WORLD’S BEST PIZZA

I love pizza. I LOVE IT. I think I could eat pizza every day and never get tired of it.

The worst pizza I’ve ever had was two summers ago in France. I got a “local specialities” pizza in Bayeau, and the gummy local ham was so chewy it rendered the pizza inedible.

Now we are in Sicily. The kids are out of school, we flew in late, spent the day at the beach, then—starving and grouchy—went in search of PIZZA.

We sat down in the cutest place ever only to be told it was only aperitif time. We’d skipped lunch and the kids were melting, so we ordered some drinks, fries and olives. Turns out I ordered a fried stuff plate and got onion rings and fried balls of herbed cream cheese which were really good. Then we trudged over to another pizza place which was serving pizza, but the only people eating at the absurdly early hour of 7pm were foreigners like us.

Isaac got the margarita. Eloise got a margarita with salami, then picked off all the salami and didn’t eat it. Chris got the buffalo mozzarella. I got THE SICILIANELLA.

Here I recommend stopping everything you are planning for the summer and flying to Palermo, take your life in your hands by hiring a taxi to Mondello, and go to La Vecchia Masseria for THE WORLD’S BEST PIZZA.

I dislike eggplant. It has eggplant. I dislike anchovies. It has anchovies. I ordered it anyway AND IT WAS THE BEST. The eggplant was roasted almost sweet, not at all slimy or tough.

The Sicilianella: tomato, mozzarella cheese, aubergines, anchovies, cacio cheese, red onion, bread crumbs, red onion, spicy small salami.

Cue a spotlight and angels singing—that’s how I felt about this pizza, even though we were not super hungry after our accidental over-fried snack and might have been angry after a grouchy family bicker following getting yelled at by a driver on a crappy side street lined with garbage.

Eloise made friends with some Italian girls her age celebrating their first communion, and the kids begged for gelato but then were too full to eat it afterwards. We literally almost died in the scariest taxi ride I’ve ever taken heading back into Palermo.

But dang that was a great pizza!