NAPOLI PIZZA Restaurant


Napoli Pizza in Wallingford is an Italian Restaurant that serves a full line of traditional Italian favorites and unique weekly specials in addition to a number of specialty pizzas. We can host a large party in our dining room, and offer party platters for here or to go.

Napoli Pizza has been owned and managed by the same family since 1967. The owners of Napoli Pizza Gennaro, Biagio, and Maurizio take yearly trips to the Naples region of Italy to continually bring fresh ideas for their menu and new weekly specials at this beautiful Italian Restaurant.

We have been serving many local customers in Wallingford that have been returning over and over again for the delicious Italian Pizza. We are committed to serving the highest quality food, and making sure their customers are fully satisfied every time they visit.

For directions to Napoli Pizza Restaurant, click here.

 

The History of Pizza

The word pizza, as it is currently spelled, was used to describe both sweet and salty pies in the Middle Ages, but took the form that we are now familiar with in pre-Renaissance Naples, a large city in central Italy.  Poor peasants used their limited ingredients -flour and water, creating a bread dough, stretched and baked  to make a seasoned, flat bread.

It’s said that the pizza that made Naples world famous is the Pizza Margherita in Italian or Pizza Margarita to the rest of the world. A local man and the town baker called Esposito first baked it in 1889. He created the pizza in honor of a visit to Naples by the Queen of Italy, Queen Margherita.

To make the pizza a little more patriotic-looking, Esposito used red tomato sauce, white mozzarella cheese and green basil leaves as toppings to follow the colors of the Italian flag. Queen Margherita loved the pizza, and what eventually became Pizza Margherita has since become an international standard. Neapolitan pizza is still widely regarded as the best in the world, probably because of the fresh ingredients available to Neapolitan pizzerias: herbs, garlic, and tomatoes grown in the rich volcanic ash of Vesuvius, and fresh mozzarella from water buffalo milk.

Pizzerias in this era usually included a large brick oven, a marble counter where the crust was prepared, and a shelf lined with ingredients. Contemporary Neapolitan pizzerias are prepared in the same way they were 100 years ago. The large brick ovens make the pizzerias uncomfortably hot in every season except winter, but the unique flavor of these brick-oven pizzas is unmatched. Pizzaioli (makers of pizza) often assemble the entire pizza on a marble counter right before the customer's eyes.

Today, the Associazione Pizzaiuoli Napoletani (the Association of  Neapolitan Pizza) maintains strict member guidelines for ingredients, dough, and cooking. This elite organization maintains that pizza dough must be made only with flour, natural yeast or brewers yeast, salt and water. Dough must be kneaded by hand or mixers which do not cause the dough to overheat, and the dough must be punched down and shaped by hand. Also, only wood-burning, bell-shaped brick ovens are permitted in pizzerias that belong to this organization. The pizza must be cooked on the surface of the oven (often made of volcanic stone), and not in any pan or container, with oven temperatures reaching at least 400-430° C (750-800° F). These ovens often have to heat up for hours before the first pizza is cooked.