Moreno Vaiano

My dessert needs to be PERFECT so I decided to wait for the cheese to be produced. We would like to let you know that we make cheese every Wednesday.

This decision shaped everything that followed. Not the departure itself—plenty of Italian families moved to Southeast Asia in the 1990s, opening restaurants, trading on European craft and memory. What shaped Moreno’s story was the fact that his family, once in Phuket, did not become restaurateurs living off Italian nostalgia. They became Italian producers living in Thailand.

By 1998, the Vaiano family had begun building a dairy in Kathu, a suburb of Phuket. La Saporita Cheese Factory was not an investment in a supply chain. It was an assertion: we will not accept Thai mozzarella when we know what Salerno mozzarella tastes like. We will not compromise because we are far from home. They made their own.

This was the conviction that would define Moreno’s later choice to launch his own pizzeria, thirteen years into his family’s Phuket tenure.

The second-generation puzzler #

Moreno was born into a family business—his parents had already proven they could transplant Italian food culture into a foreign market and make it work. He grew up watching them negotiate between two food systems: the precision they carried from Campania, and the constraints and opportunities of Phuket’s market, tourists, and supply chains. He learned the dairy business first. He learned that controlling inputs was not optional—it was how you kept your standards when everyone around you was happy with shortcuts.

The La Saporita Cheese Factory became his real education. Not the theory of pizza, but the discipline behind it. Making mozzarella is not romantic. It is chemistry and timing and water temperature and knowing the difference between a product that is good and a product that is dishonest. It is caring enough about three-gram decisions when the customer will never know the difference. His parents had built the dairy in Kathu because they understood something fundamental: you cannot make great food with average ingredients, and you cannot control ingredients unless you control production.

Working in the dairy as a teenager and young man, Moreno internalized this conviction. He saw every day how much harder it was to maintain standards than to surrender them. He saw tourists who would never know the difference between Salerno mozzarella and whatever the local supplier was offering. He saw that Thai customers were often happy with approximation. And he saw his parents choose precision anyway.

This was not about economics. It was not the most profitable choice. It was about refusing to become one of the restaurants that had come to Thailand, made money off nostalgia for a week, and disappeared. His family had decided to stay. And if you stay, you have to be honest about what you are making. The dairy was honesty made operational.

The puzzler for a second-generation founder is always the same: Do I inherit the family enterprise wholesale, or do I stake my own vision? For Moreno, the inheritance was already substantial. The family ran successful restaurants. They had built a dairy. They had proven their model. They had survived Thailand’s economic crises and the social upheavals that had shaken Phuket’s tourism economy. The sensible choice would have been to deepen it—to become the operational anchor of the family’s pizza operations, to manage more locations within the existing structure, to enjoy the stability that his parents’ hard work had purchased.

Instead, in 2011, Moreno launched Pizzeria Da Moreno as his own concept.

This was not a rebellion. It was a precision. Moreno was not rejecting his family’s work. He was saying: I have seen what you built. I know the standards you have set with the dairy. I know what it costs to maintain those standards when everyone around you is willing to compromise. I know that you stayed open during the riots and the flooding, that you chose staying over safety. I want to take those standards—your standards—and make them mine, in a place I own, with my own vision of what a pizzeria should be.

The choice to launch Pizzeria Da Moreno required his family’s dairy. It required their market knowledge. It required the suppliers they had cultivated over fifteen years in Phuket. It required the lessons learned in every crisis the family had survived. But it was his name on the sign. That matters. That changes everything.

The wood and the will #

A pizzeria in Phuket is not a straightforward business. The market is dense with Italian-themed restaurants. Tourists arrive with expectations formed in Rome or Naples. Thai locals have their own food habits. Import costs are punishing. Staff turnover is the default. Equipment breaks and parts are hard to source.

Moreno’s answer was not to compete on price or novelty. It was to become more rigorous about the fundamentals than anyone else in the city.

He sourced wood-fired ovens built to Neapolitan specifications. He sourced flour from mills he trusted—not the closest, not the cheapest, but the ones whose dough he understood. He used the family dairy to ensure the mozzarella. Every ingredient was an argument against compromise: this is the standard I learned in Salerno, and I will not ease it because I am in Thailand.

This is harder than it sounds. Every shortcut has a rational argument. The local flour is cheaper and more available. A commercial dairy supplier is easier than managing your family business. A faster, hotter oven would get pizzas out faster during rushes. These are not stupid ideas. They are just capitulations, and Moreno has spent his career refusing them.

His Thai wife, Yim, became his co-leader—front-of-house and business partner, managing the staff and the customer side while Moreno stewarded the kitchen and the supply chain. This partnership was crucial. Moreno could stay rooted in his craft standards because Yim could move between two cultures and two food systems with fluency. She spoke Thai. She understood what Thai customers expected from Phuket restaurants. She could translate between Moreno’s Italian precision and the market’s actual needs.

Together, they built five locations. Not chains. Not franchises. Five wood-fired pizzerias, each one a statement that you can run an Italian restaurant in Phuket without erosion.

The test: March 2020 #

On March 13, 2020, Thailand went into lockdown. Phuket’s economy depends on tourism—90% of it. Within weeks, the city was empty. Hotels closed. Restaurants that had been open for decades shuttered. The supply chains that had taken years to build suddenly went silent.

For a founder with a family dairy and a commitment to input control, this was a peculiar kind of crisis. Most restaurants in Phuket were caught between suppliers they couldn’t reach and customers who had vanished. Moreno’s family had built redundancy—they made their own cheese, they knew their flour mills personally, they had relationships that went back years. But none of that mattered if no one was eating out.

He stayed open.

This is a decision that reveals something true about a founder. You can stay open out of desperation—you have no choice, or you are too stubborn to admit defeat. You can stay open out of hope—convinced the tourists will return soon, so you hold your position. You can stay open out of stubbornness. Or you can stay open because you believe in what you are doing, and you believe that the people who value what you are doing—Thai friends, expat regulars, residents of Phuket who have learned to trust your standard—matter more than the spreadsheet.

Moreno stayed open during the lockdown and the slow recovery that followed. Not every location, all the time. But he kept the concept alive when many others did not.

What he was protecting, in those months, was not a revenue stream. It was an idea: that a pizzaiolo from Salerno could live in Phuket and maintain his standards. That his commitment to the dairy, to the flour, to the wood and the dough—the things he had learned from his family—could survive a crisis that had nothing to do with food or craft.

The vindication: June 2025 #

Fourteen years after launching Pizzeria Da Moreno, in June 2025, Gambero Rosso—the authoritative guide to Italian food in Italy—awarded the restaurant Due Spicchi recognition.

This is not an obscure credential. Gambero Rosso is Italian. It is rigorous. It does not award recognition to restaurants that have compromised on the fundamentals. When an Italian guide recognizes a pizzeria in Phuket, it is saying: this pizzaiolo has not eased the standard. This is real pizza.

For Moreno, this recognition was not a surprise. It was confirmation of a conviction he had carried for fourteen years: that if you control your inputs, if you trust your suppliers because they are family, if you refuse the small shortcuts that everyone else accepts, then eventually the quality will speak for itself. You will find your people. You will be recognized by the authorities who matter.

The Gambero Rosso award arrived in June 2025. By then, five locations were running. The dairy was still making mozzarella weekly in Kathu. His wife Yim was managing the front of the house across all locations. His family was still in Phuket—some running other restaurants, others managing the food supply side. The pizza was still wood-fired. The standards had not eased.

The inheritance and the vision #

The puzzle for second-generation founders is this: how do you honor what your parents built without being crushed by it? How do you carry their lessons forward without becoming a caretaker of their memory instead of a builder of your own?

For Moreno Vaiano, the answer was precision. His parents had shown him that you can leave Salerno and still refuse to compromise on what makes Salerno food worth eating. His parents had built a dairy because they would not accept shortcuts on the ingredients that other restaurateurs treated as fungible. His parents had stayed open during crises because they believed their standard mattered—not just to them, but to the people eating their food.

Moreno took those lessons and made them his own. He launched his own pizzeria. He staked his reputation on a name—his name. He expanded that name through Thailand’s worst tourism collapse, in the middle of a pandemic, when every argument for compromise was rational and justified and available. He kept the wood. He kept the dairy. He kept the dough. He stayed open when staying open was irrational.

And in 2025, a guide from Italy—the country he had left but never stopped respecting—told him that he was right to refuse the shortcuts. That the standard he had carried across the world and defended through crisis was worth the effort. That precision, when maintained long enough, becomes credible. Becomes indisputable.

This is what it means to inherit a conviction and make it your own.

Last updated: May 13, 2026