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The king of Naples-style pizza
It was a long day. It involved waking, looking out to the Bay of Naples, a humungous breakfast in the hotel dining room that included many real espressi and many more sfogliatella, the unforgettable pastries of that city, and negotiating with Neapolitan taxi drivers to get out to Pompeii and back for something less than Silvio Berlusconi’s bunga bunga budget.
Pizzaperta at the Star Casino in Sydney (Picture: Anson Smart)
Then there was Pompeii itself. Crumbs. Italy is so old.
An afternoon digesting the beauty and horror of it all meant that, with only a single gelato for lunch, it was time to digest something else. And the great thing about Naples is that there is always another pizza to eat. There are gigabytes of information devoted to the subject online. The word fanaticism comes to mind.
Which is how we found ourselves at Via Filippo Maria Briganti 22 — in a quite insalubrious part of old Naples — at 5pm, hungry as a cavallo.
Pity the restaurant didn’t open until seven. Our web research hadn’t revealed that. OK. What now?
Well, I don’t mind admitting to being a bit pissed by the time Starita eventually opened, quite a few sidewalk pre-dinner drinks later. It was my holiday. And I was there for the pizza as much as Pompeii.
And having strayed this far from our seaside hotel, into a part of town where callow tourists seemed very thin on the ground, I wasn’t going home empty-stomached. The meal? Well, it was over faster than a teenage grapple, but twice as good, and for both of us, too. Wham, bam, mozzarella, man. What a town. What a pizza. Is there anyone who doesn’t adore the stuff?
(For the record, Starita, which has a sibling in New York, was our best of several Neapolitan pizza experiences: slightly less wet at the centre than is typical in Naples and therefore a little closer to what I like in the best Australian pizza. The “leopard spots” of the charred base, the light, puffed rim, the edges and base retaining a thin layer of crispness that adds textural contrast to the olfactory heroin of pizza straight from the wood oven, all there).
Did it comply with the rules of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana? I have no idea. But to get an idea of how prescriptive they are about the making of “real” Neapolitan pizza, check out this little baby: pizzanapoletana.org/public/pdf/disciplinare%202008%20UK.pdf.
According to the website Serious Eats, the moist, loose Neapolitan pizza dough — when inserted into the oven — should instantly start to puff, creating bubbles with thin walls and micro-bubbles on top of them, with even thinner walls.
“These thin walls will quickly brown in the air of the oven and against the hot stone floor while the rest of the pizza will remain more pale. It’s this interplay of smoky, slightly bitter notes that comes from the charred spots and the soft, mild, pale dough in between that gives a Neapolitan pizza its great complexity.” Seriously.
Back in Australia, with a bit of international benchmarking up my sleeve, I think we do all right. That soupy, wet centre where the juices, oil and whey pool — a defining characteristic of the real Neapolitan deal — doesn’t thrill me so much, personally, so I’m glad that aspect of authenticity has been selectively bred out of the Australian version of the best.
At restaurants such as Sydney’s Da Mario in Rosebery and Da Orazio in Bondi, or Melbourne’s Ladro in Prahran and DOC in Albert Park, pizza can reach that Nirvanic state of being so much more than the sum of its parts. (We even do gluten-free pretty well now, too — check out the excellent version at A25 in Melbourne’s South Yarra.) That point at which you really don’t care too much about what it is you’re actually paying for, only that it is getting you as high as a kite.
And undoubtedly, it’s the parts and their sum(s) that have attracted the big boys of the entertainment industry, the casinos. Because, let’s face it, the food costs of a margherita — depending on the cheese — are what? A dollar? Half that? The profit in a pizza, done well, is huge.
So while the opening of casino pizzeria was almost simultaneous in Sydney and Melbourne, with certain aspects crossing over, the two approaches could not be more different.
On the harbour, Star has leveraged its existing relationship with Stefano Manfredi, already the face of Balla, to open Pizzaperta. While on the Yarra, Crown has hired the operator of a well-known pizzeria (Johnny di Francesco of 400 Gradi) to provide the IP and expertise for Gradi at Crown.
Both, presumably, hope to make good money selling pizza. That’s where the similarities end.
In Sydney, Pizzaperta is, at best, a smart kiosk, an outdoors/courtyard affair at street level where service is minimal and just about all the consumables — cutlery, napkins and even the pizza boxes all pizza is served in — are disposable. Tables are communal.
You order at the counter and they give you one of those things that lights up when your pizza is ready to collect. It’s like being at Westfield.
Naturally, there is a wood oven. To the aforementioned Associazione, this is non-negotiable. And there is a chef-pizzaiolo — Gianluca Donzelli — plus lots of other Italians floating about to provide a rather charming and authentic flavour to the whole experience, and a menu broken into “Traditional & Classic”, “Seasonal & New Wave” and “Roman ‘Teglia’ Style” (Roman pizza, also known as pizza in teglia — pizza in a pan — is fermented longer than normal pizza dough, served in slices, topped.)
At $22, with self-service, I guess having the pizza served in a box is OK. Not sure.
The thick, puffy rim of “Buffalo mozzarella & prosciutto di Parma” was light and delicious … There’s a note on the menu about a slow, natural leaven for the dough that aids digestibility, and Pizzaperta’s certainly felt that way. It hadn’t been cooked hard enough — the chariness was minimal — but the pizza was generously topped with rocket, cooked cherry tomatoes and prosciutto.
Somehow, despite our being the only customer for an early lunch, the pizza just didn’t have that “straight from the oven to you” magic.
Pleasingly, they offer chilli oil (in a disposable container). It’s a 3.5/5 pizza. A 2/5 restaurant experience.
Crown have gone down the road of replacing a really interesting Italian restaurant (GAS) with a really boring one. Gradi offers a full menu, a vast number of seats and an even vaster number of staff, most of whom will visit your table and fiddle with your water bottle at least once every 10-minute cycle. This is the recipe for what is surely the busiest restaurant in Melbourne. Astonishing.
Most, I would suggest, are here for pizza; much has been made of the host’s membership of the Associazione and his success in pizza-making competitions, and for a certain audience, this translates.
But producing literally thousands of pizzas a day is difficult. I would imagine that the slightly heavy, doughy rim on both pizze we tried suggests a volume of production that doesn’t properly allow for the slower, time-intensive leavening a less busy restaurant might achieve.
In other words, they’re selling ’em faster than they can make ’em.
A Gradi margherita is nevertheless a jolly nice, and very Neapolitan pizza. It is wettish at the centre; the tomato, mozzarella and basil all first-class.
And the magic of a just-made and straight-to-the-table pizza is there, the evidence of serious radiant heat clear in gnarly, dark charring of extremities. This is what you pay for.
The performance was consistent with a second — similar — pizza using fior di latte instead of mozzarella, adding good, hot salami and a nest of fresh rocket at the end. Great flavours but just too chewy around the rim to call a perfect pizza.
A 4/5 pizza in a 3/5 restaurant.
Source ; The Australian John Leathlen February 7th 2015
