Pizzeria 1926
85 Dalry Rd, Edinburgh
0131 337 5757
Dinner: £6.95-£20
Food rating: 9/10
AT the risk of oscillating alarmingly, I have undergone a conversion to the joys of fried foods. Last week I put on record that I don’t really get the appeal, but that was before I ate at Pizzeria 1926 in Edinburgh. It’s not just an Italian outfit, but a thoroughly Neapolitan one, another enterprise from Rosario Sartore, chef proprietor of the admirable Locanda de Gusti over the road.
Pizzeria 1926 is an eating spot right out of the gritty, working-class heart of Naples. The staff are all Italian (probably Neapolitan), half the diners are Italian. It’s scruffy in a good way: the sign above the door looks hand-painted. This is street food with a roof over its head. The management is football crazy, 1926 being the year the SSC Napoli team was formed. Staff wear sky blue football shirts; Napoli are known as "Gli Azzurri" (The Light Blues). This optimistic blue colour provides an obvious decorative theme throughout the premises.
"Friggitorie" (fried food shops) are a popular feature of street food the length and breadth of Italy, and I won’t start a fight about which region came up with the idea of partnering the friggitoria with the pizzeria, apart from noting that there are a lot of them in Naples. With this culinary coupling you can see why there might be an easy affinity between Neapolitans and Glaswegians. We speak the same gastronomic language here, just in different tongues.
So Pizzeria 1926 talks to my Glaswegian soul but woos me in a seductively Italian, Marcello Mastroianni sort of way. The batter on the plentiful cuoppo misto di frittura that spills out from its paper cone is light, barely there in fact, and everything inside it is worth eating: chunks of artichoke heart; courgette flowers; a shoal of whitebait; squid rings and tentacles; the famous delicacy from the Marche, Ascolane olives (green beauties covered in sausage meat under a crust); cod fish croquettes; mozzarella balls; a fat arancino of tomato and basil-flavoured risotto; a big, plump langoustine.
The deep-fried pizza – yes, this is indeed deep-fried pizza we’re willingly eating – has the come-hither yeasty smell you get downwind of a bakery. It forms a chewy, semi-circular envelope for an oozing core of peppery ricotta, tomatoes, cubes of pork crackling, cooked salami, Provola cheese and fragrant basil. We’ve already eaten a meal, and yet the pizzas when they arrive are so light and so right that we discover a second stomach. Mine, the "pocho", wins me an approving wink from our waiter. “Good choice, Signora.” It offers up soft potatoes, molten onions, porky sausage, and Fior di Latte mozzarella, on one of the best bases that I have encountered. It’s thin, crisp and dark, without even a suggestion of soggy sag in the middle, the cornicione (rim) is airily crusty, and the surface bubbles up like an overactive volcano to form those compellingly charred spots. Many pizzas are pappy and too white because they use the wrong flour, but Pizzeria 1926 knows the good stuff, and judging from their rough surface, the pizzas are rolled out in coarse semolina flour for another tongue-pleasing texture.
The "A Luciana", is essentially like having a proper cuttlefish (baby squid), olive and tomato stew on your pizza. I think that I’m only going to sample it until, that is, I taste it, at which point I discover yet another back-up stomach. The special flavour of this stew comes from ingredient provenance: small, sweet-tart Piennolo tomatoes grown on the volcanic soil around Vesuvius, violet-black Gaeta olives from Lazio, and the tenderest cuttlefish imaginable.
Right, get a grip. No desserts, I think, but then there’s a pastiera to be tried, the Neapolitan Easter time speciality. And seeing how Pizzeria 1926 gets the rest right, I doubt that it’s lazily bought in. Too right it isn’t. This tart is fresh, its filling moist with ricotta, bright with candied fruit, and perfumed with orange flower water.
Sartore doesn’t waste time with cheap ingredients, or stint on sheer effort in the kitchen. He’s honouring Neapolitan food tradition here, but charging democratic prices for it. Back of the net!
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