Franco Manca

★★★★★☆☆


We weren't sure if the floppy-haired Italian server said "that's life" or "that's alive" when we told him of the floater in our bottle of tap. Even the born-and-bred Italian in our group was unable to decipher. But the accented server took it away and quickly replaced it with a bottle that was clear. He may not have been smiling when he made the comment, but there was no over-the-top-Italian-hand gestures either. It must have been harmless.


His haste could probably have been attributed to the full capacity this pizzeria was operating on on this late Monday afternoon. At any other restaurant, the official lunch hour would have been safely cleared, but at Franco Manca you still had to wait for a table. You wonder: has Franco's reputation preceded itself or are those black and gold rounds of dough really that alluring it's got Brixton and beyond on their toes?

From the time were standing and what we were seeing, the latter must have been the case. The wait wasn't long - fifteen minutes tops - but judgment can be greatly coloured by hunger, strong wafts of burning wood and rising yeast, and vivid colours of tomato paste red, arugula green, and prosciutto pink. Majority was at stake when two of the five senses had been so easily bought over.


The taste test was less straightforward: all other factors held constant (everything was organic, including the sourdough bases, and each pizza combination comprised of all the food groups), the difficulty in the menu was not the number of choices, but the choices themselves. There were only six pizzas and a day's special to pick from so there wasn't that dilemma of which category to pick from - it was the dilemma of which combination you felt like committing your tastebuds to. One can, after all, only stomach so much pizza in a sitting.


So among us we decided to go full spectrum with a classic Margherita (£4.80, pictured above), a middle-of-the-range Napoletano (£5.70), and a full-blown daily special of bianca with artichokes, arugula, pecorino and speck ham (£5.50, pictured below). We also asked for extra shavings of ham all around (at £0.90 per portion, although we had understood the extra meat to be a complimentary option. It was the accent..). To celebrate our commitment we called for a bottle of house white (750 ml, £7.50).

Service was still eye-contactless, but this time the factors were almost purely internal - we were preoccupied with the fresh-from-the-oven puffs of dough, and our seats were so low to make eye contact would have been to look up and disrupt eye and nose concentration. So no one looked up. And no one spoke as we tore into our pizzas.

It wasn't until we were halfway into our pizzas that the Italian among us broke the silence. "This is good," she said, adding a half-concentrated "very good" to the end. Us two others nodded in agreement, but a slight frown soon appeared on my face. "It's good but, do you taste that?" "Taste what?" asked the only one who had not yet broken her muteness.


Our pizzas looked beautiful - slouchy but not flimsy dinner-plate-sized palette-shaped works of art. All three looked almost like little island-fortresses on plates; they had uneven speckled rims that, in the wood-fired ovens, had huffed and puffed to resemble breasts of songbirds. In the middle of mine was a marble of flaming orange sauce and white mozzarella doused with prosciutto, capers, olive, and anchovies. It looked brilliant. Underneath that brilliance however, it was charred.

The char wasn't overpowering, but present enough, and it was a presence that became more evident with every bite. It was only in my dough however; the dough of the Daily Special was slightly charred but it was unimposing enough to be able to ignore. It was a fitting amount of bitterness. The Margherita's dough was the most untouched of the three - soft and sweet, like freshly steamed naan bread. Once I sampled the two other pizzas, the taste of char in mine became more pronounced.


The wine helped, but not as much as the chilli oil; FM's tendentious choice of slightly vinegary organic white Cortese wine would have helped bring out the tangy flavours of the sourdough base, but it was the chilli oil that numbed away some of that singed pungence. It might have been fortuitous that we were in the heart of the Brixton African community, for Italian establishments with concepts as pure as Franco Manca would normally have chilli oils that barely touch the Scoville scale, let alone habanero peppers!

As soon as we were three-quarters way through, lunch turned cyclic: a heavy drizzle of chilli oil was followed by a bite of pizza, a sip of wine and then another small drizzle of chilli oil. It wasn't because the char was becoming unbearable - that was remedied by the oil - but that we were nearing our stomachs' capacity. We trucked along, too far along to warrant asking for a takeaway box, but too close to the end to give up the last few bites.

When we finally took our last bite, we sat, slumped deeper than our pizzas when they first appeared, and sighed in satisfaction. We smiled at each other in agreement. "That's life, " I mused. "No," corrected the Italian, "that's good life."

www.francomanca.co.uk
Unit 4, Market Row, London SW9 8LD, United Kingdom
(+44) 0207 738 3021
Monday to Saturday, 12pm to 5pm

All Writing and Images © Celine Asril 2009