Intelligent pizza
To bastardise early 20th century writer Henry Louis Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the public's demand for good pizza.
In its most exalted form, pizza simply cannot be replicated at home without a really good wood oven and patience. So there is always going to be demand. Ingredient costs mean healthy margins; selling it is good business. And great pizza is one of those things most of us are prepared to pay handsomely for and rarely tire of. I celebrated nothing in particular recently by eating pizza on four consecutive nights. It's the quintessential "more than the sum of its parts" foodstuff.
Unsurprisingly, new waves of pizza joints (Baby, La Svolta) keep crashing on the shores of Melbourne's dining beach, and undoubtedly other cities, too. But what if you already have a reputation for excellent pizza from (sorry to all you electric guys) a proper wood-burning oven? What about the rest of your food?
How do you shift perception from "pizzeria with good Italian food" to "Italian restaurant with great pizza?" And why would you bother, given the profitability of this almost universal Italian gift to the world?
Ladro on its night is home to the best pizza I've ever eaten. Sometimes, it's just plain terrific. Now, with a new (Sicilian-born) chef, they're hoping to spread the love.
Ladro Prahran: more than just perfect pizza. Picture: Andrew Maccoll
Reviewing a restaurant that is as close to a regular haunt as a peripatetic eater-out gets forces one to examine just why a particular place keeps the fires of love burning. For me, it's about informal style (which Ladro has in abundance), value for money (which remains very fair, on both the food and wine fronts), attitude/hospitality (all part of management culture) and, er, pizza. None of that has changed. But the non-pizza food has definitely come up a notch. More on that in a minute.
Great pizza is not just about a great dough (easy to say, hard to do) cooked fast with the influence of smoke and intense direct/radiant heat. It's about what goes on top: the ingredient combinations and balance, knowing when to add, when to subtract.
From the specials "board" (the tiles on the oven): a white (no tomato) pizza is built from smoked buffalo mozzarella, sliced fresh porcini and a little torn basil. It's what you'd call an intelligent pizza, and I can't imagine visiting this restaurant without at least a few slices of something like it.
Lower on the GI scale, a "salad" of softened whole farro is unpredictable and representative of the new menu: pickled eggplant, sliced shallot, mint, toasted almond and baby beet leaves get their crucial creamy acidity from fresh goat curd. Terrific.
Fresh pappardelle (they now have "an Italian zia" making pasta daily) is textbook, although I found the veal and artichoke ragu, served with peppered pecorino, under-seasoned. The same could not be said of either basil-fleck tortellini, filled with swimmer crab, in a cherry tomato and basil leaf sugo (lively, hand-made, simpatico) or the roast of the day.
The daily roast in the wood oven at Ladro is a no-brainer, if the weather's right: served in a glazed, terracotta bowl, the gnarly, on-the-bone abbacchio - Roman-style lamb cooked with liquid - is possibly the finest example of this dish I've tried. Chef must have a Roman mother.
The meat is glossy, sticky and sweet, with a proper crust, the liquids slightly acidic yet intense, the accompanying potatoes and peas making this a proper meal. Justice done.
The creme caramel is deliciously bitter on top of fine custard with poached pear and toasted almond flakes as counterpoint.
And it all happens with good humour and efficiency, despite - tonight - the owners' absence. Ladro Prahran has been refined. I think it deserves the handle "Italian restaurant with great pizza" and not the other way round. But I hope they always sell pizza, just the same. Don't want them to go broke, do we?
Ladro Prahran, 162 Greville Street, Prahran, Victoria, (03) 9510 2233
Hours: lunch, dinner, daily
Typical prices: starters $14; pizza $20; pasta $25; mains $32; desserts $12
Summary: An Italian restaurant with great pizza
Like this? Try ... Pendolino, Sydney; Ruby Red Flamingo, Adelaide
Rating: 4/5 stars
Source: The Australian, 24 November 2012
