I’ve said before that for all the attempts to make “London pizza” a thing, or our current obsession with the New York slice, the true pizza of this city has been Neapolitan for quite some time, at least since Franco Manca muscled in on Pizza Express’s territory. There’s scarcely a high street in London where you can’t get a pretty passable pizza in the southern Italian style, and half the pizzerias in Naples have made a point of opening a branch here. I think we’d have a pretty good claim to doing that style better than most Italian cities, let alone elsewhere in the world.
So it’s strange to eat Neapolitan in a city where it’s a novelty, not the norm.
Bar Del Monte is a trendy little no-reservations joint owned by Oliver Pastan. Located in Washington DC’s Mount Pleasant, it’s not too far from 2 Amys, where Pastan’s parents have apparently been slinging pizza since 2001. Still, the Pastans’ pizzas remain the exception in a city (and, perhaps, country) where crisp New York slices are seen as pizza’s default state.
It means both chefs and customers approach the pizza a little differently to how I’d expect. Looking around the room, just about every table orders less than one pizza per person, and shares them amongst the group. The pizzas even come pre-sliced for that purpose — a sentence which I appreciate makes me sound like I’ve just stepped out of the 19th Century, blinking with astonishment at the invention of the pizza cutter, but it just isn’t the norm for Neapolitan.
The biggest tell comes the moment you pick a slice up: it doesn’t flop, it folds. That firm base, often regarded as one of the key markers of quality in a New York slice, isn’t often found back in Naples, where the quick, hot bake is intended to make the crust puff but not crisp. Perhaps the true Neapolitan flop is a step too far for the American audience, though Del Monte’s compromise is no bad thing in practice — there’s a crunch to each heavily blackened slice, and with it a bitter note that helps balance the sweetness of the tomatoes and brings out all the more flavour from the dough itself.
Toppings are simple and sparse, in what feels like another effort to avoid the soupiness that Neapolitan’s detractors love to bemoan. A margherita is thinly dressed with tomato sauce, basil, and occasional chunks of buffalo mozzarella, while our second pizza pairs thin slices of chanterelles with rosemary, garlic, and a grating of parmesan. The ingredients on each are excellent, the proportions carefully balanced; these are no less impressive for feeling a little unexpected. There are only two more pizzas to fill out the compact offering, which is less than half the size of the selection of starters.
Those are worth spending some time over though. Anchovies come bathing in a golden pool of olive oil and the suggestion of tomato, with a smear of buffalo butter and thick slabs of soft sourdough bread to smear it on. The same loaf pulls double duty in a bruschetta, piled so high with tomato, cucumber, and garlic that I was forced to admit defeat and grab cutlery to eat it with. Local fennel and courgette come battered and fried to a light tempura crisp, served alongside a surprisingly subtle aioli, garlicky enough to make you care but not so much as to overpower the vegetables’ delicate flavours.
I hesitated over the prices at first — even by American standards, $25 for a margherita feels like someone’s having a laugh — but tips are included, and portions are fairly generous, so our final bill didn’t end up unreasonable at all. Throw in a strong salted martini, and Bar Del Monte’s appeal would be hard to deny except for the most zealous of Neapolitan purists.
The photo of that pizza lured me in like a moth to the flame.