Antica
Pizzeria,
Marina del Rey, CA
NOTE: Antica Pizzeria is now closed, and looking for a new space. This review is a look at what it was and, hopefully, will be again.
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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