Paesano

94 Miller St, Glasgow

0141 258 5565

Lunch-Dinner £5-18

Food rating 9/10

THERE are several reasons to welcome Paesano to Glasgow. If nothing else it returns some sense of proportion to pizza pricing. Other prominent pizzerias seem to think it’s fine to charge £9-13 for an indifferent circle of dough, and fillings that don’t include freshly foraged truffles, oil hand-pressed by virgins, or any other luxury ingredients. At £5-8 a shot, Paesano restores honesty to a market bloated by cupidity. You can have a pizza and a glass of wine here for under a tenner; you’ll struggle to find a deal like that anywhere outside a crummy chain.

There’s none of that cheapskate serve-it-in-a-box-with-plastic-cutlery nonsense either. Paesano is a stylish, sit-down restaurant with proper cutlery; even the pizza cutters work. With its roomy dance floor proportions, its industrial urban decor, an entire wall occupied by Hollywood-style light bulbs picking out the Paesano name, it wouldn’t look out of place in Manhattan, and its location on dusky Miller Street where tall buildings steal the light, stokes the New York vibe.

I can go one of two ways with pizza: if it’s a proper one, it’s eaten in a flash; if it’s a bad one, my appetite stalls after a few mouthfuls. With Paesano’s pizzas I had to show restraint and stop myself over-eating.

What makes Paesano’s pizzas so satisfying? The wood-fired ovens (£20,000 worth) come from a Neapolitan family firm that has been building them for generations, yet this is not in itself enough. (I had a pizza recently from another outfit that tells a similar story, but it was dire.) Paesano uses proper Caputo “OO” flour from Naples, but then so should any pizza operation that claims authenticity. Its other ingredients also have a great CV. No plastic Danish “mozzarella” here, we’re talking fresh cow’s milk Fior di latte mozzarella, or for an extra £1.50, buffalo mozzarella. Tomato sugo is made using the Strianese brand of plump, whole tinned tomatoes, not some slothful industrial passata bought in massive tetrapacks. Its extra virgin olive oil from the Abruzzo, grassy, and fragrantly fresh, is superlative, and generously, Paesano encourages you to pour it on your pizza with abandon. I reckon I got through six or more tablespoons in the course of our meal. This oil is addictive. The chilli version packs a punch.

So that’s all good then (as they say in W1A), but I reckon there are two other critical factors that elevate Paesano’s pizzas to another level. First, the dough (raised by a combination of yeast and sourdough) is left to develop for 24 hours, breaking down the tough proteins and enhancing its digestibility. What a difference there is between a “fast” pizza dough (quickly puffy but too often leaden and chewy as it cools), and a “slow” pizza, where fermentation guarantees flavour and natural lightness. Second, the furnace-like heat of the oven – 500C – throws up the dough almost instantly, producing a crusty, blistered lip on the edge of the pizza – what Italians call the “cornicione" – and a dry, crisp base.

So our pizzas were consumed swiftly, one with fresh, meaty, crumbled Tuscan fennel sausage, the other with caper berries and anchovies. It was interesting to compare and contrast the difference between the mozzarellas: the buffalo milk one held its ground more, just like a hefty buffalo would, forming thick creamy islands; the Fior di latte melted more decisively, melding in with the tomato sugo. Both lovely in different ways, and those tensile rubber band strands that denote poor quality mozzarella were conspicuously absent.

Paesano could pep up its side orders. A tender cream-filled burrata mozzarella deserved better than fridge-cold roast peppers and a drab pesto. The cardboard-y olives need upgrading too. But desserts – lemon polenta cake and chocolate cake – tasted pretty homemade, and despite its “Mr Whippy” appearance, the ice cream was eminently edible.

Daringly, Paesano lists only eight pizzas, and a daily special. I love this sense of focus, and take-it-or-leave-it refusal to deviate from it by adding in pasta etcetera to pander to real or imagined generic “Italian” restaurant expectations. Bravo Paesano for its clarity and single-mindedness.