Chef Tony Conte is serious about pizza. Each day before opening the doors at his Neapolitan pizzeria located on the edge of Darnestown, Maryland, Conte shapes 160 balls of dough with a marksman’s precision. “Two hundred sixty-five grams,” he said when asked how large each ball of dough is. He opened Inferno Pizzeria Napoletana in 2015, leaving behind the world of fine dining and his position at the Oval Room in downtown Washington, D.C. Now the 47-year-old chef serves up pies “until the dough runs out” each day. They are cooked for roughly 90 seconds in a wood burning oven that reaches 800-900 degrees. The custom-tiled oven features an image of a dragonfly, an homage to his late mother-in-law, who loved dragonflies.

Conte grew up in New Haven, Conn., and studied his craft at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. At Inferno, he says that his focus is on seasonal and local ingredients. Everything, that is, but the flour. Conte, who was a James Beard Foundation semifinalist in 2018, said that flour is the key to a good pizza dough. His comes from a small mill in a town in northern Italy. He wouldn’t specify further. “Trade secret,” he said. The menu on Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2019, included a final nod to summer ingredients: A creamed corn and cherry tomato pie, with fior di latte cheese and smoked prosciutto. (Noella Kertes/JOUR604)