D.O.P pizza

One of the easiest things to spot in a restaurant is pretension. There's a forced-ness that anyone who just loves to eat can simply feel. It's the feeling you get walking into a glitzed-up restaurant where the music is so cool you don't recognize it and the hostess (wearing more eyeliner than apparel) lets you see an almost imperceptible sneer as you doff your coat and reveal a less-than-uber cool outfit. The menu reads right -- these days it'll be "sharing plates", lots of pork and a whole lot more words in non-English languages -- but the food doesn't deliver.

By happy contrast, authenticity is also pretty easy to spot. When we stepped into what's billed as our city's only truly Neapolitan pizzeria, my Italian swain exclaimed that this would not be out of place in Naples. Right down to the exposed white cedar bar, the pizzeria's owners are attempting to bring the entire authentic Neapolitan pizza experience to this city.

They even have an ideology page on their website where they quote from the EU and the Vera Pizza Napoletana code. Just to begin, a true pizza must be circularly shaped, 0.3 cm thick at its centre and 1 to 2 cm thick at its crust.

YES, THERE'S AN ASSOCIATION WHICH GOVERNS THE AUTHENTICITY OF PIZZA. (And people wonder why I worship the Italians.)

I would travel days, pay a princess's ransom, abide boring conversation and even sleep in a tent to experience this kind of passionate food-related authenticity. So sitting too far across a long communal table from my beau seems a paltry compromise because the first item on the pizza list stops me cold: Margherita D.O.P.

Denominazione di origine controllata is beautiful Italian for the Protected Designation of Origin laws which guard the names of regional foods. Champagne was one of the first winners (you can't call any old bubbly champers anymore), so are prosciutto and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It's a way of keeping safe the actual words we use to name foods, keeping their original meaning in tact. Kind of like a food dictionary in application, in order to be named Parmigiano-Reggiano, it must be made in a small region of Northen Italy to specific standards inspected by the Parm-Regg cheese consortium. I have a fierce passion for dictionaries, grammar and language, so no surprise that I dig this kind of thing.

As we eat the D.O.P Margherita, we can only smile. It is perfect and simple and delicious, the San Marzano tomato sauce slightly more sweet than acid, the fior di latte mozzarella creamy and pale, the basil wilted, the crust exceptional in its simultaneous crispy-chewiness. We pull on $5 tumblers of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo and bawl at each other over the extraordinary din.

I have long lived by the motto that pizza is like sex: even when it's bad it's still good. Pizza does get slutted around rather a lot (this city also boasts an Afghan pizzeria, a Turkish pizzeria, and many varieties of BBQ chicken pizza), and that's not always a bad thing, particularly at 3am on the way home from the pub. It's just comforting to know that someone cares enough to make this pizza according to these rules. And that deserves respect.