On every stop of the Naples VIP Pizza Tour you will enjoy privileged access to the best pizzerias in Naples, with no queuing for the best tables in the house, You’ll step behind the scenes to meet – and talk shop – with the city’s most celebrated pizza makers, at legendary pizzerias like L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele and Pizzeria Sorbillo.

Beyond the VIP treatment, the tours offer something even more valuable: That special connection between people passionate about making pizza and people every bit as passionate about eating it. The star pizzaioli don’t just open up their pizzerias for us. They open up their hearts, too, transforming every stop of the tour into an event filled, between pizzas, with a learning and laughter.

Your fantasy pizza tour may consist of: 

• Exclusive pizza tastings at classic and contemporary Naples pizzerias.
• Exploration of the various styles of Neapolitan pizza.
• Behind-the-scenes chats with the pizzaioli.
• Street-food tastings of pizza fritta (fried pizza) and pizza portafoglio (small pizza twice folded, like a “wallet”)
• Pizza-making demos and master classes.
• A pizza tasting dinner at Franco Pepe‘s Pepe in Grani in the village of Caiazzo, one hour north of Naples.
• A tour and tasting at Caseificio Il Casolare, the region’s most acclaimed producer of Mozzarella di Bufala.
• Lunch at an agriturismo restaurant in the Campania countryside

To plan a bespoke private tour for individuals, couples or groups, send us an email.

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Pino Cuttaia’s cannolo di melanzana perlina in pasta croccante

For (re)inventive Italian chefs like Pino Cuttaio of Le Madri in Licata, Sicily the cannolo is a classic shape open to reinterpretation: His figurative cannolo di melanzana perlina in pasta croccante – “aubergine (eggplant) cannolo in a crunchy tube of pasta” – is a signature dish.

Perhaps only at Panificio Costanza on the Sicilian island of Favignana are the crisp pastry cylinders filled with napkins.

That’s right, Costanza fills all its cannoli with napkins. Marked nakins. Don’t believe me? Have a look below:

The trouble with traditional cannoli shells is that once filled with ricotta cream they soon become soggy and lose their crispness. As a result many of Sicily’s best pastry shops display only the pastry tubes and fill them to order with ricotta cream.

Lest an unknowing tourist mistake their empty cannoli for hallow shells, Panificio Costanza stuffs them with white napkins hand-dotted with a black felt marker. This is somehow meant to make them look more enticing.

So, no, Panificio Costanza, was not proposing you employ its cannoli shells as napkin holders, as they do. Their message is instead one of freshness: We fill our cannoli with chocolate-speckled ricotta no more than a minute before their cream and chips are filling your mouth.

Designer Mike Abrahams

Mike Abrahams of the London design consultancy Abrahams attended several BurgerMondays and SpagWednesdays and was struck by the easy links made amongst strangers thrown together at shared tables. (What people will do to get their hands on a drippy, two-fisted bacon cheese burger!) In creating a pop-up logo Mike sought to represent young&foodish as the sum of these new connections.

Choosing to work with the Frankfurter Highlight font mostly because he couldn’t resist the foodish name Mike printed paper placemats each containing a single character from Y-O-U-N-G-&-F-O-O-D-I-S-H.

Photographer Paul Winch-Furness

At six consecutive pop-ups, including the 10th of November debut of WichThursday, the food and restaurant photographer Paul Winch-Furness took playful portraits of diners holding up – or goofing with – their lettered placements. He also encouraged the diners to self-assemble for group shots spelling out words, gibberish or fragments of either.

Designer Myra Murtagh

Mike’s colleague Myra Murtagh turned these images into two versions of the animated pop-up logo seen at the top of this website since November. The collaboration of Mike, Paul, Myra and all the obviously proud models who posed with their lettered placemats will run for just a few more weeks.

All photos by  Paul Winch-Furness

1. At MEATliquor, Burger Love is Blind

2. My Confidence Cracked in Bistro du Vin Burger

3. Is Devouring a St John Custard Doughnut Truly the Best Thing to Do on a Saturday Morning in London?

4. What Do You Think is Wrong with the Dalston Superstore Burger?

5. Beautiful Pastrami Found on London Pavement

6. My Open Letter to Pierre Hermé

7. Wimpy Mega Burger an Endangered Classic in Fast-Food Design

8. Killing Time & Lovely Coffee at Monmouth Maltby St

9. The Next Great New York Burger

10. The Artisan Bagel East London is Waiting For

“Duke”, wrote Boyer, “may announce that he intends to eat nothing but Shredded Wheat and black tea. When his orders arrives he looks at it glumly, then bows his head and says grace. After he has finished his snack his expression of virtuous determination slowly dissolves into wistfulness as he watches [Billy] Strayhorn eat a steak. Duke’s resolution about not overeating frequently collapses at this point. When it does he orders a steak and after finishing it he engages in another moral struggle for about five minutes. Then he really begins to eat. He has another steak, smothered in onions, a double portion of fried potatoes, a salad, a bowl of sliced tomatoes, a giant lobster and melted butter, coffee, and an Ellington dessert – perhaps a combination of pie, cake, ice cream, custard, pastry, Jell-o, fruit and cheese.”

Here’s Duke describing his favourite burger:

At Old Orchard Beach, Maine, I got the reputation of eating more hot dogs than any man in America. A Mrs Wagner there makes a toasted bun that’s the best of its kind in America. She has a toasted bun, then a slice of onion, then a hamburger, then a tomato, then melted cheese, than another hamburger, then a slice of onion, more cheese, more tomato, and then the other side of the bun. Her hot dogs have two dogs to a bun. I ate 32 one night.

Ellington divulges the dining highlights of his American and European tours, from the chow mein with pigeon’s blood at Johnny Cann’s Cathay House in San Francisco to the 84 kinds of hors d’oeuvres at The Café Royal in the Hague to the mutton at Monseigneur’s in London. I’m not sure where I’d take Ellington to dine in London were he alive today, except that I know it wouldn’t be a tapas bar. I might bring him to St John with the understanding that he could order the whole roast suckling pig feast , a £355 set menu designed to feed 14-to-16 persons, and not be expected to share so much as an anecdote.

This was the second great honour bestowed upon Bottura in two weeks. On 4 April the local boy made good was awarded the Medaglia d’Oro – “gold medal” – from the commune of Modena (photos here).

photo from Fotoservizio Benito BENEVENTO

So which meant more to the two-Michelin-starred Bottura, the recognition from the worlds’ most accomplished chefs or the show of respect from a city of some 180,000 people famous for the production of Balsamic vinegar, sports car engines and Luciano Pavarotti?

I received what was maybe the hint of an answer from the avant-garde chef and artisanal Balsamic producer on Monday night.

“I just got the gold medal from my town,” the elated Bottura told me on the Guildhall stage he was sharing with Rene Redzepi and Andoni Luis Aduriz, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz. “They recognise what I do.”

That kind of acknowledgement might mean more to a chef in Italy, where stubborn traditionalists may regard gastronomic innovators as traitors. I myself travel Italy as a preservationist preferring simple, old-fashioned trattorias to posh, cutting-edge restaurants. The enemies of Italian invention come from without and within.

“I look at the past not with nostalgia but with creativity,” noted Bottura, defining nostalgia as sentimental praise reserved for the tortellini made by one’s grandmother or the Parmigiano-Reggiano – a speciality of Emilia-Romagna, his home region – from one’s distant past. “Let me tell you, we now have the most beautiful Parmigiano.”

“You must not forget your roots,” added the modernist of Modena, a kitchen magician who transforms Parmigiano cheese into air in his signature ensemble Five Different Ages of Parmigiano-Reggiano in Five Textures. “We are raised on the most beautiful foods. Our techniques, our ideas are in service of those products. This is the future.”

“We believe in the flavour of spices,” reasoned Arora, composing a mantra for all Indian cooking.”

Monica Bhide, the food writer and cookbook author behind the terrific A Life of Spice blog, agrees. The feeling, she says, is that the marinades and curries penetrate the meat better without the skin. There’s no barrier to entry.

For the tandoor-grilled titari (guinea fowl) he adapted from a recipe for tandoor murg (tandoori chicken) in India Cookbook, a new 815-page bible of home-style Indian cuisine (Phaidon), Arora applies two marinades to the skinless bird. The first consists of malt vinegar, spices and crucially salt, which, in 45 minutes time, draws out the moisture from the breasts and legs, leaving their meat thirsty for the second massage: a penetrating, four-hour rub of ginger, garlic, drained yogurt, Kashmiri chillies, mustard oil and caraway seeds. The full-body treatment breaks down all of the guinea fowl’s remaining defences, achieving tender succulence for the finished bird and, for the finished dinner guest, total belief in the flavour of spices.

Personally I think perfection is overrated. While its pursuit can sometimes be a noble endeavour beneficial to the greater good, its realisation is neither possible nor desirable. Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of 1986 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, titled her autobiography In Praise of Imperfection, her conviction being that human creativity and greatness were the rewards of imperfection.

True perfection would have disastrous consequences. Were we to agree, for example, that the incomparable purée de pomme de terre of Joël Robuchon was perfect there would be no incentive to do better or find better. Never mind that Robuchon’s version of mash should more accurately be titled purée de beurre fondue – “purée of melted butter” – with the odd potato mixed in.

I don’t very much like the look of perfection either. Maybe it’s a class thing. My grandfather, Paul Young (né Yankelovich), was a Polish-born, Jewish-American baker who always sent us home with large brown papers filled with the ugliest cakes imaginable. We identified their unvarnished appearance and plain packaging with the rustic ways of the old country and trusted his marble cakes, sponge cakes, Danish and babkas were vastly superior to the frilly production numbers on display in the window cases of finer French- or Viennese-inspired bakeries.

Imagine my pleasure then when in May of this year I spotted these words across the bottom of menu at the acclaimed and fashionable New York pizza restaurant Co.:

Our pies are not always round.

Co. was created by Jim Lahey of the esteemed Sullivan Street Bakery to recognise and celebrate the art of baking in the form of pizza. And that form, according to the menu caveat also employed as a “company” slogan, does not need to be a perfect circle to be good. A misshapen pizza might even taste better for its faults.

Home-made should look hand-made. Why would anyone want to cut chips (fries) by hand to such precision they would give guests the impression they’d been sliced by a machine? Where’s the satisfaction in shaping burger patties by hand to a tight, smooth, flat, flawless round that only a meat-packing plant could produce?

The trouble with cooking to any mould, be it a block of silicone hearts or the exacting template of an uncompromising chef, is that it thwarts the excitement of the unpredictable. Michelin-star-worthy fussiness is a culinary ideal embraced at the expense of whim, mood, chance and surprise.

Even those who don’t buy into the romance of rusticity should recognise that Lahey has handed home cooks a valuable out, a get-out-of-jail card to be used when we screw in the kitchen: The next time you slide a half-burned, amoeba-shaped pizza out of the oven only to discover all of its molten mozzarella has slid to one side and all its tomato to the other, don’t despair: Just tell your guests this is the way they do it in the old country.