It's 8 a.m. on a Thursday in the empty dining room of Sessanta, an Italian restaurant in the New York City hotel Sixty SoHo, and Chris Bianco, the Arizona chef widely regarded as the father of the modern artisanal pizza movement, is running on adrenaline and just a few hours of sleep.

"Oh my goodness, it was a cavalcade of who's who," Bianco says, with mock seriousness, of the dinner party he flew in from Phoenix to host in this very space the previous evening, to celebrate the July release of his long-awaited first book,Bianco: Pizza, Pasta, and Other Food I Like.