Restaurant review: Palmento
Me and pizza have history. Over the years, we’ve been to hell and back yet still remain very much an item, Mr & Mrs Tom Jones of the culinary constellation.
I won’t deny it, we’ve had difficult moments, too many of them frozen and, once or twice, some pretty appalling episodes of home delivery.
We even witnessed pizza topped with soggy chips. In Torino. Yes, Torino, in Italy.
But despite numerous stumbles, we’ve stuck together through deep-pan and thin, apparently content to amble along, accepting the other’s failings until the day the woodfired oven impacted on our relationship like a vat of pure Viagra, erasing all sins and failings of the past, pointing the way to a future filled with perfection.
The woodfired oven is the traditional cooking method employed in Naples, long considered the pizza’s spiritual home, and while it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a top class pizza, if used properly, no other method is remotely comparable.
Johnny O’Mahony’s Pompeii Pizza began some years ago as a woodfired oven atop a trailer touring the circuit of festivals and farmers’ markets before an inspired Franciscan Well Pub & Brewery invited Pompeii into their beer garden.
Temporary visitation rights gradually evolved into full-blown custody and today Pompeii Pizza is permanently housed in a dote-y little pizza-oven-shaped unit to the rear of the beer garden.
We arrive at Friday teatime, the air a-buzz with the spirit of post-work liberation.
The progeny order a classic Margherita (tomato, basil, mozzarella) with additional pepperoni.
Reports return that the combo is indeed very fine but attempts to sample said combo is resisted with shockingly feral behaviour. I blame the pizza, not the parents.
DB and I share a truly wonderful Pizza Bianca (no tomato sauce!) with Olive Oil, Sea Salt, Thinly Sliced Potato, Irish Buffalo Mozzarella, Rosemary, Parmesan and additional black olives.
Paired with a good pale ale, it is a fine reminder to this inveterate wine-swiller that beer is an equally fine companion beverage to pizza.
I must confess, I love Palmento from the moment I walk in.
The proprietors have reclaimed a relatively anonymous commercial corner of Douglas village now long subsumed by suburbia and turned it into a delightful and welcoming haven.
It isn’t flash, an exercise in welcome and simplicity, and enclosed outside seating should see the whole thing work as well in summer as in winter.
The heart soars on spying actual Irish beer taps at the counter, four of the finest from local heroes Eight Degrees Brewing, the bare bones wine list is both cheap and cheerful and the pizza menu features an ambitious range on sourdough bases.
Unfortunately, the kitchen appears to be having an off day for bases retain too deep a layer of raw dough below the sauce, too gloopy even for the traditional Neapolitan style favoured here, suggesting underworked gluten or an insufficiently hot oven.
But these are early days and word from my network (including plenty of Italians!) is encouraging so I have every confidence the only way is up for Palmento, an terrific new addition to local dining.
Simon Mould also began his Volcano Pizza operation as a mobile market unit and continues to trade in multiple farmers’ markets around Cork.
The fundamentals are executed with aplomb: good bases and a tomato sauce with real depth of flavour but it is the market environment itself and its produce that allows Mould to let rip, continually improvising a slew of superb new daily specials as if he’d been making them for years.
(Spiced Beef & Ballyhoura Shiitake Mushrooms or Yuletide Woodside Farm Free Range Pork mince and cranberry both spring to mind. Mould also sells the best takeaway DIY pizza kit around, including both bases and sauce.)
On a Thursday in Mahon, I order a Gubbeen Chorizo, Ballyhoura Mushrooms, Fior di Latte, crème fraiche before hightailing off to collect school-bound progeny intending to leave a slice or two as their lunchtime snack but professional zeal means little remains other than the cardboard box it came in.
Yep, me and pizza may have been to hell and back but, these days, we mostly reside in heaven.
Tel. (021) 439 3434
Opening Hours: Seven days, 1pm-10pm
www.facebook.com/pompeiipizza
Pizza tab: €11
Tel. 021 436 5241
Open: seven days, 5pm-10pm (Mon- Thurs), 5pm-11pm (Fri-Sat), 4pm-10pm (Sun)
www.facebook.com/palmento
Pizza tab: €12-€14
Pizza tab: €7.50-€10
