Pizza at The Salt House...too good to be loved!

‘So fair and foul a day I have not seen.’ - Hamlet

It’s the same place that not far ago had ruffled me with a dough-disk down with Rigor Mortis. That I would rather use to decapitate. And, messing with Pizza gets my goat like no other. Hardly had I reconciled with the heartbreak than a prospect to gain a chef’s sympathy in the guise of a Foodies’ meet at ‘The Salt House’ showed up. [By the way, upsetting a cook before he feeds you is vexing a barber that holds the blade to the jugular.] However, Auroni – a chef full of sangfroid, having duly heard me eased my niggling gloom like a genie by spinning three remarkable pizzas out of thin air. What followed was a phantasmagoria of requital and wonder. And, I exclaimed - let bygone be bygone. Well, not seriously!

Cherry tomato, roasted garlic, Mascarpone and verdant Basil oil Pizza had the riveting tang of garlic pitted against a buttery cheese on a ‘wet’ crust primed passably in wood-fire. No dripping. No drama. Just a one-act play more of textures than flavours that barely lingered past the last gulp. Pepperoni pizza, laid on an affable crust overlaid with delicious meat, stopped shades short of the line that promises singularity. I bemoaned not keeping from fancying Neapolitans or Romanas at The Salt House, and basking in what they serve instead. To me, Pizza Bianche are unique but off-putting like a Loren in her saggy eighties. Mea culpa. Delicious strips of bacon drizzled on a fluffy albino disk with a yielding cornicione proved commonplace whose only claim to fame was a misplaced fairness.

It sadly seems to grow tougher with time to contain a Pizza-phile of my order. Every yeasted flatbread I met that evening paraded annoying perfection with a perceptible thrift in the use of cheese. But, no trace of the defining chaos or mischief I seek [so does an Italian] so damningly in them. Unrestraint lends soul to a pizza. Without a mess it surely is Beethoven’s 9th without the chorus. Awful! Ask me and not a humbug how exciting it feels to negotiate a lavish avalanche of meaty toppings and cheese rolling off a slice. Or lock horns over the surviving cut. So, imperfection and immoderation - being the keystones of a thoroughbred Pizza, are what I would wish The Salt House in plenty. After all, who trades a well-endowed belle for a stilted Barbie? Or, a work of art for a calendar?