Affordable artichoke pizza in a nearly 100-year-old restaurant

Italy Artichoke pizza at a restaurant in downtown Milan may surprise diners with its unique flavor and affordable price.

Reader Trinh Hang, over 40 years old, Hanoi , had a trip to Italy for nearly two weeks during the recent Tet holiday. She shared her experience in Milan and the unique artichoke pizza.

Pizza is so popular in the world and is considered a must-try dish when visiting Italy. Therefore, on the first afternoon in Milan - the industrial city with the most expensive living standard in Italy, we went to Motta, a restaurant that opened in 1928.

Motta is located right at the entrance to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II - Italy's oldest shopping mall and a prominent address in Milan. A few steps away is the Duomo di Milano, the heart of Milan, where millions of tourists check in every year. Opposite Motta are a series of luxury fashion stores. Diners sitting in the restaurant enjoying pizza can watch stylish fashionistas stroll past Rolex, Saint Laurent, Prada, Armani, Dolce Gabbana or Versace stores.

Inside the Motta restaurant, overlooking high-end fashion stores. Photo: Trinh Hang

Despite its expensive location, the restaurant's menu is reasonably priced. Like many other restaurants in Italy, the menu is displayed on the sidewalk so that diners can refer to it before deciding whether to go in or not. After a few minutes of flipping through the menu, we decided to try it right away, because long-standing restaurants in Italy are not rare, but restaurants with reasonable prices are few. At Motta, most dishes cost only about 13-20 euros (325,000-500,000 VND), which can be called affordable.

In a country that welcomes around 70 million tourists each year, customer service is a top priority, regardless of the time. When we arrived at 4pm, the restaurant was still very crowded, the manager standing at the door warmly asked if we were having lunch, even though it was long past lunchtime and not yet dinner time.

The restaurant space is small but very clean, cozy, and colorful. The entire partition facing the street is made of transparent glass, creating a sense of connection with the bustling pedestrian street outside, making diners feel like they are living in the bustling atmosphere of Milan day and night.

Our meal consisted of a pizza and a lasagna. My companion chose the Quattro Stagioni pizza because of its unusual ingredients: tomatoes, champignon mushrooms, ham, and artichokes. We wondered if we had read it wrong. This familiar flower in Vietnam is only used to make cooling tea, so how could it be used in pizza? Out of curiosity, we decided to try it anyway, thinking that the first item on the pizza menu of this long-standing restaurant must be unique.

The pizzas on the menu didn't have any sizes, so we thought each pizza would be enough for one person. When the waiter brought it out, we were surprised because it was a rectangular pizza, not a round one like the other popular pizzas, quite large, 40x23 cm, with a very thick layer of toppings, lots of ham, mushrooms and green olives.

Artichoke pizza. Photo: Trinh Hang

In particular, the artichokes were cut into bite-sized pieces and covered the surface of the cake. We tasted the first piece and were surprised: the artichokes were soft, fragrant, and had a pleasant sour taste, similar to Vietnamese pickled bamboo shoots but with a much lighter and more delicate taste. This is the ideal ingredient to balance the overall ingredients of the pizza, which is quite high in starch and protein, easily creating a feeling of dryness and boredom. Perhaps because the customers ordered the restaurant to bake fresh, the cake was very crispy and fragrant without being dry at all, and the mushrooms were also cooked just right, without leaking water, making the cake soft.

For starters, the restaurant offers bread and desserts of Motta's traditional pastries. Customers can also choose from dozens of pastries made from cheese, chocolate and fruit, priced at just a few euros a piece.

Our meal that day was 43 euros (about 1.07 million VND). At more than 500,000 VND per person to enjoy traditional pizza from a restaurant nearly a century old in the center of Milan, this is a worthwhile experience.

Trinh Hang

Source link: https://vnexpress.net/pizza-atiso-binh-dan-trong-nha-hang-gan-tram-nam-tuoi-4723073.html