In the past few weeks, I've received several requests from friends to recommend a good pizza restaurant in Seattle. Coincidentally, my friend Adam who used to live here was visiting from his small town in Michigan where I’m told European eateries are scarce. He requested Via Tribunali, an all too authentic Napolitano style pizza restaurant, we discovered together several years ago. To give some preface, before Seattle, I lived in Barcelona and shared a flat with numerous people in an “Auberge Espagnol” style flat. Two of my roommates were exchange students from Naples, who used “stronzo” so frequently you would have thought it was their names.
When their crazy Napolitano friends came to town, we immediately set out for dinner at a mafia style pizzeria, where waiters were on a first name basis, the menus remained in Italian and it seemed like everyone there had grown up together. After studying the menu, I wondered, where’s the chicken? no veggie toppings? But when those simply thin, crispy, cheesy pizzas came to our tables with the scent of a fresh tomato garden under my nose, I learned what it meant to eat a Napolitano style pizza in the presence of true Napolitanos.
Back in Seattle, I fell in love with Via Tribunali at the first sight of the pizza disc. On our last visit with Adam, we ordered two pizzas at a time until we were stuffed. With only 70 seconds to cook in a wood-fired ove blazing at 1100 F, the wait time for each order was several minutes. The beauty of our ordering technique was that we tried a slice of six or seven different pizzas, which were always fresh and eaten so fast they never had time to cool. My favorite pizza of the night was the Via Tribunali with dough smothered in pomodoro, smoked mozzarella, cherry tomato, ricotta, bufala mozzarella, grana and basil. The cheese was so fresh you would have thought the cow had just been milked out back earlier that day.
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