Nina + Rafi

Atlanta’s most popular pizza maker grew up spending summers on the central Jersey shore with his grandma. To make money, he worked at his Uncle David’s pizzeria in Red Bank, New Jersey, a place called Franciosi’s, where he rolled out his first pie around the age of 12 or 13. His name is Anthony Spina, and he’s the inventor of O4W Pizza’s famous Grandma Pie, topped with red sauce, house-made mozzarella, salty pecorino, a scattering of basil and not much else, and baked in a heavy square pan that transforms the crust into a heavenly crackle.If you’ve followed the story, you know the city got hooked on the masterful Grandma Pie virtually the second Spina started hawking it at a counter-service joint beside the Beltline’s Eastside Trail at Irwin Street. This was 2015. A year and a half later, dude had the audacity to move his operation to Duluth. Only recently did he return to his old hood in the Old Fourth Ward, with a spiffy new spot called Nina & Rafi, bankrolled by restaurateur Billy Streck and designed by Smith Hanes Studio. (The name pays tribute to Streck’s 91-year-old Sicilian-American grandmother, Nina, and Spina’s No. 1 culinary influence, his late great-grandmother, Rafi.)