It won the Haberfield pizza duel, but is this icon still one of Sydney’s best pizzerias?

“Currently astatine La Disfida,” a person messaged the different week. “It’s easy successful the pantheon of large Sydney pizzerias.” A mighty call, yes, but it was coming from a mate who grew up successful New York City, which everyone knows is wherever pizza was invented. It was each I needed to perceive to marque a luncheon booking astatine La Disfida due to the fact that it had been years since my past sojourn to the Haberfield icon, too.

When Ruggiero Lattanzio opened the Ramsay Street edifice successful the 1990s, Sydney’s pizza scenery was inactive successful the Super Supreme age. You mightiness brushwood a portion of immoderate salmon and pea tendril-topped nonsense successful a chichi Surry Hills tratt, but it was an epoch mostly dominated by Pepsi refills, stuffed crusts, deep-pans and Dial-a-Dino’s. Leichhardt had its reliable, red-sauce haunts, but the Italo-Oz assemblage didn’t get excited for pizza “like home” until Napoli successful Bocca and La Disfida launched successful Haberfield astatine astir the aforesaid time.

Local families were either Team Bocca oregon Club Disfida. It was Ford versus Holden, Milo versus Nesquik. Peter Zuzza took implicit La Disfida successful 2009 (he’d been moving his family’s long-standing Mixing Pot edifice successful Glebe), maintained Lattanzio’s pizza recipes, and sold the concern to Debbie Colacicco 2 years ago.

I’ve been to La Disfida 3 times successful the past 4 weeks, specified is the pulling powerfulness of its warm-lit eating room.

The two-storey edifice remains packed each weekend, and manager Simone Busi runs a choky and affable vessel connected the floor. The Napoli successful Bocca tract is present a confused-looking “Asian fusion” joint, truthful I conjecture we yet person a winner.

I’ve been to La Disfida 3 times successful the past 4 weeks, specified is the pulling powerfulness of its warm-lit eating country and cooking successful winter. I privation to beryllium surrounded by Campari posters and the coating of Disfida di Barletta, the namesake medieval barney betwixt French and Italian knights. I privation to ticker furrowed-browed pizzaiolos enactment the wood-burning oven. I privation to instrumentality the leftovers location for time night’s dinner, eaten connected the sofa with a John le Carre movie adaptation and lugs of sangiovese.

Penne al forno with pork sausage ragu.Jennifer Soo

The penne al forno ($35) is simply a pasta seemingly designed for watching Cold War spies from beneath a woolly blanket: affluent pork sausage ragu baked with molten mozzarella, ricotta and parmesan, positive a topcoat of aureate breadcrumbs.

Bitey pappardelle is tangled with a braised, wild-boar ragu ($37) of commanding depth. Salt-and-pepper spatchcock ($35) comes with crisp peperonata and a batter not excessively dissimilar to confederate fried chicken. (Look, I truly don’t privation to accidental “big KFC vibes”, but there’s truly nary different mode to enactment it.)

Each of those dishes were ordered from the specials menu, which lists astir a twelve caller oregon returning items each week. It’s not each end-of-days, hibernation cogwheel either, and you could good find yellowfin tuna tartare with avocado and horseradish ($31) adjacent to the four-cheese arancini ($23). One of the crockery specials is ever a astute order, specified arsenic a nicely acidic pear, cabbage and goat’s food fig ($22) which popped up successful precocious June.

Anyway, the pizza. Does it unrecorded up to the hype? Indeed. Absolutely. The basal is thin, chewy and somewhat salty – pliable, but inactive dutifully strong: toppings don’t descent off. The condiment is bright. No 1 astatine Disfida volition bang connected astir the (frankly boring) satellite of dough hydration rates and flour types. Staff lone privation you to cognize that the room uses San Marzano tomatoes and fior di latte buffalo mozzarella. The bully stuff.

A margherita finished with caller basil costs $23 and is devoid of those small pools of grease that plague lesser pizzas. The Diavola ($27) is paved with a salami of superior heat, olives and the occasional anchovy.

Lattanzio created the Disfida ($28) for his restaurant’s opening menu, and it’s hardly changed since – a briny, triple-punch of olives, capers and anchovies tempered by ham and smoked mozzarella. Terrific with a solid of Andrea Occhipinti’s caller and adust 2020 Alter Alea Bianco ($17) made with aleatico grapes grown conscionable northbound of Rome.

Go-to dish: Salsiccia e funghi pizza.Jennifer Soo

If I person to sanction a favourite pizza, it’s the salsiccia e funghi ($28), starring tanned, juicy pebbles of pork sausage, chaotic mushroom and much olives. Close 2nd is simply a caller peculiar neatly layered with salami, threads of bitter-green friarielli and tiny islands of whipped ricotta ($29).

Like immoderate bully pizza, it’s champion eaten astatine the source, but everything is disposable to instrumentality away, and my woman is picking up the salsiccia e funghi and a panettone bread-and-butter pudding ($14) arsenic I decorativeness these lines. My lone tasks are to find immoderate chianti, and cue up Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

This reappraisal was primitively published successful Good Weekend magazine

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