accessible, he picked up more information and combined it with what he was learning on the job. He studied what was happening beneath the surface — fermentation, hydration, flour strength — the science behind the dough, rather than just the steps needed to get to the finished product. 

After a decade in Rome, curiosity pulled him further afield. The years that followed took him abroad and back more than once before an opportunity eventually brought him to Singapore.

A love story well-proofed

It was in Singapore that Daniele met his now-wife, Esther Tan, 37, while working at East Coast stalwart Al Forno — Daniele was in the kitchens as a pizza chef, while Esther worked front-of-house part-time. 

Though he moved back to Rome after this stint, they reconnected years later when Daniele returned to Singapore and eventually married in 2016. 

“It was meant to be, for me,” he says. “It was destiny that I had to stay here and have a family, settle down here in Singapore, and open Daniele’s Pizza.” 

Esther’s family has become part of the business, too. Her father is a regular presence at the restaurant, dropping by often to help on the floor. 

“He loves to come. If it was up to him, he would come every day. He feels alive when he comes over here, and he is very helpful,” adds Daniele.

While Esther has her own full-time job in logistics, she supports Daniele by assisting with back-end issues such as liaising with contractors and handling administrative tasks. 

That same sense of family shapes the restaurant itself. Walk into Daniele’s Pizza, and you won’t find candlelit tables or hushed fine-dining service — it’s a homely, family-friendly space, closer in spirit to a neighbourhood trattoria where food and family are never separate things.

Bringing Italian tradition to Singapore

Despite decades of cooking in cities far from home, Daniele has never strayed far from his home traditions. 

“I stick to my idea of Italian pizzas,” says Daniele. He has found that diners in Singapore appreciate it when chefs hold onto tradition rather than chase trends, and they’re always happy with his suggestions.

You will still find the slightly controversial Hawaiian pizza (from S$17 for 10-inch) available on the menu. 

However, Daniele recommends the classics such as the tomato-based parma pizza or the Bologna (from S$17 for 10-inch) — an Italian classic featuring mortadella, pistachios and burrata on a mozzarella cheese base. Do note that the smaller 10-inch pizzas are only available during weekday lunches. 

To bring those traditional flavours he envisions to life, Daniele incurs additional costs to import the best ingredients: Cold cuts, olive oil, tomatoes and more are all imported. 

Even the flour is far more technical than it appears. Daniele uses a specific Infibra flour from Denti Molino, a family-run Italian milling company founded in 1955.

“They will remove the wheatgerm from the wheat, toast all the germ, and then insert it again into the flour,” Daniele explains, adding that this process is what gives the dough more character, flavour, and nutrients than standard flour would. As a brand ambassador for Denti Molino, he has visited the mill and seen the process firsthand.

“When they were toasting it… the nutty flavour really went all over and I could smell it everywhere. It was unbelievable. All this flavour and aroma, you will find it in your bite.” he says.

For the average person, Singapore’s heat and humidity complicate the pursuit of consistency. The temperature can affect how the dough behaves, and a skilled chef needs to read it by feel rather than rely on a fixed formula, adjusting fermentation time as needed.

And the dough is a huge part of the menu at Daniele’s Pizza. It’s served as a focaccia to accompany dishes such as the ricotta cheese dip (S$18) and zuppa di cozze (sauteed mussels in white wine sauce, S$22), and has the perfect texture. The mussels, in particular, are flown in from Italy three times a week, so they arrive at the table as fresh as possible.

The dough is cooked in a large pizza oven imported specially from Valoriani, a family-run Italian furnace maker with a history dating back to the 1890s. 

It’s the centrepiece of the restaurant’s semi-open kitchen, responsible for the lesser-known panuozzi (a type of Italian sandwich made with pizza bread, S$22) as well as its pizzas: pizza rosse (from S$13 for a 10-inch), which is tomato based, and pizza bianche (from S$17 for a 10-inch), which relies on mozzarella instead. 

Despite its resemblance to a classic wood-fired oven, it’s actually powered by gas. This was a deliberate choice made by Daniele.

Daniele explains that a pizza spends a maximum of two and a half minutes in the oven — not nearly long enough for the wood’s aroma to make a real difference. Most restaurants today have moved to gas ovens, which produce more consistent results and let diners get their food faster.

True enough, the crust at Daniele’s Pizza remained light and springy well after it had left the oven, despite the extra time needed for photos.

While the restaurant is best known for its pizzas, Daniele is quick to point out that the pastas are just as good. As a Roman, he points to the carbonara (S$26), a Roman speciality. It is made the traditional way with egg yolks, pecorino cheese and guanciale (cured pork cheek) — not pancetta or bacon, as Daniele emphasises. 

Dessert follows the same script. Every option is made in-house — from the freshly churned premium Italian gelato (from S$5.50 for a single scoop), and tiramisu (S$12), to the panna cotta (S$10), made with real vanilla pods for a delicious scent and flavour.

Looking ahead

Family, tradition, and three decades of precision have carried Daniele from his first outlet at The British Club to a cloud kitchen in Tampines, and now to his own space in Plaza 8. 

Getting there wasn’t easy. During the cloud kitchen phase, high third-party costs ate into margins — the inaccessible location meant Daniele’s Pizza had to rely almost entirely on delivery platforms, and the business was running at a loss.

Rather than scale back, Daniele changed course, instead opening at Plaza 8 in 2022, where higher foot traffic from nearby office workers offered a way forward.

“I love what I do, and there’s no bigger satisfaction for me than to be in restaurants,” he says. “As a restaurant owner, our mission is to make people come back again. And when I see people doing that, I can’t ask for much more than this.”

That satisfaction hasn’t dulled his ambition, though. Nearly 30 years in, Daniele remains forward-looking.

“I’m very happy, but my mentality is always to keep an eye on the future,” he said. “There are other things that I want to try to achieve and expand in my field. So I don’t see myself as having achieved everything I wanted yet.”

That next chapter looks like a bakery. Daniele hopes to expand beyond pizza and pasta into Italian pastries that are hard to come by in Singapore — cornetti (Italian version of a croissant), Italian breads, focaccias, and biscuits — and is eyeing a bigger space to bring the idea to life.

Whatever comes next, one thing’s unlikely to change: the good things are worth the long wait.

Hungry for more eats? Check out the latest smokehouse in Bukit Timah by Decker Barbecue, or our top picks in Changi City Point.