Ok, I’ll admit that I am partial, but only because this chain comes directly from my native Italian city of Torino! Since its opening just a few weeks ago, I really do believe that Eataly Moscow has become the best place where to enjoy an authentic Italian pizza in the Russian’s capital.
First of all, let’s stress that “Eataly” is not a spelling mistake (see my previous post on poor Italian spelling to understand why it is important to remark that in Russia!) but it is a playful play on words with the terms (to) eat and, of course, Italy. In fact, under the same roof (Kievskaya, 2 Shopping Center “Kievskiy” 4th floor – as the name suggests it is next to the Kievskaya train station and metro station) Italy offers a number of restaurants, a very well-stocked marked of both Italian and Russian goods, and even cooking classes.
A pizza in Russia in 2017 can never be *that* good – I know you are thinking that – because the sanctions forbid the import of real Italian mozzarella and Italian cheeses in general. If that can be true for the store, where you can in fact only buy Swiss cheese, don’t worry about your pizza: Eataly has you covered and to solve the problem, it produces its own mozzarella, stracciatella and other cheeses.
Besides Italian tomato paste and flower (directly from Mulino Marino – Sorry, in keeping with the tradition, their site is Italian only!) one big “secret” for a great pizza is that of having the right kind of oven: it must be a wood oven, first of all, and then it has to have the right shape (between a semi-sphere and an “onion shaped dome). Eataly has two of them and they even have a little “ace up their sleeve” to ensure perfect consistency: inside each oven the base rotate so that you put the pizza in, wait for it to make its “round” in the oven, and it comes back to you perfectly cooked, every time.
One final note: the pizza Margherita (the most classic one) costs just shy of 500 Rubles, which at the time of writing, thanks to a favourable exchange rate for foreigners, makes it even a bit less expensive (around 7,5 Euros, 8 USDs or thereabout) than the same Pizza in Eataly Torino!
Russia Through The Lens 