Oven Man Moves From Space To Stone Age

Inside an old Shelton Avenue factory, E. Carlton Harris Jr. used to manufacture electronic circuits. Now he’s making and selling pizza ovens — and riding a mobile-food wave.

To bring his Newhallville business, EleMar New England, to that point, Harris, who goes by Carl, has been from New Haven to China to Italy to Brazil and back again. And he has changed with the times to stay in business.

In the EleMar showroom the other day, he smiled as he watched his son Patrick slide a pizza into a brick oven, which was already hot, ready to cook. Carl was asked how long he’d been on Shelton Avenue.

“I just got here!” he said — meaning he’d walked into the office only five minutes earlier.

But Harris has actually owned the property that now houses EleMar, which deals in marble and granite from around the world, and Tuscany Fire, which deals in brick ovens, since 1985. Except in 1985, Harris didn’t work with stone or brick ovens.

He was in the electronic printed circuit business back then; the company was called Elmatco. Science Park was just getting off the ground nearby. And ​“you couldn’t beat the price” for the 48,000-square-foot facility, Harris said. He bought it for ​“buttons,” though at the time, ​“it was a stretch to afford it.”

He had a good run in electronic circuits. At Elmatco’s peak, Harris said, he had close to 75 employees and was manufacturing and distributing circuits across the Americas and Europe.

But at the end of the 1990s, the circuit business moved to China and Korea. Harris contemplated moving to China, too, even taking a few exploratory trips there. But ​“China just wasn’t in it for me,” Harris said.

The circuit business was over. And he still had his facility. ​“So I said, ​‘Now what?” Harris recalled. His Shelton Avenue location, far from the highway, meant that he couldn’t count on foot or car traffic to drive whatever business he went into next.

He thought about becoming a steel distributor but ​“couldn’t get passionate about it,” Harris said. ​“You have to be passionate about what you do.”

So he hit on an idea: ​“I decided we would go from the space age to the stone age.”

Democratizing Stone

At the beginning of the 2000s, natural stone, marble, and granite as household materials were ​“really for the rich and famous,” Harris said. He knew something about it from his travels in the circuit business, and already knew the ropes of running a business that dealt with import, export, and distribution. High-end stone could be a good niche to fall into.

“That’s where margins are made,” Harris said, ​“doing something unique and interesting.”

So he reconfigured his facility. He visited quarries in Brazil and Italy and collected unique lots of marble, granite, and other stone. (“If I’m going to be a player, I’ve got to have stuff that everyone else doesn’t have,” he recalled thinking.)

Then he got in his truck and drove around to businesses near and far, from New England Stone in Milford to companies in Boston, an area he knew well from his Elmatco days. ​“The financing was all done by the quarry owners,” Harris said.

It was up to him to make a market for unusual stone in North America. He opened for business in 2001 and he’s been open since, selling exotic materials from ​“boutique quarries,” Harris said. ​“That’s what people come here for.”

What got Harris into brick ovens?

He patted his stomach. ​“My belly,” he said.

Harris always loved cooking. In his backyard in Guilford, he already had a grill, a smoker, and a sauté station. He wanted a brick oven. On trips to Italy while visiting quarries, he stopped by factories that made brick ovens and found one, Di Fiore, he particularly liked. He asked some friends if they’d be interested in buying brick ovens too, and they said they would be. So in 2001 he ordered 10.

“About six months later, the ovens come in, and I’m all excited,” Harris said. ​“I’m like a little kid.” But one by one, his friends backed out. He had nine ovens on his lot. ​“So Carl’s in the oven business,” Harris said, laughing.

He called that part of his business Tuscany Fire.

A Mobile Moment

It turned out to be a stroke of luck. For whatever reason, starting in 2001, having more elaborate home kitchens was becoming a trend. Between the stone trade and the brick ovens, ​“we were well positioned,” Harris said. ​“We were like a blind squirrel finding a nut.”

EleMar and Tuscany Fire now employ 20 people. Since 2001, Harris estimated, he has sold 600 or 700 ovens all over North America. They have ended up in homes and backyards, in restaurants (including the award-winning Shaya in New Orleans). And many have ended up on wheels.

The mobile food business ​“just fell in our lap,” Harris said.

Builders called asking if he’d ever installed a brick oven on a trailer. After his first project, he had. A builder in Cleveland wanted to know if he could install a brick oven in an old fire engine. Harris helped him make it happen.

Another builder called from Rhode Island. ​“I hear you put pizza ovens on vehicles,” Harris recalled him saying. Harris said he did. A little while later the customer showed up on Shelton Avenue with an old trolley he’d bought in South Carolina. ​“Can you get that in here while I wait for it?” Harris explained it would take a little time. The customer understood. Weeks later, Tuscany Fire finished installing the oven, and the customer drove off with it. He spends the summer at the beach in Misquamicut. ​“He’s now in Key West,” Harris said.

Harris learned how to make sure the ovens conformed with state and local health regulations across the country and developed four different models of trailers to work within them. Today about 20 percent of the mobile oven business Tuscany Fire does is in trailers built on site. One of them was bound for oil fields in South Dakota, where the trick was to make sure that oven and plumbing for the accompanying kitchen would still work, and safely, when temperatures plummeted to 30 below zero.

“We basically don’t say no,” Harris said. ​“There’s always a way.” There are costs and conditions, too, of course. ​“But it’s always easier when you say yes.”

A Home On State

Tuscany Fire has also installed plenty of ovens closer than South Dakota. There’s one in Brunello, in Branford. Naples and Bufalina in Guilford each have one. So does Fire Engine Pizza Company in Bridgeport. P&M Orange Street Market has one mounted on a trailer. And there’s one in Da Legna on State Street, installed in 2012 and still going strong.

Shortly after Da Legna opened, owner Danny Parillo found himself snowed in with two other employees. They’d stayed at work too late, and found the roads closed. So they stayed at the restaurant — as it turned out, for three days. “We were the only place open the day after the blizzard,” Parillo said. With a skeleton crew of three, Parillo did everything from making pizza to boxing it. With no waitstaff, Parillo would just put order tickets on boxes and let the customers sort it out.

“It became a huge hangout for the neighborhood” during the storm, Parillo said. Customers “were serving themselves. They did dishes.”

At the center of Da Legna’s kitchen is a mammoth brick oven installed by Tuscany Fire. Parillo learned about Harris’s company after doing research and finding companies that were selling “something mass produced,” which he didn’t want. By installing an oven with Harris, Parillo said, “we could create it the way we wanted it.”

The first time they fired up the oven, it “was like getting into a sports car,” Parillo said. First they just cooked dough, in part to absorb any grit that was still in the oven from construction, and in part to essentially cure the oven. “The oils” from the dough, Parillo said, “all bleed through to the stone.”

The first food they made was a simple cheese pie. How was it?

“It was good,” said chef Andrew Aruny. “It was fast.” He had learned to make pizzas in gas ovens and was used to pies taking eight to ten minutes to cook.

“This oven went like this,” Aruny said, and snapped his fingers.

Parillo grew up in New Haven, but the oven in Da Legna — the one Parillo had in mind — is in essence like the oven on Parillo’s grandparents’ farm in Italy, which he visited as a child. He guessed that maybe 10 people worked that farm, and over time “became part of your family,” he said. His grandparents used to feed their employees every day.

“That’s what I wanted to do the concept,” Parillo said, meaning the brick oven. “It brings me back. Makes me feel like a kid again.”

The brick oven also brought Da Legna back in a larger sense — that is, back to the beginning of cooking, before electricity, before gas, when fire was the only way to do it. Parillo’s ideas about how to cook the food extend to where he gets his ingredients, both meat and vegetable, from small farms and flour mills around the Northeast, creating a web of regional entrepreneurs who also care a lot about the food they produce. Even the wood that fires the oven

“I have a 9 year-old boy and we’re trying to be on the right path to eating properly,” Parillo said. “As I’m teaching him, I’m learning myself. I would feel bad doing it any other way.”

Running a restaurant like that is hard, Parillo said —  in some ways, harder than it needs to be. But in words that echoed Harris in explaining why he went into stone and brick ovens instead of steel, Parillo said, “Your heart’s there to do it the right way. It keeps me up late at night.”