Click here for Greater Long Island newsletters. Click here to download the iPhone app. Or follow Greater Long Beach on Instagram.
The dough ferments for 24 hours. The tomatoes come straight from Naples. And the mozzarella clears customs just before it hits your plate.
That’s the formula behind Via Cuma, the sourdough pizza and cucina concept that just opened its second Long Island location in Oceanside after winning a devoted following in Valley Stream — and it’s converting skeptics one bite at a time.
“We use all imported ingredients from Italy — from the flour to the salt for the dough, all the tomatoes and mozzarella,” said owner Luca Schiano Di Cola, who grew up in the Campania region near Naples in a family that has operated some 20 restaurants across the Napoli area for generations. “Growing up, cooking was in the blood.”
Schiano Di Cola came to the U.S. in 2018, lured partly by relatives already running an Italian restaurant in Roslyn. After opening a pastry shop in Astoria in 2020 and running the two operations simultaneously for a stretch, he made the call: sell the pastry shop, move to Valley Stream and pour everything into Via Cuma.
The Oceanside location followed this past April.
The name is itself a tribute — Via Cuma being one of the oldest roads near Naples, a connection to the Roman and Greek civilizations that, Schiano Di Cola argues, established the culinary traditions that eventually gave the world pizza.
The menu unapologetically leans into that heritage.
Nearly two dozen sourdough pizzas range from a classic polpettina — slow-cooked tomato sauce, special meatballs, ricotta — to the cipollina, a more complex construction featuring smoked fior di latte from Agerola, broccoli rabe velvet cream, imported preserved tuna and black pepper. Pasta options include lasagne napoletane, gnocchi alla sorrentina and a paccheri alla genovese — jumbo rigatoni in a slow-cooked beef and onion ragù, finished with shaved Parmigiano Reggiano.
“The sweetness and caramelization of that dish makes it one people love. It’s a top seller,” Schiano Di Cola said.
He keeps the menu deliberately tight. Small enough, he said, to guarantee the freshest product on every plate.
The taste brings her to tears
Prices run a bit higher than the neighborhood slice shop. A personal pizza starts around $18.
“Some people were expecting the typical slice shop,” Schiano Di Cola said. But he’s found that most doubters come around after the first bite. One woman tried his lasagna and burst into tears, he said, telling him it tasted exactly like the kind her Italian-born mother would make.
Before settling in New York, Schiano Di Cola spent time in the United Kingdom and Australia studying how Italian cuisine had evolved abroad. He said that because a New York-to-Naples flight is a fraction of the journey from Sydney, it’s far easier for U.S. restaurants to source the real thing directly from Italy.
He noted that “British Italian is ok …but it suffers from some influences from traditional British food, which is very bland,” he quips.
Australian Italian is good, he said, but they had to create their own version of Italian food, which is good, but not the most authentic due to the country’s isolation and distance from Italy.
Vito is a big fan
Among Via Cuma’s growing fan base: Long Island native Joe Gannascoli, the actor and celebrity chef best known for his role at Vito in HBO’s “The Sopranos.” It was his first time trying sourdough pizza.
“Anytime I can try something different, I’m all in,” Gannascoli said, “and I loved it — the gnocchi, the burrata salad. I’ll be going back.”
Via Cuma is open Tuesday through Sunday in Valley Stream and Oceanside. Online ordering is available at viacumaus.com.
Top: Luca Schiano Di Cola in his Via Cuma restaurant (courtesy photo)
Your Long Island news, delivered.
Subscribe to the GLI Newsletter — its free
