Forbici

You’d never catch anyone in Naples using a pizza wheel. This is the firm belief of Davide Argentino, master pizzaiolo for Forbici, on Cross Street. What he doesn’t know about dough is simply not worth knowing.

He’s made pizza all over the world – in one instance on the top of a mountain in China – and can sense in the air and surrounding atmospherics whether he needs more flour, water, yeast, proving time… all the variables that you can only effectively command when you’re a master of the craft.

So when he says we should be using scissors to slice up this authentic Neapolitan pizza, we should be listening (forbici also happens to mean ‘scissors’ in Italian). His pizza differs from much of the pizza on offer in the city.

While many claim to be authentically Neapolitan, Davide uses the ‘biga’ method, where a mother dough is fermented overnight, a little like sourdough, and then used to form the next day’s output. This pre-fermenting method creates a pizza which is so light as to float out of the window, and if pizza tends to leave you full and bloated, this could prove something of a revelation.

Toppings here are purposefully traditional, as they should be. No fried chicken, no hoi sin duck (their Espanola does feature chorizo and padron peppers, but that feels entirely permissible). That said, in a nod to a sense of place, you might find Bury black pudding appearing on the specials every now and then. Nowt wrong wi’ that.