Orange County NC Website
<br />Napoli delivers taste of Italy in a truck <br />By Matt Goad <br />July 6, 2016 6:00 AM <br /> <br />When Gael Chatelain decided to start a Neapolitan -style pizza truck in Carrboro, complete with <br />a wood-burning oven, he figured there would be some bureaucratic hoops t o jump through. <br />That part, at least, turned out to be easier than he expected. <br />Chatelain contacted the Fire Department, which referred him to the Orange County Health <br />Department. <br />“It’s one of those things that so few people have tried that it’s not in the rule book that you <br />can’t do it,” Chatelain said. <br />He bought an old delivery truck in 2014 that would be sturdy enough to support the nearly 2- <br />ton oven and the several hundred pounds of wood the Napoli Gourmet Wood -Fired Pizza truck <br />also carries. <br />He built the 56-inch oven using a kit and then covered it in insulations and four layers of <br />mortar, and covered that with 10,000 pennies, an idea that wife Sonja got from seeing pennies <br />used as tile on Pinterest. <br />“I was looking for some way to cover the oven that wou ld be easy to clean that wouldn’t be too <br />heavy,” Gael Chatelain said. “The pennies were the cheapest, lightest, most interesting way we <br />could think of to cover it.” <br />He had to have a bank special order the pennies for him. <br />To decorate the outside of the truck, he went to a business that covered it in vinyl designed to <br />look like bricks with a background map of Naples, Italy, the home of Neapolitan pizza. <br />Chatelain found a spot to set up at a dentist office’s parking lot at 203 N. Greensboro St., just <br />south of Fitch Lumber & Hardware, and first opened on July 2, 2015. <br />For the first few weeks he manned the truck by himself, working 16-hour days. He made his <br />first hire at the end of that July and now he has seven employees and is open seven days a <br />week from 5 to 10 p.m.