bombay masala at pizzeria

Pizzeria is awesome because it exists. Back in the day, we used to go to New Yorker for pizza but the food was super Gujufied, as in strangely sweet.

So thank god Pizzeria opened, to provide competition and variety. It’s on Marine Drive, and the restaurant’s huge open windows look out to a view of the salty sea. Fans whirring at high speed mix the sea breeze with Bombay’s smelly air and sun: it’s a great place to have a beer and inhale the city.

Although they now have “stuffed crust,” I prefer the thin crust plain cheese pizza or the tangy paneer pizza. Pizzeria’s thin crust is crispy, almost like a quickly fried flatbread.

I ate at Pizzera twice this trip, both times for lunch. On my first trip, we ordered jalapeño poppers for our starter. Total junk food but the jalapeños were actually spicy, and the dipping sauce was pleasantly smoky. Also, the filling was a finely-chopped jalapeño and cheese mixture, instead of just one jalapeño suspended in cheese.

The second time I went, we ordered the festive looking gnocchi. It was decent, but like fast-food gnocchi – nothing was fresh and the pasta precooked (these gnocchi were rolls instead of dumplings, btw). It wasn’t bad, but again- more junk food than real food.

I tried three pizzas- the Bombay Masala, the Tangy Paneer and Italian Veggie (not my choice). The Italian veggie was reminiscent of Guju pizza in that the pineapple chunks and baby corn were odd and made the sauce too sweet, and there were no customary jalapeños to balance out a slice. The tangy paneer was great. Paneer in India is unbelievably different from the disgusting paneer in America. On this pizza, it was like ricotta, and the sauce was warm with Indian spices. Yum. The Bombay Masala was plain cheese with masala sprinkled on top, and a slightly sweet sauce. It was just okay- tasted like regular pizza with sweet sauce, and with an aftertaste of heat, from the spices. Apparently, it wasn’t up to its usual excellence on the day we went, said my cousin who visits Pizzeria once a week for the Bombay Masala.