Antica Pizzeria,

Marina del Rey, CA

We visited Antica Pizzeria in Marina Del Rey (which is just as much Los Angeles as any of the other ninety-nine towns in L.A. County). The headline on Antica's website says "Traditional Neapolitan Restaurant", and Antica is all about the tradition.



In fact, owner Peppe Miele is the founder of the American branch of the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, and offers training in the traditional Neapolitan style of pizza-making. You can learn more about this organization and its discipline on our Vera Pizza Napoletana page.

On entering Antica, we saw a pizzaiolo stretching dough, and when he picked it up, he had an almost perfectly translucent disc. We could literally see his hands through the dough! This was promising.



While we're familiar with Neapolitan-style pizza, we'd never eaten in a certified VPN pizzeria (we've never been to Naples either - yet). So we were really looking forward to the authentic Neapolitan pizza promised by Antica.

First of all, the service was excellent. Friendly, polite, attentive without being distracting, we liked the wait staff. When Cary started photographing the pizzas, we were treated as if every patron takes pictures of their dinner before eating.

We ordered the most traditional of Neapolitan pizzas, the Margherita (see our Italian Pizza History page for more info), as well as a Marinara (tomato sauce, oregano, and garlic - no cheese) and what Antica calls a Pizza Siciliana (mozzarella, grilled eggplant, basil and chopped tomato - no sauce). The Siciliana is usually made with smoked mozzarella, but we don't like smoked mozz, so we ordered it with fresh mozzarella.

First, a disclaimer: this was our first pizza outing since we'd been to Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, which is one tough act to follow.

The dough, basis of all pizza, was quite good, and tasted better as our meal went on, but it wasn't spectacular. Since the VPN "Pizza Discipline" accepts only one type of flour ('00', a superfine wheat flour) and does not allow for any shortening in the dough, the flavor must come from the flour, salt, and the fermentation skills of the pizzaiolo. It must be very difficult to create a crust that could stand alone using a recipe as basic as this. We noted a lack of variety in the "hole structure" (the air bubbles in the crust), and although the spotting looked good on the bottom, the pizzas could have benefited from another minute in the oven. Maybe it just wasn't their best night for dough - these things happen.

Antica's Margherita was perfectly balanced: the fresh, homemade cheese was delicious and the tomatoes bright and tasty. The Siciliana and the Marinara were equally good. Lillian particularly liked the paper-thin slices of eggplant on the Siciliana. Even so, as tasty as they were, these were not pizzas we'll be pining for in the days and months to come.

Cary liked the pizza at Antica a little more than Lillian did, but still wasn't wowed. "It's the best pizza I've ever eaten in LA," says Cary, "but I haven't had pizza here since 1988!" 

You can make something just right, and exactly according to plan. You can follow a recipe to the letter, and please almost everyone. Antica Pizzeria is wonderfully sincere and we have no doubt that their pizza is a perfectly authentic representation of the pizza in Naples. We prefer a more intense taste, a richer flavor, or maybe just more passion in our pizza. Still, Antica Pizzeria is a must-visit in Los Angeles.

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