Slow pizza in the Venice of the North

The idea is not to make you wait for your fast food, but to use “slow food ingredients” such as stone-ground organic flour for the pizza dough, and a slow rising time driven by yeast already present in the flour and water. This is meant to be healthier, tastier and better for society in general.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the slow food philosophy is the simplicity of the pizzas, which cost €13-€20 each. The foundation is either red or white, which is to say Fior di Latte cheese with or without tomato, plus one or two additional ingredients on top. That might be just anchovy, or broccoli and Tuscan sausage. This is not the place to come if you like a quattro stagioni or one of those hipster pizzas topped with the maximum number of buffalo products.

Even the “gourmet” pizzas owe their luxury to the choice rather than the number of ingredients: cherry tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella, for example, or Caprino goat’s cheese, artichokes and smoked tuna.

Amunì also does starters, pasta and other mains, so before getting to the pizza I indulge in bruschetta topped with pancetta and scamorza (€9 for four pieces). Scarmoza is often melted, but here the cheese has been crisped at the edges, forming a succulent layer over hot Italian bacon, which in turn lies on toasted bread. Just toasted, not baked to a brittle crisp. I approve.

After that, I choose a red pizza topped with Nduja (a spicy Calabrian sausage) and parsley. Nduja is tricky to manage: it’s meant to be soft and spreadable, but served on pizza it often looks and behaves like an angry ball of chilli paste. Here it is visibly sausage, the red flesh studded with chili seeds, delivering a pleasing wallop.

The pizza crust is soft and doughy, almost to the point of feeling underdone, but the tomato and cheese were not wet, so the whole thing held together and tasted fresh. I’d certainly come back to explore the menu further, but later in the evening to give the slow oven time to warm up.