Quick bite: Pappagallo, Leederville, WA
You don’t make pizzas this good, or authentic, overnight. The base alone takes 48 hours. An all-Italian staff helps too.
Who’s waiting tables in Italy these days? Hard to imagine the answer is Italians — they all seem to be here.
No matter where you go across our broad, brown land, you’ll find someone standing beside you who can roll the word parmigiano off the tongue in a manner that no amount of standing in front of the mirror with a Berlitz audio tutorial in the background could ever hope to equal.
I’m not unhappy about that; they are, generally speaking, matter-of-fact waiters who don’t believe their vocation entitles them to some kind of celebrity. They just, you know, wait tables. Which takes us to the Italian end of Oxford Street, in Leederville, Perth just across the road from the excellent Re Store (if you’re a Melburnian, think Mediterranean Wholesalers in Brunswick) and to Pappagallo, a “cafe pizzeria” where seemingly everyone on the payroll is Italian born.
In an hour we encountered five wait staff from various parts of the republic, and that pizzaiolo with the Don King hairstyle … definitely. Throw in some regulation tins of San Marzano tomatoes, Italian pizza flour and bottles of Aperol on the shelves and, well, you know the look. Pappagallo hovers somewhere between chintzy and cool, and the souped-up cars cruising the strip add an element of Lygon Street, Carlton, old-school Italian-ness.
The pitch: Pizza with other great stuff.
The reality: Pizza.
The cuisine: Italian, obviously, with all sorts of standards keeping the menu reasonably predictable — antipasti, pasta, pizza in two sections, rosse and bianche, and secondi. And dolce, which largely consists of pastry items you can see stacked in a glass display cabinet. Pretentious it is not.
Highlights: Pizza tricolore — from a hybrid gas-wood oven with a rotating turntable that elevates and lowers, to take advantage of different temperatures in the cooking chamber — was one hell of a brilliant pizza. The owner came out to parrot on about the 48-hour process of creating a base, and, well, the flavour and light, sublime texture certainly spoke to the effort. The tricolore is merely hand-crushed Italian tomatoes, torn buffalo mozzarella of high quality added after the pizza emerges from the forno, and basil. I’d go back for one now.
A second pizza — misto di bosco — with mushroom slices and paste, taleggio and some truffle oil, is good, but not quite in the same league. But the base is no accident. They have a winning formula here, and pleasingly they don’t try to imitate the soggy/soupy centre of a pizza that is a hallmark of authentic Neapolitan style but, frankly, is improved upon by the best Australian pizze. Another high point is the very reasonable wine prices (the most expensive Abruzzese white is $44).
Lowlights: The ravioli of the day is sold as ox cheek with a champagne sauce, so — foolishly perhaps — I didn’t expect parcels filled with a pinkish and fairly tasteless paste the colour and texture of liverwurst. A coleslaw side salad isn’t much better.
Will I need a food dictionary? No, all this lingo is pretty much a part of the Australian food vocab these days.
The damage: Pizza around $23, mains around $30.
Pappagallo, 250 Oxford Street, Leederville, WA, (08) 94440889; Open: lunch, dinner Mon-Sat. Food: excellent pizza. Rating: 3 stars.