Casa crew bring terrific pizza (and pizza-adjacent favourites) to Mount Hawthorn
The crisp, 96-hour-fermented pizzas are designed to travel but can also be enjoyed in-store, ideally with a bottle of organic vino from the mothership next door. And yes, there’s a Hawaiian pizza on the menu.
Paul Bentley is unapologetically pro-pineapple when it comes to pizza. How you respond to this statement will help determine whether Casa Pizzeria is the place for you.
Of course, if you’re familiar with Bentley’s renegade Italian cooking at Mount Hawthorn wine bar Casa, you probably assumed that a Hawaiian pizza would be on the menu when the bar’s pizza off-shoot eventually opened next door.
And that when the controversial pizza did materialise, it wouldn’t be made using tins of crushed pineapple or commodity bulk bacon. You’d be right on both counts.
Instead, the ham is a lightly smoked prosciutto from Northern Italy, while the pizza’s controversial fruit component is a pineapple gastrique (a sweet and sour sauce) made with a habanero chilli caramel. It’s modern. It’s fun. And it’s – purists be damned – giving the people what they want: a sentiment that seems to sit at the core of Casa Pizzeria.
“Originally we opened just as takeaway,” says Bentley, “but we saw how people were using the space so added some dine-in tables.
“Once we get our liquor license, the space will evolve again. We’re happy to adapt just as long as the space complements and doesn’t take away from what we do at Casa.”
What else do management think the people desire? An uncluttered, sparsely appointed dining room that respects the modernist bent of the original, is one.
Snappy, pizza-adjacent snacks are also on the agenda: think French onion soup arancini, well-saturated garlic bread, charred broccoli salads and tiramisu for afters.
Finally, Casa’s strong focus on good drinking has also carried over to the new space with the pizzeria’s application for a license under way. For now, thirsty guests can buy a bottle of wine from Casa at takeaway prices and drink it at the pizzeria with no corkage. (Wines brought from home, meanwhile, will attract $10 corkage per bottle.)
There are, naturally, other pizza combinations available beyond ham-and-pineapple. The 13-item pizza menu overseen by Bentley and his dough-slinging offsider Vitor Queiroz is split into tomato sugo-based (rosso) and non-sugo-based toppings (bianco) and is pleasingly pun-free and built along classical lines a la margheritas, capricciosas and pepperoni pies.
And what of the dough, arguably the most crucial element of any pizza? Very good.
Slowly fermented over 96 hours, the yeasted dough puffs up nicely into a round, high-walled crust pocked with the occasional burn mark after a star turn in the kitchen’s stone-based Moretti Forni twin deck oven.
Eaten in-situ, the pizzas arrive at the table nicely burnished and cut into sixes. The base has enough structure that you’re able to pick up a slice, fold it like a paper airplane and hold it in your hand with almost no perceptible droop. The dough itself, meanwhile, is crunchier and nuttier than the wetter, Naples-style wood-fired pizzas that are all the rage. Not a bad thing: or at least for those that value diversity in pizza.
“Pizza is so subjective,” says Bentley. “What you enjoy is what you enjoy.
“For me, I like pizza with good fermentation in the dough, good hydration and some nice char in a few spots.”
In short, Bentley likes a pizza like the ones served at Casa Pizzeria.
Casa Pizzeria (397 Oxford Street, Mount Hawthorn) is open Friday to Sunday from 5pm to 9pm. Online ordering for pick-up is available with delivery launching by mid-May.
Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.