Sud Italia
You gotta have a pizza this!
In the heart of busy Liverpool Street, with its endless offerings of restaurants and cafés, lies Old Spitalfields Market, a more casual eatery where you and your friends can try different cuisines all at once.
Among the vibrant array of cuisine, Sud Italia is a little blue truck that sells freshly made Neapolitan pizza straight from the stone oven.
Situated at the market corner, the little blue truck is not hard to miss with a swarm of people crowding around it as they wait for their orders.
They sell a range of 12-inch pizzas from your typical Margherita to something unheard of in chain pizza shops such as Salsiccia E Friarielli.
However, as good as these pizzas sound, they are not what attracts the crowd.
The main pizza that attracts people's attention is the £5 Pizza A Portafoglio. Yes, you read that right—for only five quid, you get a whole pizza!
Of course, like most people, we ordered the pizza a portafoglio and the server gave us a ticket stub to wait for our order.
You can also get dips such as truffle mayo or pesto mayo for an extra £2, but we decided to skip it and keep our pizza as it is to taste the flavours.
What surprised us the most was the large stone oven that takes up half the little truck, where you can watch your pizza be made. Seeing the stone oven filled us with relief that we could trust that the pizza would be good and possibly as authentic as Neapolitan pizza made in Naples.
Finally, our pizzas were pulled out of the oven and transferred to the blue paper of the Sud Italia brand.
The server folded the pizza twice so it formed a thick triangular sandwich of a pizza.
As I took the first bite, I couldn’t really taste the tomato sauce or anything else in the pizza since the outer part had four layers of thick crust.
It was a little burnt, so the crust felt a bit dry, but once I made it to the centre, the tomato sauce had a sweet and tangy taste, a telltale sign that it was freshly made.
Because the pizza was piping hot, the mozzarella cheese was stretchy enough to get a nice cheese pull, and the fresh basil balanced everything out with its natural bitterness.
Overall, the pizza was flavourful, but the condiments could have been more generous, as some parts, especially the crust, only taste of burnt dough. As for the authenticity of the taste, it is hard to verify as we haven’t been to Naples for the original taste, but for now, this pizza would have to do for your budget and your bellies.
Written by Althea Scully