The contents of this blog are matters of opinion formed over one more visits. There has been some artistry applied and metaphors and similes should not necessarily be taken literally.
Crazy Nonna is our local woodfired pizzeria. We walk past it several times a week on the way to the grocery store or the parcel locker, but have never eaten in, only ordered take-away.
The Crazy Nonna Pizza ($26), with San Marzano tomatoes, fior di latte, basil, pork sausage, ham and salami was super tasty. It was absolutely topped with toppings, with each bite presenting multiple flavours and animals in one.
The Nonna Irene ($28) with its San Marzano tomatoes, Fiore di latte cheese, hot salami, chilli oil, stracciatella and alleged dash of honey was super delicious too, with the creaminess and mildness of the stracciatella providing the perfect foil for the spicy salami. The honey was difficult to appreciate, but appreciated all the same. The pizzas at Nonna’s were 2 for 2 bangers.
My partner loves a good pasta, even though I am a bit iffy about takeaway pastas in general. We had the boscaiola ($26), which though acceptable (she enjoyed it thoroughly), I’m sure would’ve been better eaten in a dine-in capacity. I just don’t think pasta usually travels really well.
We ate at La Disfida two days before Christmas, two years after the first time we walked past it on our way to Yakitori Jin (really great, by the way). The place was almost empty on this Saturday 23rd, though my friend and colleague DTC who first told me about this place said he couldn’t get in at all on a weekday 27th, just four days later.
This is a picture of bread.
This is burrata with smoked/marinated eggplant and pomegranates ($25). It has been my long held belief that burrata represents extremely poor value when ordered at a restaurant, but I simply can’t stop my girlfriend from ordering it every time. I tell her, “we have burrata at home”, and really the options from La Casa Del Formaggio ($6.50) and whatever company makes the $8 burrata at Coles Local (I thought it was Fresh Fodder but I’m being proven wrong by Google at the time of writing) are perfectly fine, and in fact better than the one we had, often with a runnier and less solid centre. I just don’t find an additional $18.50 of value in some mashed eggplant, a miniscule amount of pomegranate, and a drizzle of EVOO. That’s how I feel.
Somehow dining with a family of seafood haters we were able to order the busiate with fresh snapper, calamari, and prawns with olives, green peas, chilli & cherry tomatoes ($36) off their specials menu. It had a pretty good mix of tomato and seafood flavour, though I think the tomato dominated over the seafood and I wouldn’t have minded some extra ocean-ness to this dish. The pasta had an enjoyable chew to it.
Pasta #2 was more tomato, a gnocchi della nonna pomodoro e basilico ($26). My partner, who usually loves all forms of potato but apart from gnocchi, did actually enjoy this. It would’ve been nice to have more than one basilico in it, given the basilico makes up 16.7% of the words of this dish but much less percentage by either weight or volume.
Both pizzas we had were pretty good, and really the reason we came here. I was banned by the group from ordering anything with anchovy on it, so a number of attractive options were out of contention. The barletta ($27) with a tomato base, mozzarella, prosciutto crudo, basil, black pepper, and olive oil was pretty good. Good tangy flavour to the tomato base, well balanced with thin slices of prosciutto, and an actual showing of basil leaves that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to write about in the dish’s title.
The quattro gusti ($28) with tomato, mozzarella, hot salame, eggplant, pork sausage, and wild mushrooms was what I settled on as my pick from the menu. This was a really tasty pizza, if I do say so myself, with a bit of spice from the salami, a nice rich and moist sausage, and a smattering of vegetables and fungi to make you feel like they’re doing something good for your body whilst devouring a thousand calories of grease. It was delicious and absolutely loaded with toppings, although this drew attention to La Disfida’s very thin and flimsy bases.
It was an impossibility to eat this pizza by hand without folding or wrapping it up, as the base simply didn’t have the ability to remain rigid under the weight of its toppings. This is something we experienced with the more lightly laden barletta as well, but which definitely came into play more with the quattro gusti. It didn’t make it less yummy, but it did make it more messy to eat.
Overall thoughts Pretty good showing for pizza, though I’m not as sure about the pasta, and definitely not convinced by the burrata. If anyone has suggestions on how to fix my burrata problem, please let me know. I’m thinking I pre-read the menu for any future restaurant meals and replicate the burrata with the same toppings 3 days before we go. Thoughts?
What can I tell you about Bella Brutta, in the haze of six months after our visit, that will add to the online discourse about this already widely known restaurant?
Probably nothing, so let me bore you with some poorly taken photos (the steam is a killer) and some very brief thoughts.
The clam pizza ($32) is very good. I loved the seafood flavour mixed with the zesty citrusy fermented chilli. This is one of their signature pizzas and for good reason.
The sausage pizza ($29), meaty, was good but not in the level of specialty as the clam. It’s a pizza you could get from any good pizza shop, with all the requisite sasuage, tomato (pretentiously named pomodoro on their menu), fior di latte, and fennel seed toppings.
The cavolo nero pizza ($28) was a vegetarian feature, with a lacinato kale apparently traditional in Tuscan cuisine. The flavours were good, vegetably, and I didn’t hate the confit garlic, even though I was worried that I would. Also missable under the shadow of the surf clam.
The casarecce with spanner crab in lobster oil ($28) was an excellent and memorable pasta. I’m really surprised that my seafood averse fiance and her seafood averse brother allowed us to have two seafood dishes, but this was great. Again, so much seafood umami intensity.
Overall thoughts: While the overall quality of food at Bella Brutta is good, the seafood dishes (surf clam pizza and crab pasta) are the unmissable items here.
As a disciple of New York City food videos and pizza in general, My Mother’s Cousin has been high on my list of restaurants to visit for a little while now. Moving to the vaguely inner, vaguely South, vaguely West of Sydney has finally given me opportunity to go. As someone who’s never been to New York and whose only New York style pizza has been a single slice of Marinara from Frankie’s back in 2017 I really had no idea what to expect, and probably thanks to my partner’s choice in pizza I still don’t know what to expect, even having been.
I am grateful for my partner arriving at the restaurant before me, and ordering pizza so that I could inhale it and make a mad dash to the other side of the city for my night shift. Her choice of pizza was the Snag-a-Relli ($27), a 13-inch pizza with fior di latte, “pomodoro” which I think is just Italian marketing speak for tomato, Italian sausage, Smoked housemade “MMC” sausage, parmigiano reggiano, and pickled Jalapenos. It’s not what I would’ve chosen, but I sent her with no instructions, and again I am grateful.
This pizza, if not the Platonic ideal of the New York City Slice™, was still a pretty good pizza. The pizza was highly moist with a structure that didn’t quite stand up to it, resulting in some drips and some sagging of the very thin base of the slice on holding. This sagging was aided by the superior, top-heavy topping to base ratio, with plenty of toppings on board for maximal (but not supra-maximal) flavour. It reminded me of the meaty pizza with Jalapenos that my mum would order from Domino’s or Pizza Hut Wentworthville back in the early 2000s – though I think in the context of their last fifteen years of health kick (metabolically they’re doing great for their age) I don’t think either of my parents have had pizza in a very long time. Despite these comparisons, MMC’s Snag-a-Relli was a decidedly elevated adventuer over the old $5-with-coupon deep dish pizza (more bread for the same money!) from back in the day.
Having said all of this nonsense, my overall feedback is that the Snag-a-Relli is a good pizza, and well topped to boot. I particularly liked the texture of the sausage topping (it remains unclear at this point which pieces of sausage were Italian and which were Martian), which I felt was quite moist, as well as its taste, which I found to be not too salty (frequent readers of this blog will understand that this is quite a compliment from me). I don’t know that I would even change anything – it’s just not what I wanted in my mind, but did not convey with my words to my partner.
The hot honey with parmigiano reggiano wet wings ($12 for 6) was our other pick. They were my consolation prize for not being able to have the hot honey and pepperoni pizza, but sadly not as good as I expected. I felt that the honey was sweeter than I would’ve liked, and I was also surprised that “hot” meant warm rather than spicy. My partner enjoyed these wings, and I must admit that perhaps part of why I wasn’t so enamoured by them was the rift between expectation and reality.
THOUGHTS Pretty good. I also like that they have separate handwashing facilities inside, because they know you’re going to make a mess. Can recommend.
Fratelli Pulcinella really makes you question the difference between a ‘sit-in restaurant’ and a ‘takeaway only pizza shack but feel free to sit in our extensive backyard with undercover seating and tables, but don’t call us a sit-in restaurant’. Our visit came after a strong recommendation from our friend and local baked goods oracle CRN (née CRE), who had hired them to cater for their wedding.
Their operating model, at least on our afternoon visit between two stroke calls at the local quaternary referral centre, seemed to be extremely hands off, with the backyard pizza kitchen completely unpopulated when we arrived, staff being summoned from within the presumably air-conditioned confines of the house by an online order placed by phone. It honestly seems like a highly efficient and comfortable way to work.
We will start with a description of the Vesuvio ($30), a double layer pizza of tomato, ham, mushrooms, italian sausage, mozzarella & parmesan cheese. The flavours were good, with a saltiness erring to the saltier side of things. The base pizza structure was good with good foldability as well as long-lived crispness of base, though I’m not sure that I’m fully sold on the double-layeredness of it all. I don’t know that it really added anything above and beyond what could be achieved by a conventionally structured pizza, nor did an extremely cursory web search of the history of double layered pizzas in the Neapolitan school really turn up any useful results.
The Funghi ($20) with truffle mushroom pesto, mushrooms, mozzarella, rocket, garlic & chilli oil was a rare vegetarian pick for us, but not one that we regret. The dominant earthy flavour of mushrooms was matched well with the freshness of the huge amount of rocket layered on top, though neither my partner nor I were able to pick out any hint of chilli flavour (although on review of the photos whilst writing this post I do see some red spots). I again enjoyed the extreme thinness of crust, which held a great crispiness, even if it did sag under the generous weight of the cheese on top.
OVERALL I agree with the general opinion that Fratelli Pulcinella offers the best pizza in Parramatta at this time – though to be honest it’s not a high bar given its main competitors have been Bondi Pizza and the recently-deceased CicciaBella, a restaurant for which I had not published a review until now because I didn’t want my site with three monthly readers to be blamed for their inevitable downfall.
