Ingredients are the most important things to making a great pizza and at Spasso Milano you get the best pizza in the world.
If you imagine getting on a plane and flying to Italy, home of the pizza, and driving to a pizzeria in say Naples, supposed birthplace of the pizza, you could not find a more authentic or better produced pizza. You most certainly would not find it any cheaper.
So imagine my surprise when I found that you can get the best pizza in the world with ingredients sourced from Italy at a cheaper price than you would pay in Italy, here in Straits Quay, Penang.
Wherever you go in the world you will find a pizza restaurant or an Italian restaurant serving pizza but how many of them are genuine Italian pizzas.
Pizza should be baked in a wood fired oven. Pizza should have Mozzarella Cheese and homemade tomato sauce, ‘just like mamma used to make’. At Spasso Milano you get just this.
The pizza dough is made by hand freshly every day. Good quality flour rich in glutens (the stuff that makes it sticky and elastic!) mixed with water, oil and salt. Left to prove, then separated into individual portion size balls ready for rolling as and when the orders roll in.
The sauce is made from skinned and seeded fresh tomatoes that are gently heated through with finely diced onions, garlic and infused with herbs.
The cheese is Mozzarella, nothing less will do.
These above ingredients make up the basis for the most simple of pizzas, the margarita with just the decoration to be added of fresh locally grown basil leaves.
The aroma of the basil wafts up and sets the taste buds a tingle before you even get to smell the freshly baked dough, tomato sauce and cheese.
This is also, without the basil, the basis for just about every pizza.
My personal favorite, and let’s be honest the beauty with pizza is that there are infinite combinations to suit any taste, is the Neapolitan. Pizza with anchovy (love ‘em or hate ‘em) and capers, my dream pizza.
We watched and listened to Chef Felice, who having been raised in Milano in Northern Italy knows a thing or three about pizza, showed us the right way to make it.
After an illustrious career working in Italy, Chef Felice moved onto work in the Maldives for a few years and then Phuket, Thailand.
It was from there that he finally moved down to Malaysia to open Spasso Milano in KL two years ago.
The first restaurant was very well received but to be honest just not in the right area. Spasso Milano was opened last year at Straits Quay, Penang and only last month the KL Spasso was moved to Pavilion where it is now going from strength to strength.
This keeps Felice very busy with two locations, two kitchens, and two sets of chefs to control but this native Italian takes it all in his stride.
Spasso Milano has much more to offer than Pizza but as I said in the introduction this really is the best Pizza I have ever had in the world. So if you fancy some world class pizza, get down to Spasso Milano in Straits Quay or if you are heading to KL you can try it there on the 6th Floor of Pavilion.
