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Antica Pizzeria
13455 Maxella Ave., Villa Marina Marketplace, 2nd Flr.,
Marina del Rey
310-577-8182
Hours: Tue.-Thu., 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. & 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Fri.,
11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; Fri.-Sat., 5:30-11p.m.; Sun., 5:30-10 p.m.
Peppe Miele, owner of Antica Pizzeria, serves the only pie in Southern
California that is certified as genuinely Neapolitan.
Pizza is basically just a piece of bread dough with a tomato topping.
But what adifference in the details. Nowhere else on earth does it as
well as Naples, the southern Italian city that sprawls in the shadow
of Vesuvius.
Maybe like San Francisco's sourdough, the quality of Neapolitan pizza
is due to some fortunate synergy of yeasts and climate. The crust has
the misshapen, handcrafted look of raku pottery and emerges blistered
from the oven, the rim a fat coil just high enough to keep the topping
from overflowing. The secret is the quality of the ingredients: the
pear-shaped San Marzano tomatoes grown on the region's volcanic soil
and the extraordinary bufala mozzarella made in the nearby
countryside.
If I'm anywhere near Naples, I can never resist driving into the city
for a pizza. One restaurant there makes what I consider the ideal
Margherita. Just off the municipal square, Pulcinella is an upscale
pizzeria and restaurant with a contemporary design aesthetic. No
red-checked tablecloths here. Ask for "la bufalina."
Instead of tomato sauce, it's made with quartered pomodorini (fresh
cherry tomatoes) and bufala so fresh it weeps milk. The ferocious heat
of the wood-burning oven cooks the pizza in just a few minutes. It
emerges a molten pool of bufala and tomatoes garnished with a few lone
sweet basil leaves, sitting on a crunchy, fragrant bread crust.
Stupendously delicious.
In Los Angeles the best place to find Naples-style pizza is at Antica
Pizzeria on 3rd Street, and also at its second location in Marina del
Rey. Not only does owner Peppe Miele hail from the Naples area, he's
also one of the few U.S. members (actually the first) to be a member
of Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana.
That means pizzas must be baked on the brick floor of an oven fired
only with wood; that the dough must be made only with flour, natural
yeast and water; that a Margherita, for example, must be topped only
with good quality tomatoes, real mozzarella, Parmesan and fresh basil.
His Margherita is artful in its simplicity -- just loosely chopped
tomatoes, little pools of melted mozzarella (though not bufala) and a
few whole basil leaves. That's it. Try it.
-- S. Irene Virbila
Times Restaurant Critic
Cross street:
Lincoln Boulevard
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