I know, I know. You don’t want to hear about the best parts of my month-long European holiday. You want to hear about the disasters.
Like when I took a wrong turn on the way to a French market and ended up driving us into Switzerland. Or when the
butcher at a tourist town wanted $30 for the sausage I’d chosen and I paid it because I was too embarrassed to hand it back.
Or this morning, when I accidentally left the wrong set of clothes out for the plane home, meaning I’m now flying all the way from Milan to Auckland in my swimming togs.
That’s just a sample. The numerous other stories will come out when enough time has passed to legally share them safely.
But for now I am here to talk about pizza and my firm belief that it is overrated (as I type, we have just left Italian airspace, so no longer fear mob reprisals for sharing this hot take).
What is pizza? It is half a sandwich but without the best bit (mayonnaise). Worst of all is pizza with a thin crust: a piece of A4 photocopy paper with some melted cheese on it. What is the right portion size – three slices, or four, or eight? It’s impossible to tell because your brain isn’t used to eating a food with only two dimensions.
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Kids like pizza. This is supposed to add to the appeal but to me it makes it worse. Pizza is the Toy Story of restaurant orders – something the whole family is supposed to enjoy but, let’s be honest, if it was genuinely aimed at adults, the children wouldn’t be interested.
On our final day in Italy – six hours of driving, almost as long spent buying last minute presents at the supermarket, checking in to an expensive hotel too late in the evening to enjoy any of the amenities – we had to somehow find a reasonably priced dinner for six.
And though after 30 days of pasta I would have killed for a beef vindaloo, Victoria found a highly rated pizzeria “nearby”. (These quotation marks are not aimed at her; in big European cities this word means anything within a 25-minute drive, usually involving a 130km/h toll road but only sometimes an unexpected three-point-turn in Geneva).
I drove to the restaurant (Pizzeria di Michele de Lorusso, for the record) with low expectations. I had already composed most of this column in my head and was mentally leaning into the most radical aspects of my new opinion.
We found a carpark in the shadow of a typically confusing Italian street sign (no parking between 9am and 8pm except on stadium event days or when accompanied by two or more Sagittarians in the back seat), and approached the restaurant, which was around the size of our hotel lift with just as much decoration and ambience.
I let Victoria choose the pizzas (“they all taste the same anyway”, this was a key cornerstone of my new belief system) then we assembled six stools around a tiny table and waited.
If the headline writers have done their job, you’ll have already worked out that the next few minutes did not turn out as I expected. The proprietor arrived at our table with (I try not to use this word too much despite its clickability) the BEST pizza I have ever eaten.
Better than that, it was the best meal of the entire holiday – good enough to vanquish my entire “Pizza sucks” worldview as soon as I set eyes on it.
Victoria had ordered the ortolana, a vegetable-heavy option towards the bottom of the menu (the adult section). The base was thick, like good focaccia, served in slices around the size of a computer keyboard. Slathered in tomato sauce and mozzarella, it had been baked at high heat until the cheese melted into a heavy blanket. The chef had then removed it from the oven and heaped it with lightly grilled vegetables – courgette, eggplant, capsicum – and, finally, red onion and a handful of market-fresh rocket leaves. Every vegetable tasted of itself; the whole thing tasted of heaven.
So much of a taste experience is influenced by the look and shape of food, and one of the most exciting parts of this dish was the way the huge slice had then been cut in diagonal lines both ways to create bite-size diamonds which were perfect when poked with a plastic fork then rushed into your mouth (obscure reference I know, but if you remember cousin Richie’s deep-dish pizza scene in The Bear’s “Forks” episode, you’ll understand how appetising those neat, plump mouthfuls looked).
I ate it at 9pm, in 33 degree heat, washed down with a cold bottle of Italian lager. Having started the day miserable about flying home, I was cheered up enough by this meal that I drove back to our hotel with a big tomatoey smile on my face.
Pizza is back, baby. It might even be my favourite food.
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