Osteria Cicchetti
If you buy the pizza here, you can't blame me
I think someone power-washed the faux brick a bit too much
Osteria Cicchetti is Italian for Upside-down Omelette. Your guess is as good as mine as far as why they named their restaurant this. I went here with some family members for lunch to celebrate our grandmother's birthday. This place seems pretty ritzy in the same sort of way Housewives of Herpes County seems ritzy. Actually, fuck it, it was a pretty nice place overall, even if it's located in a terrible nouveau riche dickhole of a stripmall. Astonishingly, all the food (at least at lunch) is pretty cheap, most items under $9. The pizza was $8. I wasn't expecting much and what I got was not what I was expecting. Which is not to say that what I got was good; it was just much different from my expectations.
I was expecting your standard-ish looking American attempt at a classic Neapolitan Margherita pie: an attempt at a thin, round crust, allegedly cooked in a "wood burning" "artisan" oven, some crummy "fresh" mozzarella and some crummy "fresh" basil with a passable sauce. This would have probably been pretty shitty, like the pie I once got at Kornerstone (which I will try to review before they eventually close down). Instead what I got was this rather strange-looking, oblong bastard:
Maybe in some shitty part of Italy, this is what a Margherita pizza looks like. In Naples, it looks like this. I was expecting some Americanized/bastardized version of the pizza pictured in that link. The pizza pictured above - what I got - I don't know what the fuck this shit is. I don't even know where the hell to start. I guess bottoms up, in honor of the liquor I'll soon be chugging in order to forget about the gastric cheesebaby Osteria Cicchetti fucked into me.
The crust was probably the worst part about this shit. It was real thin and airy, which is normally probably a good thing, but it was overcooked to shit, brittle as hell and covered on the bottom in cornmeal or something, and on the top with some other bullshit. The craziest thing, the thing that made me question reality, is that it seemed like this pizza's crust was the same shit that they just served us before our meal, in a bread basket. They serve you this delicious bread and this tasty, unleavened sorta-flaky, crispy something-or-other stuff. I think the dough of this pizza is the same shit except maybe thicker and just overcooked to hell, like if Satan were making a pizza but forgot he was in hell, so it got really fucked up but he served it to you anyway, because you're in hell so fuck you. I think it had the same strange spice glaze-y sorta shit on it too. This crap was alright as a pre-meal snack but newsflash: nowhere does this qualify as a fucking pizza crust. Not even in a terrible stripmall.
The sauce. Was there sauce on here? I guess there was, but fuck me look at all that cheese. It tasted pretty good but there was so much of it, so goddamn clusterfuck much of it that it was just a solid, idiotic mass. Mozzarella is a pretty cool cheese because when it' s hot it gets all elastic-y. It stretches and shit. This didn't. It was like biting into a Silly Putty (don't do it, it's gross). But it tasted good so fuck it I ate that whole fucking slab of cheese and I'm not ashamed. The basil was fine and I think there was some nice olive oil on there, which is cool. I don't know what these tomatoes were doing on there but they were okay too.
This pizza is sort of beyond the scope of this blog, except that scopes can fuck off, and so can this pizza. This blog can fuck off too, because the other food items at the table looked pretty dank and I forced myself to order and eat this romper room bullshit instead.
Happy birthday Gram!
Yes I know that it doesn't mean 'upside down omelette.' What's an upside-down omelette anyway? It's still a fuckin omelette.
6 recircs out of a possible 8 recircs (lower is better)
Osteria Cicchetti - $8.64 1125-K Military Cutoff Rd. Â Wilmington, NC 28405