You’d never suspect there was a bonafide pizzaiolo in the forever wild woods of the Catskill Mountains, baking homemade Neapolitan pies in a gloriously off-the-radar hideaway, all the while garnering tens of thousands of social media fans (and sharing recipes with Stephen Colbert)—but you’d be mistaken.
Meet Auggie Russo
Meet Auggie Russo, kamikaze pizza chef, who has put Ralph’s Bar & Bowling at Urban Cowboy Lodge in Big Indian, NY, at the top of many traveling foodie’s “to-do” lists. When Russo’s not behind the oven, he’s on the road. Favorite mode of transportation? Amtrak.
“For me, it’s such an obvious way to enjoy traveling,” Russo says. “The trip starts as soon as I step onto the train platform; it’s always both extremely exciting as well as extremely relaxing.” Russo says he used to routinely travel up to pizza capital New Haven, CT, from Brooklyn to bake pies for clients and restaurant pop-up events, his chef’s backpack and pizza peels at the ready. Now that he’s based in the Hudson Valley (his hub stations are Rhinecliff and Hudson), Russo is still more than content to sit back and enjoy the ride and the views after cooking for the hungry hordes who mob Ralph’s every weekend, hoping for one of his pies before he inevitably sells out every night.
“I particularly love a long train ride, not just because you can wander into the dining car and strike up a conversation with a stranger, which always turns out to be completely captivating in and of itself, but because there’s something about falling asleep as you pass through one town and waking up a few states away,” says Russo, waxing poetic at the thought of his next trip. “You can see by the way I live my life that I really love the ‘getting there’ of it all.”
Russo loves train travel so much that he’s fantasizing about a multistate trip in which he gets off every few stops to bake pizzas as he crosses the country. Hey Amtrak, are you listening? “Pies by Rail, from Auggie and Amtrak” has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
When he’s not hopping a train, Auggie Russo (IG: @tinypizzakitchen) can be found at Ralph’s (IG: @ralphsbarandbowling) in Big Indian, NY, or inside Stephen Colbert’s Does This Taste Funny cookbook on pg. 27, with his “Auggie’s Fennel-Bourbon Candied Hot Peppers” recipe.