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Scott Ugell & Tom Doran, Owner of Valley Pizza, Napoli’s, Open Mangia Pizza In New City’s Growing Downtown Center
By Tina Traster
This is going to sound like a scene ripped from The Andy Griffith Show but with a New York twist.
Tom Doran, a descendant of restaurant royalty and Italian heritage, went to a New City deli. He was 13 years old and forgot to bring money for the mozzarella he’d come to buy. Instead, he was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: “hey, kid, come help us grate some mozzarella” in exchange for a ball to take home. That morphed into a gig breading eggplant, making fresh mozzarella, learning the art of the meatball.
Doran discovered the kitchen wasn’t a job; it was a calling. Now, at 50, Doran has opened his third restaurant, along with partner Scott Ugell, the retired judge and cannabis entrepreneur. How the two merged their interests (Doran is the majority owner in the venture) is a story about perseverance, real estate, and opportunity.
Mangia Pizza has leased the long-shuttered location at 68 North Main Street in New City in the ShopRite shopping center — the former site of Victor’s Pizza. The pizzeria struggled through the COVID pandemic, eventually going out of business. Ugell, who works in real estate, tried for ages to contact the shopping center’s landlord to find out about the space. That proved a black hole until one day he was at a real estate conference and met the owners.
Ugell envisioned opening a pizza establishment but he needed a culinary partner.
Enter Doran, whose teen-years bootcamp training in kitchens led to a degree from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY. After graduating at age 20, Doran lived the peripatetic life of a learning chef. Four days after graduation, he became a sous chef at Little Palm Island in the Florida Keys, where he learned about cooking and cavorting with celebrities and billionaires. I asked him to namedrop. He mentioned Michael Keaton running through the kitchen with seaweed on his head distributing $100 bills, and meeting Drew Barrymore.
“I didn’t grow up in a fancy world like that,” he said. “We cooked, we did pizza takeout.”
Next stops included working for Larry Forgione, the head of the James Beard Foundation, American Place, Danielle, the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck. At 23, he bought a Rockland County pizza restaurant, with money borrowed from his father. “He gave me a year to pay it back; I paid him back in six months.” This stint didn’t last too long; he was bought out by a partner. And life (a woman who became his wife) took him to New Castle, England, where he worked at a five-star Michelin restaurant for seven years.
After leaving Britain, Doran returned to Rockland County where he worked for a year as a sous chef until the restaurant closed.
“I didn’t know how to manage money,” he said. “I took a break from the food business and joined my father’s paint company. Over the next 12 years, Doran said he learned discipline in business. He learned how businesses operate at a large scale. He said the experience prepared him to buy his first restaurant, then his second, and now his third.
COVID changed everything. At 42, Doran was hungering for the restaurant business. He’d remember how he’d cook in the kitchen with his grandmother. “I was taller than my grandmother. She’d often have to stand on a stool to mix the sauce in a pot. So when I was taller than her, she’d ask me to stir the pot.”
COVID gave Doran the gift of time – as it did for many. And the space to think.
“I wanted out of my Dad’s business. I was watching all these takeout places killing it.
In 2021, Doran bought Valley Pizza in Valley Cottage from a retiring owner. It was seamless, though Doran said, “I hadn’t made pizza in 23 years, so I went back into the kitchen.” A year later, he bought Napoli’s Pizza & Catering on Germonds Road in New City.
Doran and Ugell have signed a 20-year-lease for the space where Mangia opened this past weekend. The 56-seat restaurant, with an emphasis on square pizza, will be a more complex operation than Valley Pizza and Napoli’s, which are known for takeout and catering.
Both entrepreneurs see New City as a bastion of opportunity, given two significant proposals for multi-family housing developments along Main Street. These proposals, centered around the DeCicco’s Shopping Center and the ShopRite Retail Center, will add hundreds of units. Doran said ShopRite’s remodeling and creation of a food court, an outdoor picnic area, and gazebo, added to the draw of opening Mangia.
Preparing to juggle three restaurants, Doran reaches back to lessons learned at CIA, which he describes as quasi-military. “We got up at 5 am, shoes polished, whites pressed, neckerchief perfectly tied, sideburns not half of the length of your ear, moustache a quarter inch above the side of the lip. It was all written. A phrase I learned is mise en place, French for to put in place.”
Now Doran knows how to build a team, hire the right people, choose vendors, take advantage of centralized buying power because he’s running three restaurants. “It’s about a pecking order; not a free-for-all.”
Ultimately though it’s about the food, and pizza’s iconic place in the American heart and stomach.
As Ugell said, “I am originally from the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. Pizza is not a food; it’s a part of life.”
He quips, “I would not serve anything less than the best, otherwise my friends from Bensonhurst will be looking for me!”
Doran agrees: “Pizza brings people to the table. It’s greasy and messy and you have to eat it with your hands (that’s statutory law in New York, ask Ugell). People have to put down their cell phone when they gather around the table. Pizza brings you back to sharing and gathering. That’s something that’s missing today.”
