Margo’s
Mistra

Food: 9/10
Service: 7/10
Ambience: 8/10
Value: 9/10
Overall: 9/10

You need patience to get through the menu here. Patience and time. The menu opens with a bombastic puff piece; a page-long eulogy that waxes lyrical about the delights of a Margo’s pizza, laden with superlatives and ostentation. It would seem that a Margo’s pizza is quite unrivalled, a pizza beyond compare. I would have to wait to try the pizza before lambasting the establishment for such abject puffery.

The menu seems to go on forever. Echoing the gushing tones of the opening page, each item on the menu is accompanied by an effusively-written explanatory essay, detailing not only the ingredients and their origin but the story behind each dish’s conception. Is it long-winded? Definitely. Is it pretentious? Perhaps.

Pretentious for sure is Margo’s white truffle pizza adorned with 24-carat gold leaf. Costing rough­ly about  €1,800, it is certainly one of the most expensive pizzas in the world and is undoubtedly the priciest commercially available pizza on the island. We were here for pizza, not this flagrant vulgarity.

We waded through the seemingly endless menu, eyeing the more reasonable offerings. In frustration, an exasperated few put down the rambling menu and decided to fashion a pizza of their choosing.

The menu had ruffled feathers but the rustic restaurant’s gorgeous location in  picturesque Mistra Bay encourages you to order and feast at leisure. We sat outside under the shade of ma­ture oak trees, enjoying the large, outdoor space and the laid-back atmosphere. Mistra was idyllic in early summer, the bay devoid of boisterous beachgoers. Ugly Bu­ġibba was thankfully far away, hidden by something almost as unsightly – a neat row of camper vans forming a line along the bay, blocking out the view to the sea.

Margo’s may be a (predominantly) pizza place but it is not a fast food joint, far from it! This gourmet pizzeria heads in the opposite direction. This is the home of authentic Neapolitan pizza and slow food. Never before have I witnessed a pizza made with such love, care and devotion.

This pizza crust is good enough to be eaten on its own

They are serving what has come to be accepted as a fast food, while tightly embracing a slow food philosophy. The engaging chef-patron is a gregarious guy. He is also a gastronome – a lover of good food who takes pleasure in cleanly producing sustainable ingredients and cooking flavoursome, quality food. Only the finest, high-quality ingredients are made use of, and there are agreeable home-grown, organic elements to each dish.

The crust is, of course, the backbone of any pizza. It is a bespoke flour dough that forms the base of each Margo’s pizza. A unique blend of several flours yields a superb and nutritious yeast-free sourdough. Fired and puffed to crisp perfection in a wood-burning stone oven, the dough transforms into a traditional thin crust that is golden and glorious and delicious. At once there is body, texture, lightness, flavour and a satisfying crunch.

This pizza crust is good enough to be eaten on its own.

Artisanal cheese is used in all pizzas – fresh, hand-made, or­ganic water buffalo mozzarella from Ponte Reale, dehydrated slightly in order to concentrate flavour and reduce wateriness. It is heavenly, rich and luscious. This is quality and it speaks volumes.

The sauce element of a pizza is often overlooked and pizzas are all too often swathed in a tasteless, watered-down slick of pomo­doro passato. Margo’s uses no average tomato in its sauce-making. Only the finest, sweet, sun-ripened San Marzano plum tomatoes – the preferred tomato when one speaks of truly authentic Neapolitan pizza – are deemed worthy to crown their culinary creations.

With ingredients such as these, Margo’s Margherita pizza was utterly sublime in its simplicity. Finished off with a drizzle of organic, extra virgin olive oil and a couple of basil leaves, it burst with pure goodness.

Many of the other ingredients used to embellish a Margo’s pizza are organically grown on the res­taurant’s estate. The estate’s saline fields in Mistra supply the kitchen with an abundance of herbs and vegetables, while the surrounding hills are rich with wild herbs. A Okm philosophy can thus be employed. Ingredients literally pass from field to fork with only the restaurant kitchen providing interim interruption.

Apart from home-grown produce, sausages and pancetta are home-made and smoked on site along with bacon, ham and fish, following traditional cold-smoking techniques that do not call for the use of chemicals. This is honest, natural food.

When a kitchen works in tandem with nature, there is unsurprisingly an emphasis on seasonality. I in­dulged in the Pizza Sta­gionale, with in-season figs taking centre stage as the star ingredient. I hoped that they would raise the pizza to un­imaginable heights of deliciousness, and they did. The fig pulp add­ed bursts of sweetness to a pizza bianca topped with salty Parma ham, cherry tomatoes, rucola and lashings of a fragrant basil pesto. It was mouth-wateringly moreish and I ate it down to the last crumb. I just couldn’t help myself.

The Affumicata pizza, a speciality of the house, is not for the faint-hearted. Comprising a veritable meat feast of smoked mozzarella, sausage and pancetta, it is a meat lover’s paradise. Thinly sliced and charred to a crisp, the meat exploded with flavour and intense smokiness.

The Al Tonno Fresco, adorned with generous chunks of fresh tuna (canned varieties are frown­ed upon at Margo’s and regarded as nothing more than pet food), was a thing of beauty.

The Romana pizza, topped with meaty, flavourful an­chovies, onion and capers, was utterly scrumptious; the intense savouriness of the anchovies melting into the creamy mildness of the mozzarella.

They are positively passionate about pizza at Margo’s. It is this passion that drives them, that makes them successful in the crea­tion of outstanding pizza. It is pizza made by aficionados, for aficionados. They strive for excellence. And excellence is achieved.

They can be forgiven the bombastic, wordy menu, the puffery and the at times clumsy staff.  They can be as pretentious as they like. They’ve earned it.

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