Pizzeria Calvino, Act I

The first act of my Pizzeria Calvino tale begins in frustration. I am denied access to the rear dining rooms by unsmiling men-in-white-shirts and left to contend with the Sicilians-in-waiting who crowd the entrance area.

Salvatore Calvino

Inch by slow inch I slither my way to the counter and order takeout from Salvatore…, sorry, Signor Calvino, as he’s addressed even by elders who’ve been frequenting this Trapanese institution since 1946.

When choosing accommodation for a visit to Trapani you are advised to rule out all options more than 200 metres from Pizzeria Calvino (see map). In the likely event you’re relegated to a takeout pizza you don’t want to give it time to cool. The “five-minute” walk from the pizzeria to the palazzo apartment we’ve rented through Airbnb takes us four minutes. I set the pizza box on the dining room table and open it: Oh, good, our Margherita is still steaming hot.

Trouble is I don’t like how this pizza eats. Its crust, though exquisitely charred, is too bready. It’s smothered in a bland blanket of industrial mozzarella with scant dots of cherry tomato.

In despair I summon the phrase I repeat as the key to unlocking minds that refuse to open:

Sometimes you have to twist your head around and drop preconceived notions of how something has to be.

Isn’t it foolish, I reason, to question the judgement of Sicilians, of all people, and the Trapanese, of all Sicilians, when it comes to their pizza, a regional variation of Sicilian-style pizza? Next time I must leave behind my pizza reference points, from Naples to New York. I must give my preference for thin-crusted, puffy-rimmed pizzas with only a few select toppings a night off.

Pizzeria Calvino, Act II

Possessing a smartphone and the telephone number printed on the Calvino staff t-shirts is not enough to secure a reservation. Bereft of family connections we are barred again from seeing the seating areas, much less eating in one. This time I am too hungry to fear bodily harm as a consequence of my jumping ahead of the wrong person. I push to the counter and await my moment with the man who takes all orders and all the money and inspects all the cooked pizzas (few of them Margheritas btw). A busy man, that Signor Calvino.

I choose two pizza varieties with pungency and pizzazz: the Trapanese, with anchovy, tomato, garlic, mozzarella, parsley and oregano, and the Alla “Salvo” con mozzarella, with tomato, mozzarella, potato, black olive, tuna, oregano and onion. This time the “five-minute” walk back to our apartment takes us three minutes.

We dig in: The salty bite of the anchovies in the Trapanese and the olives in the Alla “Salvo” are their salvation, cutting through the bloat and putting their mark on the mozzarella. The potato really works. I could get to like this pizza.

The following afternoon, at the conclusion of a private tour of the Donnafugata winery in Marsala, we are led from the cellars to a building in the rear of the property and into one of its handsome tasting rooms. We’ve gained admittance to the inner sanctums of one of Italy’s most prestigious wineries but not yet the back rooms of a pizzeria some 23 kilometres (about 14 miles) up the Mediterranean coast. As our charming host, Donnafugata’s Anna Ruini, pours us glasses of Mille e una Notte, an award-winning red of great complexity and elegance, my mind drifts. Between sweet sips of Ben Ryé I pose a question you, the casual observer, may view as unrelated to what makes it one of the world’s exceptional dessert wines:

“Anna, have you ever been to Pizzeria Calvino?”

Anna reveals she has visited the pizzeria she’s heard so much about since moving to Sicily from Northern Italy but it proved impossible to get anywhere near a pizza. Too many people spilling out onto the Via Nunzio Nasi. Nothing to resemble a queue. No sure route to the counter and Signor Calvino. I nod in sympathy.

At that very moment I receive a text from Giuseppe Venza, the well-connected Trapanese pharmacist who has rented us his apartment. He’s managed to reserve a table for us that night at Calvino. I suppress a smug smile.

Pizzeria Calvino, Act III

I introduce myself to Signor Calvino and point to my camera. Signor Calvino is all smiles. With sweeping arm movements he directs me to the kitchen. My wife and son are escorted by a man-in-white-shirt to one of six utilitarian dining rooms each too small to park a Vespa 98.

I take photos of the pizzaioli dressing pizzas on long wooden boards and loading these onto racks. (Calvino’s pizza queue is as organised as its people queue is chaotic.) I aim my lens into a pizza oven with two wood fires and enough room to park a Fiat 500. I photograph the men-in-white-shirts at the kitchen passthrough as they attack each new pizza with their two-handled mezzalunas, carving chessboards over the surfaces of the charred crusts with cross cuts of the rounded half-moon blades.

I make a show of it for the locals who may be wonder how a foreigner and his camera have managed to get the run of the place. The Sicilians-in-waiting can’t be bothered to so much as to look in my general direction.

I take a seat with my wife and son. Watching as pizzas, none of them Margheritas, are served to the other tables I experience two epiphanies: The first, that the men-in-white-shirts are waiters; the second, no mozzarella. I repeat, no mozzarella.

We order two pizzas with grated Pecorino Siciliano in place of mozzarella. Each is a revelation. The Pizza Rianata is a platform for anchovy, fresh tomato, garlic, parsley, oregano and olive oil brought together by the intense aroma and salty accents of the grated Pecorino. As the cheese melts it marries with the rim of the puffy charred crust, a divine effect. I love this pizza.

For a triumphant exit I decide the only way left to impress the Sicilians-in-waiting is for them to hear me address Signor Calvino as Salvatore. As I bid him farewell I put my arm around his shoulder while initiating the sort of warm handshake you extend only to a favourite uncle:

“Grazie, grazie mille, Saaaa…..Saaaa….Salvatore.”

The Sicilians-in-waiting react with unrestrained indifference.

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.

When Pino Cuttaia advises young, ambitious Sicilian chefs to follow his example and work abroad to experience new techniques and unfamiliar foods he is not necessarily pointing them towards London or New York. The overseas destinations he has in mind are on mainland Italy and in particular the north, where you find such curiosities as polenta and, stranger still, butter. Butter, for the uninitiated, is a dairy product made by churning milk or cream and is often used in place of olive oil.

But, as Cuttaia and Italian food journalist Roberta Corradin made clear to Londoners at his informal Galleria Illy talk and tasting  (see video), a chef with Michelin stars in his eyes no longer needs to leave his native Sicily for good to pursue them. With the island only recently gaining recognition for its culinary aspirations and new regionalism, Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Catania, Enna, Messina, Palermo, Ragusa, Siracusa and Trapani are no longer just the provinces of cucina di nonna – grandmother’s kitchen. Forget the trattoria image: One highly rated restaurant, for example, Cuttaia’s La Madia, can turn a small, nondescript seaside town, such as Licata, into a destination for diners and chefs travelling from abroad, this time meaning Tuscany AND London.

It might have been his wife’s homesickness, more than his own, that ultimately lured Cuttaia back south to Licata from Piedmont in 2000. But the two-Michelin-starred chef clearly missed the flavours of his youth. His is a cutting-edge cuisine focused, paradoxically, on the past, filtering cherished memories of childhood through modern techniques. At Galleria Illy it wasn’t merely the memory of melanzane alla parmigiana Cuttaia wished to evoke. It was the still sweeter recollection of del giorno dopo (“the day after”) aubergine Parmesan. On summer afternoons young Sicilian boys love to dig into the chilled leftovers when their mothers either aren’t looking – or, more likely, pretending not to notice.

For the Galleria audience Cuttaia cleverly presented his del giorno dopo in small tasting glasses as a layered parfait of fried baby aubergine topped with a purée of aubergine, egg yolk and ricotta, a foam of Parmigiano-Reggiano and the Sicilian cheese Caciocavallo Ragusano and a chopped tomato and olive oil garnish. This may not have resembled anyone’s grandmother’s aubergine Parmesan, but the flavours were true to memory – Cuttaia’s guiding principle – and the custard-smooth textures transformed an old standard in Sicily as well as other regions of Italy into a new and guilty pleasure. This was dessert to start a meal, a small boy stealing something cool and creamy from the fridge after his mother stepped out of the kitchen.

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Cuttaia closed the show with bags of ricotta cream – the only thing that a Sicilian kid likes better in a cone than gelato. He piped this cannoli filling into pastry horns in the traditional manner, dipping them in crushed pistachios (Sicilian, naturally), adorning them with orange peel and powdering them with icing sugar. Then he took what was left of all the ingredients and improvised a deconstructed cannoli, crushing the pastry with his fingers and using the small pieces as the crunchy foundation for a cannoli parfait.

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So how was Cuttaia’s deconstructed cannoli parfait? Let’s just say I waited for the moment when he was looking the other way – or pretending to do so – and stole a second serving.

It got worse. They didn’t only bring memories of Italy with them; they carried spoils, too: Bottarga di tonno rosso from Marzamemi, Gerardo di Nola long spaghetti from Gragnano, Poggio di Bortolone extra virgin olive oil from the Chiramonte Gulfi winery of the same name.  The first thing one of our house guests did after setting down his bags was commandeer our kitchen and toss together a large bowl of spaghetti alla bottarga con limone e prezzemolo.

As I ate his maddeningly impeccable pasta I chewed over my London EATinerary:

St. John Bread and Wine
Present (coffee from World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies)
Monmouth Coffee (Borough Market)
Kappacasein (toasted cheese sandwich)
Tayyabs
De Gustibus Borough Market (salt beef)
Dock Kitchen
Petersham Nurseries

Each outing began with a steep climb from our temporary home in Crouch End to the Highgate tube station. Charming as this leafy stretch may be in its autumnal splendor, the 20-minute hike was no stroll through the Piedmontese vineyards. If my friends wanted to burn their quadriceps and destroy their knees I’m sure they would have chosen to do so while in the bucolic hills of Langhe and Monferrato. The white truffles of Alba do wonders for ruptured tendons. Moreover, it was difficult for them to enjoy their walks in this deceptively calm area of North London given the clear and present danger of being run off the pavement at any moment by a Bugaboo buggy or a Micro kick scooter.

They made it safely to the first 4 stops on my food tour without incident. Their luck changed at Tayyabs, where the queue inside the dining room moved at the pace of a glacier – that is to say, a glacier prior to the era of global warming. A more benevolent Tayyabs would hand out naan noshes and toothpick-skewered sheekh kebabs to ease the long wait. Instead they torture you for 90 minutes by parading sizzling platters of succulent kebabs and lamb chops within inches of your nostrils at 10-second intervals. The dizzying aroma from the Punjabi spice mix is so potent it could be used in place of smelling salts to revive any Tayyabs waiters knocked unconscious by the fists of the victims left to starve on the endless queue.

The Friday night journey to Dock Kitchen, beside the Grand Union Canal in Ladbroke Grove, took 1 hour 50 minutes – over 30 minutes longer than the London Journey Planner estimate. Suffice to say that if you are going to travel nearly two hours to a Grand Canal you want it to be the one in Venice. That schlep, however, was no more bothersome than a November breeze when compared to our Saturday expedition to Richmond’s Petersham Nurseries. We left the house at 11am for a 12:30 lunch booking and arrived at 1:40pm. Royal Mail would have delivered us to our destination more quickly than the District line.

Steven Biondolillo is a respected marketing consultant who should be famous for his radius restaurant-rating system. Instead of using stars or point scales to evaluate restaurants he scores them according to the distance you would be willing to travel to dine there. Under his radius system, elBulli might rate a 5,000 to indicate a radius of 5,000 miles within which the restaurant would be worth a detour. A sympathetic critic might award Subway sandwich shop a score of 0.00000013.

For London purposes the Biondolillo radius system needs to be revised. The journey from front door to first course must be measured in minutes, not miles. And so, if Petersham Farms, described by these two ultimately delighted Californians as “Chez Panisse in the English countryside”, merits a journey of 160 minutes, then award it a rating of 160.

Judged solely by my friends’ comments I have critiqued the London food tour as follows:

St. John Bread and Wine – 90 minutes
Present – 30 minutes
Monmouth – 30 minutes
Kappacasein – 40 minutes
Tayyabs – 60 minutes
De Gustibus – 20 minutes
Dock Kitchen – 30 minutes
Petersham Nurseries – 160 minutes

Of course it’s possible we appreciate things more when we experience great difficulties beforehand. The French have an expression for it: après l’effort le réconfort – “after effort comes comfort.” Sounds to me like a great poster slogan for Transport for London.