Bar Etna, N16

Molten marinara

Phew. For a minute there, I was worried London might go a whole week without the opening of a North American-inflected pizzeria, leaving us briefly bereft of muddled explanations of New Haven style, or Brits trying to earnestly throw around the word “pie.”

Fortunately, Bar Etna has emerged in Newington Green, just in the nick of time. And unlike most of the city’s other comparable openings, it has some authentic expertise: it’s co-owned by Joe Beddia, whose Pizzeria Beddia apparently has a credible claim to selling Philadelphia’s best pizza. His partners in London have pedigree too, albeit with different cuisines: Ed McIlroy’s Four Legs, previously responsible for the likes of The Plimsoll and Tollington’s.

McIlroy has a well-established love of Spanish and Mediterranean dining culture; Beddia presumably knows a thing or two about Italian-American. Bar Etna feels like an attempt to weld the two together. It starts, true to its name, in the bar. Just as at The Plimsoll, half the site is reserved for walk-ins willing to drink and eat on a perch, whether at the bar itself or along the narrow counter space running around the rim.

This is the European half of the equation. On a sunny spring evening it felt buzzy and bright, £5 negronis flowing freely and small plates scattered about, delicate anchovies and fat judión beans lazing in pools of golden olive oil — proof that no-one involved is precious about keeping things strictly Italian.

The star is the tomato pie (shit, they’ve got me saying it too). A true Italian-American icon, this is an offshoot of Sicilian sfincione, readily found across bakeries in Beddia’s Philadelphia, or indeed my partner Vivian’s Rhode Island upbringing. Bakery pizza, as she grew up calling it, still looms large in her consciousness, and we’ve chased it down together from Sicily’s west coast to America’s east — Bar Etna’s lives up to any we’ve eaten together so far. Slabs of the housemade, bubbly focaccia are smeared liberally with a bright marinara, thick enough to leave bite marks in, then dusted with oregano and drizzled with oil. It’s sweet, and savoury, and sharp, and for this, if nothing else, I know that Vivian and I will be back.

The space is beautiful, the snacks delicious, but as a bar I’m not wholly convinced. Those negronis are short and strong, good value for a fiver, with a sweet, dark vermouth at the same price if you prefer, but the rest of the pricing is firmly in inflationary-financial-crisis territory. There are three house spritzes and a rotating cocktail, pleasant enough but a little cloying, and steep at £12. The house wine is drinkable but not special at £9 and up for a small glass, while the bottle list starts at £45 and climbs quickly. The Plimsoll is a wonderful pub to share a few pints in, but so far Bar Etna’s booze is expensive without much to show for it — the appeal is mostly in its food.

Not that the pizza is any cheaper, £17 at a minimum, but the food feels special enough to justify the outlay. You can order whole pizzas at the bar, but the counter is so small that I can only imagine it feeling cramped. Better, if you can, to secure a table in the back, the only area that can be reserved. Here is Etna’s American half, all white paper tablecloths and dim amber candlelight, a retro red sauce joint transposed to Newington Green.

There are four pizzas, all served on the sort of thin, crispy, short-crusted base that dominates London’s modern pizza scene. This is one of the better executions out there: the dough is cooked long enough to have crunch but kept thick enough to preserve a little chew; the blackened crust is left fractionally breadier to give you something to gnaw on. Crisp remains London’s leader for this style of baking, but Bar Etna is among the best of the rest, and its minuscule menu still manages to offer more interesting options than most.

The Number Four is my pick of the bunch, another straightforward, cheese-free showcase for that exquisite marinara, with the option to add anchovies if you prefer — a reassuring authoritarianism ensures you’re only allowed to customise each pizza with certain ingredients. The Number One is Etna’s take on the margherita, Irish coolea cheese paired with tomato and mozzarella, with extras like mushroom and pepperoni available. The Number Two is more interesting, even if it was lifted almost directly from Pizzeria Beddia’s menu: cream, chilli, greens, and more coolea, with the option to add on sausage. It’s rare I find a white pizza that I truly love; with its subtle bitter notes this might be the best in the city right now.

Then there’s the eponymous Etna Curry. This is the odd one out, a cream base topped with mozzarella and curry-spiced spinach, ragebait for Italian food purists. It’s clearly intended to evoke saag paneer, and the punchy spicing is a compelling counterpart to the cheese and cream. Unfortunately a heavy hand with salt undid the whole dish; it was a chore to finish even a single slice. Fix that, and this could be a standout, but instead it was the worst thing we ate all night.

Dessert is simply soft serve. There were two flavours on our visit, cream or coffee. The former was sweet and simple, but arrived in a droopy, slumped swirl; the latter is more interesting for its bitter edges, but a pert peak betrayed an icy, crystalline texture. Neither was bad, but you won’t miss much by skipping them.

Bar Etna is still only sputtering into life, but less than a week into its lifetime that’s understandable. Some of this feels quickly fixable — a little less salt in the curry, a bit more practice with the soft serve machine — though the drinks menu might need a more fundamental rethink. The essentials are here though, with good dough and outstanding marinara, already enough to place it in the upper echelons of London’s pizza hierarchy. If it can get better from here, Etna might truly erupt.