Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria
Via Napoli Ristorante e Pizzeria is a table-service restaurant in the Italy Pavilion of World Showcase at EPCOT in Walt Disney World. Operated by the Patina Restaurant Group, it specialises in Neapolitan pizza baked in wood-fired ovens, alongside pastas, salads and other southern Italian dishes. It held its grand opening on August 5, 2010, and has since become one of the most consistently praised places to eat in the park, largely on the strength of a pizza made to a deliberately strict Neapolitan specification.
History
Via Napoli was a late addition to the Italy Pavilion, which had opened with EPCOT in 1982 with a single table-service restaurant. The pizzeria was built at the rear of the pavilion, adjacent to Tutto Italia Ristorante, the Patina group's other Italian restaurant in the pavilion. Patina's chief executive, Nick Valenti, developed the concept from his travels in southern Italy and from his earlier Naples 45 Ristorante e Pizzeria in New York, which had received the La Vera Pizza Napoletana certification for authentic Neapolitan pizza. Before opening, Valenti spent time in Naples studying dough, crust, sauce and oven temperatures at celebrated pizzerias including Da Michele and Trianon.[1]
The restaurant held its grand opening celebration on August 5, 2010, then operated on a walk-in basis during a soft-opening period before reservations began for its formal opening that September. With around 300 seats, it substantially expanded the pavilion's dining capacity, and its arrival also completed a part of the pavilion plot that had long been earmarked for an attraction that was never built.
Setting
The dining room is a large, high-ceilinged space designed in a Florentine style, with work led by the Florentine architect Stefano Nardini. The room is open and deliberately lively rather than intimate: long communal tables sit alongside conventional seating, colourful hand-painted tiles decorate the tables, and a row of windows brings in natural light. The centrepiece is the open kitchen, where pizzaioli work in full view of diners, stretching dough and sliding pizzas into the three wood-burning ovens that dominate one wall. Each oven is sculpted with an open-mouthed face, giving the kitchen the character of a working theatre as much as a cooking station.
Cuisine
The menu centres on pizza Napoletana made as closely as possible to the Neapolitan tradition. The dough uses Caputo flour imported from southern Italy, San Marzano tomatoes and handmade mozzarella. The water for the dough is not ordinary Florida tap water: it is sourced from a spring in Pennsylvania chosen because its mineral composition closely matches the water of Italy's Campania region, a step taken to reproduce the texture and flavour of a crust made in Naples.[2] Pizzas are offered in individual, large and half-metre (mezzo metro) sizes, the last intended for sharing, in varieties that include margherita, quattro stagioni, piccante and ortolano.
Beyond pizza, the kitchen serves pastas, including baked pasta dishes finished in the wood-fired ovens, salads, fried starters such as arancini, and desserts including gelato, tiramisu and zeppole. The combination of a shareable signature dish and a broad supporting menu has made the restaurant a fixture of "best pizza at Walt Disney World" discussions since its opening.
The volcano ovens
The three wood-burning ovens are named Etna, Vesuvio and Stromboli, after Italy's three active volcanoes.[3] Each is sculpted with the face of the volcano, reflecting the gods of the mythology surrounding each mountain, and the ovens burn oak at temperatures high enough to cook a pizza in little more than a minute or two, producing the leopard-spotted, slightly charred crust characteristic of the Neapolitan style.