Viva Brighton Issue #38 April 2016

food review
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Very Italian Pizza
Un ristorante molto italiano
Call me a snob, but
I wasn’t expecting
much from a place
with the name ‘Very
Italian Pizza’. I’d
never heard of it
until Bee, our latest
intern, mentioned
it in an editorial
meeting. “It’s very
genuine,” she said.
“All the Italians in Brighton go there… they grow
all their own food, on a farm in Naples… the pizzas
are amazing.”
And so I walk in the door, one Thursday lunchtime
in the first half of March, looking forward to
a nice pizza, but just a tad cynical. I’m met with
a visual feast: Sophia Loren smiling from a wall,
garlic cloves and dried peppers hanging from the
ceiling, a wall full of unfamiliar-familiar Italian
goods on sale on the shelf, blackboards announcing
today’s specials. Meanwhile Pino Daniele
sings his high-pitched pop through the speakers,
and that great smell of pizza cooking in a woodfired
oven pervades the air.
Pauline, my dining companion, is sitting waiting,
looking extremely happy. “It’s like being in Italy,”
she says, as if I haven’t already spelt that out.
She’s ordered a bowl of plump green olives, and
judging from the fact that there are more still untouched
in the bowl than there are stones in the
saucer in front of her, she hasn’t been there long.
It is just like being in Italy, though, which is
further exemplified by the fact that about half the
clientele are speaking the language around us.
I order some bresaola carpaccio to start, and have
a look at the pizza menu. Rule of thumb when
you’re reviewing
a pizzeria? Try the
margherita, or the
one which bears the
restaurant’s name.
The ‘VIP’ is the most
expensive on the
menu, at £12.50, but
once I see it, the other
37 choices haven’t a
chance: ‘mozzarella,
black truffle cream, porcini wild mushrooms and
sausage’. Pauline decides on a ‘quattro stagioni’.
I get chatting to one of the waiters. VIP have
been trading in Brighton for two years now;
the family who’ve started it up come from five
generations of food producers/vendors in Naples.
They do have their own farm, from which they
source most of their meat and dairy produce.
“Most Italian people who live in Brighton come
here at least once a week,” he exaggerates.
The bresaola, sprinkled with Parmesan and drizzled
in lemon juice, is a delight. My pizza (and I’m
a harsh critic when it comes to pizza) is nothing
short of sensational, with its puffy sourdough
base, its battle for taste-dominance between the
truffle and the porcini, and its hefty, tasty lumps
of sausage meat. I reluctantly agree to swap a
quarter of it for one of Pauline’s stagioni.
“They have swordfish on the specials board,” she
says, as we sip our macchiati, wondering how
they make espressi taste so good [enough Italian
plurals, sub-ed]. We’re far too full, obviously, but
there will be plenty of next times, however wary I
am of their name, which I’ll have to explain away
when I’m raving about the place. Alex Leith
19 Old Steine, Brighton
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