Before coffee snobbery there was pizza snobbery.
How thin is the crust? Is the oven wood-fired? Did the chef train in Italy? Do they twirl the dough in the air? Are their artisan toppings dry-cured in the San Daniele del Friuli area, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of Italy?
Footpath dining at Da Vinci's in Summer Hill.Credit: Kirk Gilmour
Pretensions about pizza and its architecture have faded, maybe because good pizza is easy to find.
Da Vinci's, a family-run pizzeria in Summer Hill, makes very good pizza. The sort you try to eat in whole slices without cutlery or deference to table manners. You want to eat it fast.
Prosciutto pizza at Da Vinci's.Credit: Kirk Gilmour
Made in a wood-fired oven next to the front window, it is soft without being flabby, moist but not oily. When the prosciutto pizza arrives, the main thing you notice is the prosciutto – swathes of it draped across a peppery sauce and daubed with fresh fior di latte.
We are sitting inside Da Vinci's in a homey but smart room with tiled floors, wooden furniture and Leonardo da Vinci art prints. The outdoor footpath seating is popular, next to Summer Hill's central fountain and square, lit by a string of light bulbs.
We have ordered garlic prawns and calamari fritti, plus two pizzas, prosciutto and capricciosa, which has more prosciutto plus mushrooms, artichoke, black olives and boiled egg. We are eating, truth be told, like rabid maniacs.
The garlic prawns, pan-fried with chilli and cherry tomatoes, are big and fat and as garlicky, and salty, as anything I have ever tasted, leaving us with breath that could render an ox unconscious. This requires much drinking of excellent prosecco.
Gelato at Gelatony, Summer Hill.Credit: Kirk Gilmour
The calamari fritti, deep-fried calamari with zucchini and red capsicum, is crunchy and tender with a wealth of olive oil.
Then we eat a whole pizza each. The salad, though fresh, is again too heavy on the oil.
There are not enough of us to pre-order Da Vinci's polenta specialty dish, a huge platter of creamy polenta topped with sausage, pork and broccoli, served on a wooden board. Even I, notably keen at the dinner table, could not do it justice. Though I would try.
Da Vinci's also has a secret weapon. Out the back, accessible by walking through the restaurant and past the kitchen, or via a back gate, is Gelatony, a small but utterly heavenly gelato bar.
Gelatony is the work of Antonino Lo Iacono, whose father taught him to make gelato in Italy.
He opened Da Vinci's in 2013 with his nephews Nicola Piteo and Valerio Rossi, who persuaded him to come out of retirement.
Lo Iacono, whose ice-cream credentials stretch back more than 30 years to a gelato bar near Rome, shot to fame recently. His fig marmalade gelato with dark chocolate and lemon zest won a special mention for technical excellence in the Asia Pacific round of the Gelato World Tour.
This is the same contest that endorsed another Sydney ice-creamery, Cow and Moon, crowned world's best gelato makers in 2014. That led to queues snaking out Cow and Moon's Enmore Road corner entrance and down the street. So keep this gelato bar to yourself.
We're too late to have gelato – the friendly, Italian-speaking staff start packing up by 9.30pm – so I return the next day at noon with a small girl to eat scoops of fior di latte milk gelato, which blows vanilla ice-cream out of the water. The fig marmalade flavour (made using fresh figs, a recipe from Lo Iacono's mother) had sold out in an hour, so get in early to score a taste.
DA VINCI'S
25 Lackey Street, Summer Hill
9716 9000
Mon-Fri, 5pm-10pm; Sat-Sun, noon-9pm
davincispizzeria.com.au
THE PICKS
Garlic prawns; prosciutto pizza; capricciosa pizza; gelato
THE LOOK
Smart and unpretentious, family-run
THE SERVICE
Fast and knowledgeable
THE VALUE
Good. Entrees $4-$19; salad $12-$18; pasta $17.50-$26; pizza $16-$24