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«Master of Margarita: The City's Best Pizza»

22.09.05

Pizza, one of humanity’s greatest inventions, is also one of the most versatile dishes: it can be something for slobs to stuff themselves with during Monday Night Football, or a nice meal in a good restaurant, or an energy source for deadline nights, as it tends to be in our case.

Sick as we are of every week eating delivery pizza that we can charitably describe as “weird,” we gathered together the Best Of Kyiv team to find pizza we could actually enjoy.

Cheesed Off

Il Patio near Bessarabka was, as always, packed with local middle management types and middle-aged ex-pats feeding their local girlfriends. Our table wasn’t so much fun – the AC was blowing right at us and the chicks at the table next to us smoked like locomotives. Our crabbiness evaporated as soon as our “four cheeses” pizza arrived. One of us, the pickiest pizza expert in our crew, came to the conclusion that the crust wasn’t crisp enough, but the rest were happy with the toppings and the ground Parmesan cheese and infused olive oil on the table. It was nice and fast, but we thought we could do better.

What followed was quite a journey.

Next on our list was Stradivari, that Italian restaurant right on Khreshchatyk. The place has got a beautiful location, and about a year ago we really liked it. By now, however, it seems that experiments with the menu have brought more headaches than benefits. Our team members, seated on the second floor and looking out over Kreshchatyk through elegant windows, were the only people in the place, which was sobering given that it was Friday night. Our pizzas, Lucis Perfetto and a Margarita, were quite small and not that great, but our starving crowd consumed them in minutes.

We issued onto the street. Where next? One of us remembered having encountered a pretty good pizza at Zdorovenky Buly, a nice big cafeteria set off more or less behind the Khreshchatyk metro building. An overly complicated system of ordering and paying up front forced us to spend at least 20 minutes trapped in an intense crowd of teenagers, students, party-goers, provincials and young tourists. At 8 p.m. on Friday, it seemed like lunch time in there. There was simply too much shoving. A pizza margarita and a Sicilian – that is, with pepperoni and bell peppers – was cheap, straight from the oven, and nice enough. Yet it was still fast-food pizza. Not our style, we decided – after all, a condition of our pizza odyssey was that we would ignore the more proletarian fast-food pizzas in Kyiv, and stay strictly higher-end.

We resolved to continue our quest.

Where’s the spice?

Though we like Arena’s beers, their margarita and vegetarian pizzas didn’t impress us at all. What they called “big” and charged an extra 30 percent for wasn’t that much bigger. Also, the crusts were soggy and the pizza had an absolute absence of taste – it was like eating bland white bread with a slice of flavorless cheese. No garlic, no salt, no pepper, no oregano, no basil, no nothing. Fast-foodish, we thought, and in fact on the bad side of fast-foodish. We walked out, dissatisfied.

Pizzas from Primavera, near the Lukyanivska metro station, and from Limoncello on Moskovska, made us happy. The pizzas burst with flavor, and the crusts were crispy-chewy and smelled nicely of smoke. At Primavera we ordered margarita and Diablo (sausage and hot pepper) varieties: both were well-balanced in terms of taste and perfectly baked. We stepped into the suddenly cold and unwelcoming weather with a warm feeling. Primavera’s comfortable interior didn’t turn us off, either.

Limoncello has always been good to us. Their nice terrace is now closed in by glass windows, and there’s dim lighting, warm smells drifting from the wood stove, the scent of fruit tobacco wafting from a hookah – it’s almost a Christmas feeling. We ordered the mushroom and margarita pizzas, which were just like the place itself: good, wholesome, warm and rewarding.

Da Vinci’s Genius

Best, though, was the pizza at Da Vinci Fish Club. We knew this upscale place knew how to handle seafood. Apparently, they’ve also mastered pizza. The wood stove is right there in the dining room, forming part of the elegant interior.

On a Sunday night, the place was almost empty – what is it with Kyiv restaurants? – but there was none of the dreary feeling that that should have created. The service, meanwhile, is profoundly refined. The pizza, which wasn’t as expensive as we expected it to be, was in fact luxurious in its simplicity. A “white” pizza (Hr 35) was tender and sweet, with just mozzarella, chopped basil and a fine crispiness/chewiness; the “Roman” (Hr 71) was assertive in its flavors, with its capers and anchovies lending it a piquant, balsamic saltiness.

We felt satisfied and calm; we knew the quest was over. Da Vinci was it.


Da Vinci Fish Club

12 Volodymyrska, 490-3434.

Open daily from 11 a.m. till midnight.

English menu: Yes.

English-speaking staff: Yes.

10% off with Kozyrnaya Karta card.


Source of information - Kyiv Post

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