Back in Vienna that summer, the e-commerce job felt different. It had always been a little hollow but now it felt actively wrong — like wearing shoes that had fit perfectly once and then, gradually, hadn't.
I was still going in every day. Still managing the orders, the suppliers, the Excel sheets. The textile company was ticking along without catching fire. I was earning well enough for a decent life, for some trips, for restaurants. There was nothing obviously broken.
But I kept thinking about Ayala's food truck. About what I could bring to it. And one evening through a mutual friend I ended up at a dinner where someone made me a pizza that stopped me mid-bite.
His name was Emilio. And he had potatoes on top of it.
In Italy, that's not just unusual. It's a provocation. But it was extraordinary — light, airy, a fluffy crust and a crisp thin base, nothing too heavy or too salty. You could watch him stretch the dough and lay the ingredients down, and it was obvious he understood exactly what he was doing. The fact that he was doing it at home, in a regular kitchen, made it more impressive, not less.
I asked him to teach me. He sent me a list of YouTube videos. "Try it in your oven," he said. "See what happens."
So I did. The first four or five doughs were completely unusable — sticky, collapsing, nothing like what I'd seen him produce. But something was different this time. I didn't stop. I went back to the flour the next week and the week after that, and slowly the failures started to teach me things that the videos couldn't.
I didn't know it yet, but Emilio would become one of my closest friends. We'd end up talking regularly about dough hydration and different styles and what makes a crust actually work. He'd introduce me to a private pizza makers' association in Vienna where we're both members now. He wasn't just showing me a technique — he was handing me something I hadn't known I was looking for.