Pizza e Vino

It's Sunday night in Hawksburn village's refined shopping strip and this big, bold new pizza joint from the Cafe Latte family is full of people perfect for Robin Leach's old show about the rich and famous.

Their wishes might be for champagne and their dreams of caviar but the menu printed on paper placemats here is fast becoming a Melbourne cliche: the now-predictable artisan pizzeria rollcall of thin discs of dough topped with prosciutto and rocket, Italian sausage and, obviously, a simple smear of tomato sugo, mozzarella and a few basil leaves. Then a few antipasti such as carpaccio, a selection of cured meats or cheeses, and hot stuff such as arancini (fried rice balls) and fried calamari. At least salads of rocket and pear, and radicchio with gorgonzola, are more adventurous than a crowd-pleasing Caprese.

Really, Pizza e Vino - like so many of these pizza places opening in the past year - brings little new to the table. Apart from, I suppose, their panzerotti. Now apparently pizza fritta is a bit of a street-food fave in Naples' backstreets as well as Scotland. Panzerotti is the version in the city of Bari. Here, as there, they deep-fry fresh dough filled with cheese and tomato rather than using the cheapest frozen supermarket pizzas like the Edinburgh chippies do. For me, it is a little too much like the traditional end to a night of too many "heavies". OK, it's probably unfair to ask for innovation from your local pizza joint, especially when they are making a reasonable fist of the standards.

More important is that Pizza e Vino is a good-looking space in a stripped-back Swedish sort of way. One wall is decorated strikingly with a sinuous line of black metal tracing a huge outline of the famous boot and its two balls, while a low boomerang of an American oak bar with red stools provides a rampart in front of the electric deck ovens. All the flat, hard surfaces make it noisy when full, especially at the back when half the seats are taken by kinder kids hyped up on ice-cream and chocolate sauce.

Service when we are in has a sort of 200-miles-an-hour-careening-downhill-without-brakes sort of a feel. It's actually quite fun and, you could argue, exactly how a local Italian pizzeria should be. Nothing is forgotten or overlooked, however, and given the crowd, any slight wait is to be expected.

It's also good to see the dough hand-stretched and tossed behind a glass screen. With the pressure on, cooking is a little uneven - some bases perhaps slightly too blackened in spots for my liking, some toppings not quite browned enough, but there's nothing shabby about toppings of pooled taleggio with hunks of pear, or sweet red onion with salty gorgonzola and bitter oven-crisped radicchio. The adults with me also liked the calzone of smoked mozzarella, ham and olives; the kids more impressed by the presence of frankfurt sausage on a margarita base. Pleasantly, pizza prices are a couple of dollars cheaper than other (comparative) rivals such as Pizza e Birra and Mulatta.

To finish, there's an affogato or, of course, dessert pizzas such as a calzone filled with chocolate.

There are some interesting imported beers and a short wine list.

If going here early and without kids, get a table at the front, because the traffic noise will be quieter than the raucous squabbling over whose turn it is next with the red felt pen.