ItalyPizza with artichokes at a restaurant in downtown Milan can surprise diners with its unique flavor and affordable price.
Reader Trinh Hang, over 40 years old, Hanoi, had a trip to Italy for nearly two weeks during the past Tet holiday. She shares her experience in Milan and her unique artichoke pizza.
Pizza is so popular around the world and is considered a dish not to be missed when coming to Italy. Therefore, on the first afternoon arriving in Milan - an industrial city with the most expensive living standard in Italy, we went to Motta, a restaurant opened in 1928.
Motta is located right at the entrance to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II - the oldest shopping area in Italy and a prominent address in Milan. A few steps away is the Duomo di Milano, the heart of Milan, where millions of tourists check in every year. Opposite Motta is a series of luxury fashion stores. Diners sitting in the restaurant enjoying pizza can watch stylish fashionistas stroll through Rolex, Saint Laurent, Prada, Armani, Dolce Gabbana or Versace stores.
Inside Motta restaurant, you can see high-class fashion stores. Image: Trinh Hang
In such an expensive location, the restaurant's menu is reasonably priced. Like many other restaurants in Italy, the menu is displayed on the sidewalk so diners can refer to it before deciding whether to enter or not. After a few minutes of flipping through the menu, we decided to try it right away, because long-standing restaurants in Italy are not rare, but there are not many restaurants with reasonable prices. At Motta, most dishes cost only about 13-20 euros (325.000-500.000 VND), a price that can be called affordable.
In a country that welcomes around 70 million tourists each year, entertaining guests anytime, anywhere is the top priority, not based on time. When we arrived it was 16pm but the restaurant was still very crowded. The manager stood at the door warmly asking if we were having lunch, even though it was long past lunchtime and not yet dinner time.
The restaurant space is small but very clean, cozy, and colorful. All partitions overlooking the street are transparent glass, creating a feeling of connection with the bustling walking street outside, making diners feel like they are living in the bustling day and night atmosphere of Milan.
Our meal consisted of a pizza and a lasagna (thinly sliced, layered, oven-baked noodles). My companion chose the Quattro Stagioni pizza (four seasons pizza) because of the very strange ingredients: tomatoes, champignon mushrooms, ham and artichokes. We said to each other, maybe we read wrong, this familiar flower in Vietnam is only used to make tea to cool down the heat, could it be used to make pizza? Out of curiosity, we still decided to try it because we thought that the first dish on the pizza menu of this long-standing restaurant must be unique.
The size of the pizzas on the menu was not listed, so we thought each one would be enough for one person. When the waiter brought out this dish, we were quite surprised because it was a rectangular cake, not round like other popular pizzas, quite large in size, 40×23 cm, with toppings. Very thick filling, lots of ham, mushrooms and green olives.
Artichoke pizza. Image: Trinh Hang
In particular, artichoke flowers are cut into bite-sized pieces and covered on the surface of the cake. We tasted the first piece and to our surprise, the artichoke was soft, fragrant, and had a pleasant sour taste, like Vietnamese sour bamboo shoots but with a much lighter, more delicate taste. This is the ideal ingredient to balance the overall ingredients of pizza, which is quite high in starch and protein, easily creating a dry, boring feeling. Perhaps, because customers ordered the restaurant to be freshly baked, the cake was very crispy and fragrant without being dry, the mushrooms were also cooked well, and did not leak water, making the cake soft.
For an appetizer, the restaurant offers guests bread and Motta's traditional pastries for dessert. Customers can also choose from dozens of cakes made from cheese, chocolate and fruit, priced at just a few euros per portion.
Our meal that day was 43 euros (about 1,07 million VND). With more than 500.000 VND per person to enjoy traditional pizza from a nearly century-old restaurant in the center of Milan, this is a worthwhile experience.
Trinh Hang
