L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele

On a side street off Corso Umberto, a few minutes from Naples' central station, a pizzeria has been doing the same thing since 1870. L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele serves exactly two pizzas — margherita and marinara — and has never found a reason to add a third. The room is plain, tiled and brightly lit, the service is fast to the point of brusqueness, and the crowd outside is a permanent fixture of the street. Phil Rosenthal came for Somebody Feed Phil and, by the look of it, briefly lost the power of speech.

The margherita is the entire argument, made in the city that invented it: dough proved slowly and stretched by hand, San Marzano tomatoes crushed by hand, fior di latte, a thread of olive oil, a few leaves of basil, all fired for barely a minute in a wood oven hot enough to blister the crust while leaving the centre soft enough to fold. The marinara is the older, starker pizza — tomato, garlic, oregano and oil, no cheese at all — and for many Neapolitans the truer one. Sizes come as normal or double; order the double margherita and share it, unless you have spent the day preparing for exactly this.

The rules are easy. Take a number, expect to wait the better part of an hour, and accept that the wait is the price of the pizza rather than a fault in the system. Once you are seated, the kitchen turns the table at startling speed. Beer or water, nothing complicated. The bill will be small enough to feel like a mistake.

Somebody Feed Phil is built on the idea that the best food is found by following your appetite rather than a guidebook, and that feeding people well is a form of generosity. Da Michele is that idea in one dish: no reservations, no embellishment, no apology — just pizza made so well that a city full of excellent pizzaioli still queues for it.