Course number three and I’m roundly befuddled: why hasn’t this menu “popped off” on Instagram? Well, they’re not really doing press bookings for one thing. And this is a pizza tasting menu, so I can’t imagine many influencers are enticed by the prospect of liberal dough, however light and leopard-spotted it might be; of olive oil and luscious cheese and then, after an indelicate Campanian journey, the boundless sugar of Italian confectionery. Yet this is something everybody should do at least once. Especially those who think pizza is “just pizza”. Idioti! Hand gestures ever about us.

Before unconventional cooking in a two-storey, futuristic pizzeria in Soho with its curved windows, Berghain-esque concrete and neon, Michele Pascarella was squeezing tomatoes and stretching mozzarella in his native Napoli, where he started making pizza aged 11. Years later, he opened his first Napoli on the Road in Chiswick. It was named Europe’s best pizzeria by Italy’s prestigious 50 Top Pizza awards for three consecutive years up to 2026 and Pascarella was named world’s best pizza maker by a similar rubric in 2023.

He’s 34 now and “still learning”. Neapolitan pizzaiolos treat pizza as the Japanese do sushi: a highly skilled craft where ingredients are all and technique long-honed. The undoing of decades of Domino’s in Britain will take time. “Too many people still think of pizza as junk food in Britain,” Pascarella says. But it’s happening. London is a fully-fledged pizza city today. You can have a soupy Neapolitan pie on Tuesday and a New York-style slice on Wednesday.

Craig David aside and I’m sitting in front of a busy kitchen watching a Dolmio advert unfurl in real time. Inexplicably svelte Italian men are drizzling olive oil on margheritas, ladling tomato sauce onto springy dough and plucking basil leaves from fragrant bushes. The warmth of two arched pizza ovens billows through the crowded dining room. Tanned solo diners are practising a libretto, the method by which you fold a slice in half and then turn the nose in on itself; families are sharing plates of parmigiana di melanzane, luxurious and stunning in red.

No à la carte for me. Our first course is san marzano tomatoes four ways: raw and then cooked for two, six, and 10 hours. A curious opener. It enlivens the palate. Then come three street food snacks born out of a deep-rooted respect for leftovers. A cube of polenta is topped with stracciatella and caper dust; there’s a classic crocché, or potato croquette; and a sphere of frittatina, or fried macaroni, imbued with courgettes and spritzed with Amalfi lemon.

The first slice of pizza — there are four overall — is an elegant medley of mozzarella, globe artichokes, half soft, half crispy for texture, generous splodges of hazelnut cream and grinds of black pepper. It’s deceptively light; we’re immediately rapturous.

Pascarella and team don’t just dish out slice after slice. Methods are tweaked at each course. A traditional Neapolitan dough calls for 00 flour and only a two-minute whoosh in the oven at 400C, but the next slice is a world away, with a crispy base of barley and rye that requires far more water and is harder still to sculpt and deliver. This pizza is steamed, then baked, then fried before arriving topped with a hockey puck of mozzarella di bufala and dotted with wild garlic pesto and tomato jam (and dried oregano). It’s messy, gladiatorial food.

There are pauses. One brings a green, zingy soup of barattiere, a Puglian melon harvested unripe so it’s extra refreshing and mouth-puckering. Later comes a cleanser in the form of sgroppino: Venetian lemon sorbet with prosecco and vodka. And we’re taken elsewhere in Italy, to Torino, for a folded focaccia-like pizza sandwich filled with slices of veal — breast, not loin, so more tender — and a heady tuna sauce amped up with anchovies. It’s umami-maxxing stuff, bagna cauda on a memory foam mattress.

Full up? Whatevs, find me someone capable of declining the savoury finale — a riff on Pascarella’s signature ragu, deep with cuts of beef and pork and painted with a spiral of parmesan fondue — and I’ll find you a chill Italian. There’s a pot of extra sauce for crust-dipping.

The concept of a pizza tasting menu is mad. More so given Pascarella’s dessert trio includes a mini-Magnum. But this is what London does best: artful lunacy. I cannot chef’s kiss enough.