Tag: Pizza

Categories
Italian

Dom on Bruelli – Wollongong NSW Restaurant Review

My partner and I visited the number one rated (by averages) Italian restaurant in Wollongong last night, with an average of 4.9 stars across 60 reviews. Despite this, we were the only customers at Dom on Bruelli during our meal, with a staff to customer ratio of 2:1, which was maintained by the arrival of another couple just as we were leaving.

Seated in one corner of the extremely narrow but long restaurant, we had our choice of two pizzas and nothing else.

The salsiccia pizza ($28) was the less enjoyable of the two – a very mildly flavoured white pizza with a topping of sliced potato, confit garlic, parsley, fennel sausage, and a mixture of cheeses – ricotta, fior di latte, and parmesan.

Though I’m usually not one to complain about food being untasty, I’m afraid I have to in this case. In what I would consider an unusual move, the sausage was sliced rather than presented as caseless clumps on the pizza, and though this in itself didn’t distract from their flavour, their sparseness as well as their generally mild taste did mean that the pizza overall was less tasty. The different cheeses also were minimally salted, with the ricotta disappeared into the molten amalgamation, further adding to this problem. The potato slices were semi-crispy and again minimally seasoned. Perhaps the saving grace of this pizza was the restaurant’s housemade chilli oil, which added a bit of flavour and complexity to both the pizza at large as well as its voluminous crust.

I found the diavola pizza ($28) much more enjoyable, with bold flavours from the San Marzano tomatoes, fermented chilli, sopressa, nduja, and the rare appearance of guindillas, which I’ve not had before on a diavola. The presence of these little pickled chillis was key to adding an interesting zest and freshness to the pizza, cutting through the fatty fior di latte and meats, and making this a special pizza overall.

Thoughts on the structure
The base of this pizza was thin and floppy, meaning that we found that our slices were best eaten folded. Contrastingly, the crusts were voluminous, comprising a large percentage of the overall surface area of the pizza. Whilst my partner heretically discarded her crusts, I dutifully consumed all of mine with the help of chilli oil. But did there need to be so much?

I also just have no idea how they could possibly make money with 2 customers at a time during our 36 minute snapshot visit. Hopefully it got a bit businer for them as the night went on, but I suspect the huge patronage from the Wollongong Thursday night food market takes away from the local restaurants a bit.

Dom on Burelli
1/63 Burelli St, Wollongong NSW 2500

Categories
Italian

Lupa Pizzeria – Wollongong NSW Restaurant Review

I found myself having an extra night in Wollongong, and was craving some pizza. Both unwilling and unable to go to Kneading Ruby, having exhausted their pretty delicious menu back in 2021, we decided on Lupa, well recommended on the internet, which had a couple of open tables for walk-ins on a Sunday night.

The first thing I noticed about Lupa was this cute logo of a wolf providing milk to piglets? wolflets? the founders of Rome? on their window. It was cute but weird, kind of chaotic and modern.

My partner decided on the pizza, which was the quattro stagioni ($24), with tomato sauce, fior di latte, ham, salami, mushrooms, a single artichoke, and olives. Being simple folk who don’t know much about pizza lore, we had expected all of these ingredients to come mixed on the pizza, however this is not how it was. This pizza came in discrete sections, with Wikipedia stating that each section represents one Italian season.

It was actually very good, with a nice thin crust but with strong, non-floppy structure. The salami was quite delicious, likely an artisan variety rather than something more pedestrian. The artichoke was tender, marinated in some kind of vinegary substance, and the mushroom and ham definitely not problematic either. This pizza was so good that even before our pasta came I was regretting not just getting two pizzas.

The orchiette with pork sausage and mushroom ($22) was the pasta special for the night. It was quite al dente (probably too much for me), and I must admit that I didn’t love it, though my partner enjoyed it, possibly even more than the pizza itself. There was no sauce, instead being more of an oil-based pasta with a hint of aniseed flavour amongst the mushroom and pork sausage. I do wish that we had just ordered two pizzas, but I’m glad that my partner go to enjoy this pasta, and I’m also glad that I wasn’t in a situation where a number of patrons on a different table each ate their own pasta and didn’t get to try anyone else’s food at at all.

As we were leaving, our waiter said our visit wouldn’t be our last. He’s probably right. Yum.

Lupa Pizzeria
98-100 Keira St, Wollongong NSW 2500


Categories
Italian

Crazy Nonna – Campsie NSW Restaurant Review

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.

Local gem.

Crazy Nonna
60 Charlotte St, Campsie NSW 2194

Categories
Italian

La Disfida – Haberfield NSW Restaurant Review

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?

La Disfida
109 Ramsay St, Haberfield NSW 2045
02) 9798 8299

Categories
Italian

Bella Brutta – Newtown NSW Restaurant Review

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.

Bella Brutta
135 King St, Newtown NSW 2042
(02) 9922 5941