I'd heard that Rossopomodoro do a mean pizza, so we headed to the Covent Garden branch for supper. There was a small queue and we were advised that it would take up to 15 minutes to get seated. We ordered a bottle of wine which did not seem to be coming, so after 5 minutes I queried this with the waiter who'd served us. He was very apologetic, and quickly returned with two small glasses of red, which he gave us on the house. We were seated straight after. For starters we shared an antipasti platter, which included buffalo cheese (variety unspecified but similar to ricotta), roasted pepper, an overcooked boiled egg with an unattractive brown ring between yolk and white, a very small amount of mortadella, an even smaller amount of salami, some pecorino, a few leaves and a couple of olives. That the egg was the only item likely to have been cooked in house, and had been badly done so, left me fearing for the main event.
I'm happy to report, however, that I needn't have worried. This was good pizza, like seriously good pizza. I'd go so far as to say that it was one of the finest pizzas I've ever eaten in my entire life. I'm a lover of Franco Manca, but Rossopomodoro is at least it's equal. I usually go for meat as a topping, but kept it plain this time as there's no better test of a pizza's quality than sampling the plainest variety. The fluffy, chewy, slightly sour base would have been great on it's own, but the cheese and tomato topping elevated this pizza to epic proportions. I've read some other folks commenting that this chain's expansion (80 branches worldwide and counting) could be real threat to local Italian restaurants, but I'd hope that it would encourage them to raise their game rather than driving them to the wall. In my experience, the pizzas offered up by local Italians taste cheap, and have been badly cooked in a modern (not wood fired) oven. And I'd rather have a Rossopomodoro down my road than a Pizza Express.
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