Joe Carlucci’s first pizza looked like a football. Today, he makes some of the best pizza in America.
At Valentina’s Pizzeria & Wine Bar in Madison, Alabama, a man who spent decades mastering pizza has created something much bigger. Excellence extends beyond the pizza. It is in the food, certainly, but also in the wine poured beside it, the dessert that follows, the ambience of the dining room, and the people who make your dining experience feel effortless. In 2026, 50 Top Pizza, the prestigious organization headquartered in Naples, Italy, ranked Valentina’s No. 12 in the United States, an honor that evaluates not simply the pizza, but the restaurant around it.
For Carlucci, that distinction matters. Because long before he learned how to build one of America’s best pizzerias, he had to learn how to make a circle.
Raised in the Bronx, Carlucci was only fifteen when he picked up his first ball of dough at the neighborhood pizzeria where his mother and sister also worked. He had spent hours watching the pizzaiolos behind the counter, mesmerized by the ease of it all. Their hands seemed to know what to do without being told: stretching, turning, tossing with muscle memory. Perfect circles emerged one after another. Then Joe tried it himself. The dough resisted. The circle became an oval, the oval became something else entirely, and somewhere along the way, he learned the first lesson of a craft that would consume much of his life: the people who make difficult things look easy have usually spent years dedicated to getting better.
So he got better.
His talent eventually carried him onto national television and across oceans with the U.S. Pizza Team. But as his ambition grew, so did the belief that he could outrun almost anything. All the while, Carlucci was drowning beneath mounting debt even as his name traveled the nation. Eventually, the applause stopped mattering, and he was forced to stand by as marshals padlocked the doors on his dreams.
There would be other careers, other restaurants and more painful lessons. Somewhere along the way, Carlucci stopped measuring progress by how far and fast he could run. He wanted to live and create with purpose. Then Joe learned he was going to be a father.
Suddenly, purpose had a name.
Valentina.
Life did not suddenly become easier. In Slicing Through Adversity, Carlucci writes of depression, exhaustion and selling furniture that held their memories as they started over. Still, in 2020, he tried once more. The space was a commissary, the budget was tight, and the dining room held only forty people. When the doors opened on October 9, the tables sat six feet apart. If this restaurant failed, Joe had decided, he was finished.
After a lifetime of chasing bigger, Carlucci began again with something small. This time, he put someone else’s name on the door: Valentina’s.
These days, forty seats wouldn’t come close.
Valentina’s has grown from that little pandemic-era pizzeria into a restaurant worthy of lingering in. It’s the kind of place where pizza may be the reason you arrive, but it need not be the reason you stay.
Start, though, with the dough. The flour comes from Italy, and what happens next cannot be hurried. Valentina’s dough ferments for 96 hours, developing the tiny pockets of air that give the finished crust its characteristic micro-bubbles. It is the kind of detail most diners will never know, and exactly the kind Carlucci has spent a career obsessing over.
The Godfather and classic Margherita are both award winners, alongside a pizza bearing Carlucci’s own name. For an insider’s order, though, Mason, one of Valentina’s employees, builds his own: mozzarella, extra garlic butter, meatballs, ricotta, hot honey, basil and extra cheese. Add a Devil’s Margarita with its float of red wine, then finish with the triple chocolate mousse cake.
Fittingly, some of the best recommendations at Valentina’s come from the people Carlucci now considers its greatest investment. In 2024 alone, the staff grew from roughly ten people to fifty. Carlucci’s philosophy today is almost an inversion of the young man who once believed he could outrun anything: find great people, trust them, get pride and ego out of the way, and let them be great.
“There’s no such thing as a bad employee or a bad kid,” he says. “It’s always a culture issue.”
Perhaps that is why, for all his individual world titles, Carlucci speaks differently about Valentina’s national recognition. “The award had almost nothing to do with me, and everything to do with our people.”
It is a transformation Carlucci’s friend and North Alabama Pepsi CEO Brian Davidson has watched, too. Beyond Carlucci’s passion for his craft, business and family, Davidson points to the causes and people he has quietly supported along the way. “The more complete story,” Davidson says, “is that he is someone who has tried to make his success mean something beyond himself.”
Now, Carlucci is looking toward what comes next. He is preparing to open a reservation-only concept rooted in a traditional Tuscan kitchen. Beyond pizza, the menu will explore Italian staples and more ambitious reinterpretations in an intimate dining room framed by limewashed walls. This time, the goal is not another pizza title.
Carlucci wants to build the kind of hospitality worthy of a James Beard Award.
It is an audacious ambition. Then again, nearly everything after that first football-shaped pizza has been. When the next goal feels impossibly far away, Carlucci tells his team to go outside and look up.
“See the clouds?” he asks. “We’re never going to reach them, but we’re always going to try.”
Perhaps excellence was never about reaching them. Perhaps it was always about looking up.