Spacca Napoli won a prize for Chicago’s best pizza, as the chef faced cancer surgery

Spacca Napoli in Ravenswood has won plenty of honors. But last month’s Jean Banchet Award for “Chicago’s Best Pizza” came at the exact right moment for restaurateur Jonathan Goldsmith.

Last July, doctors discovered cancer in his stomach. It was a cosmic gut punch for a man who has spent two decades sending customers out the door with delightfully stuffed bellies. Three days after the Banchets, he underwent surgery to remove a tumor, which had been successfully shrunk during rounds of chemotherapy.

“I was getting a little tired this summer, and a little whiny. I was ready to stop,” he says. “To have the recognition from within the community itself … it felt good and, in some ways, needed.”

His last day in the kitchen before the operation, Goldsmith massaged focaccia in the restaurant’s front windows at the corner of Sunnyside and Ravenswood avenues. He quickly poked the tips of his fingers into the dough, before drizzling olive oil and topping it with rosemary, Maldon Salt and red onion.

Together with his wife, the artist Ginny Sykes, Goldsmith has created a space beloved by Michelin-level reviewers and neighbors alike. The cozy, Italian-inspired dining room has hosted engagements, funerals and other important life moments. It’s the type of reliably good neighborhood restaurant that gives Chicago its reputation as a top-tier food city.

Goldsmith’s award-winning pizza isn’t the deep dish tourists seek downtown or the tavern style some locals call the “real” Chicago variety. Instead, Spacca Napoli serves classic Neapolitan pizza made with simple, quality ingredients.

Goldsmith, who will soon turn 70, insists he’s no chef. “I’m a dough boy,” he says, wearing a T-shirt that reads “Sono un pizzaiolo e basta!” Or: “I’m a pizza chef and that’s it!”

His staff reveres him. “He’s the best boss I’ve ever had,” says Gerson Pineda, the restaurant’s assistant manager. “… People come in here and they stay. … It’s a big family.”

Goldsmith, who grew up in and around New York City before moving to Chicago, had been a social worker focused on adolescent psychiatry. He became a pizzamaker at 50.

The career change came after a fateful encounter on a plane to Italy.

He’d been volunteering at Inspiration Cafe on the North Side, making meals for homeless people. Aboard the flight, Sykes saw a newspaper photo of Goldsmith cooking a meal.

She showed it to her husband, who proudly showed the young Italian man beside him. “Are you a chef?” the man asked. Goldsmith waved him off: “No, but I do breakfast for the homeless on Sunday mornings.”

“Out of the blue, he just proposes that I consider doing a pizzeria. He said, ‘Flour, water, salt and yeast make a lot of money,’ ” Goldsmith says.

“He was my Clarence,” Goldsmith says, referencing the guardian angel who guides Jimmy Stewart’s character in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Immediately, it made sense to Goldsmith. He would be a pizzamaker. “I felt if I had the proper oven, the mixer, and if I could have the Caputo flour — the Neapolitan flour that I was familiar with in Naples — that we would begin.”

A perfectionist, he treats the restaurant like an extension of his home, which is just blocks away. He’s meticulous about touching up paint, and each piece of art has a story he’ll gladly share.

Then there’s the pizza, and his insatiable drive to make it perfect. As a cook fires a Margherita pie, Goldsmith looks on: Dough made from three types of flour, Italian tomatoes, blended with some olive oil and salt, a mix of cow’s milk cheese and buffalo mozzarella, some basil and olive oil.

The pie goes in until the crust bubbles. It’s pulled out, rotated, returned to the same spot: cooked to perfection in 90 seconds or less.

Topped with a little more olive oil, it’s ready to be cut and devoured.

Goldsmith indulges in a slice, nodding approval..

With surgery less than 24 hours away, he’s moving about the pizzeria with an added layer of anxiety. He’ll be out a while, a return date unknown. It could be a month or more.

He’s been away before — months in Italy, visiting friends, gathering new ideas for the restaurant and working on a farm, where he helps to harvest grapes for wine.

This time is different, he says. He won’t be available for a quick call or to hop on a plane and come home. “I do feel anxious that I won’t be as easy to connect with for a few days.”

He shifts the conversation back to the bounty that his midlife career shift brought him. He’s quick to enumerate why, despite the circumstances, he’s lucky: He has good health insurance and a robust support system.

If all goes well, Goldsmith will complete another round of chemo in the spring and then board a plane to Italy in May, heading back to the place where he first got the taste for the pizza he has brought to Chicago.