Chef and Owner

Dante Cistulli

Zephyr's Street Pizza is owned by Dante and Stephanie Cistulli. The story of this place actually starts before it was theirs. Stephanie was a server at Backstage Pizza, the restaurant that previously occupied this very location on Farmington Avenue, when she and Dante first met. He was working down the street at Max's Oyster Bar. From the beginning, this little spot had a place in their story.

For years the space sat in the back of their minds. They would talk about what they would do with it someday. But the timing was never right, and life kept moving.

Dante's career took him deep into the world of wood-fired cooking when he became chef and owner of Max Restaurant Group's newest concept, Savoy Pizzeria and Craft Bar. It changed the way he thought about food and fire.

His love for pizza was not new. It started in his grandmother's kitchen when he was five years old. She would pull a dining room chair up to the counter, back facing forward, so he could reach the surface and roll pasta sheets alongside her. His first hand-stretched pizza dough in a professional kitchen came at Naples Pizza in Farmington in 2000, where he worked alongside people who would go on to become some of Connecticut's most respected pizza operators. From there his path ran through Millwrights in Simsbury, Max's Oyster Bar, and eventually Savoy, where fire became his medium.

In early 2021, the Backstage space became available again. Dante and Stephanie were in the middle of a life transition and the timing finally felt right. Their son Zephyr had just turned two. Dante had spent a lifetime obsessed with skateboarding and the culture built around it, and naming the restaurant after his son felt like the only option. The Z-Boys. The triangles. The brick walls. It all clicked.

In June 2024, Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports walked through the door and gave Zephyr's an 8.1 on the One Bite Pizza App. That score brought a new wave of guests to Farmington Avenue and confirmed what the West Hartford neighborhood had known for years. The review went national. The lines followed. Through all of it, Dante kept his head down and kept cooking, adding rotating specials, fresh semolina grinders, and new seasonal builds that keep regulars coming back every week.

Three years in, Zephyr's is not a pizza place that happened to get popular. It is a place built entirely on craft, community, and the kind of relentless consistency that only comes from someone who has been preparing for this their whole life.