One of the most authentic joints for good, delicious and cheesy pizza in Mumbai is 1441 Pizzeria. No doubt, this one has always been our favourite wood-oven pizza where we get to make the pizza from scratch. Think more like a DIY pizza!
At 1441, you can not only choose your toppings but participate in the whole baking process - from the dramatic air-flipping of the dough to sliding it into the oven.
Here's our first hand experience of making our very own pizza. We chose to make the gourmet pizza, tied up our aprons tight and our hair net tighter, and got this pizza party started. Hand-stretched pizza dough, placed strategically on a long-handled wooden paddle was our canvas, on to which we splashed just about everything we saw.
Step 1: Spread the sauce. We could choose from tomato sauce, mama’s sauce (a more spicy Italian one), or a white sauce. We went for the spicy one coz our mama’s always right.
Step 2: Then came the cheese. We sprinkled shredded mozzarella, smoked mozzarella, fresh buffalo mozzarella and parmesan until the chef gently suggested that the dough might collapse if it got too heavy.
Step 3: This was the toppings section, and choices were pretty much unlimited. We threw on olives, all colours of capsicum, mushrooms, sweet corn, baby corn, green chillies, cherry tomatoes, onions, caramelised onions, piri piri paneer tikka, and spiced potatoes on it. We made the other half non-vegetarian and added to all the existing cheese and veggies, a bunch of non-veg toppings such as chicken tikka, salami, chicken meatballs, and curried chicken.
Step 4: And the fruit of our labour is ready, and it's so good. The pizza was gorgeous, and so was the place. We wolfed down every bite of that pizza, while a colleague had the non-veg half. Both of us ignored each other and finished the food in ten minutes’ flat.The entire pizzeria was flooded in warm, yellow light and had scenes from an Italian countryside on the walls. We sat atop one of the high red stools there.
The gourmet pizza we made was for INR 695 (inclusive of all taxes and all toppings you add) and you can even go for a classic pizza with unlimited toppings (INR 595). The difference is the number of cheeses, and a few toppings options will be reduced.
Call yourself a pizza-lover and haven’t been to the 1441 pizzeria yet? Pfft. This is the place to go if you are obsessed with the slice of heaven slapped with cheese.