Volturno, located on Shrewsbury Street, is a really good restaurant; its famous for the Italian pizza, but it’s also a place where you can get drinks and cocktails.
As an Italian, I can vouch that we are talking of a pizza place that really respects and reflects the Italian tradition, starting from the appetizers, or “antipasti” in Italian. The menu includes many traditional items: for example the selection of house-made cheeses, foccacia, caponata, ricotta and risotto fritters.
The ambience is characterized by a soft light and by the heat of the wood oven, giving the restaurant an orange-tinted light that it’s really welcoming and warming. Volturno looks like a loft in Brooklyn, with high walls and an open-space, where you can see the people at the tables chatting in front of the huge windows, you can hear the tipsy people drinking cocktails at the counter in the middle of the room; you can smell the freshly baked pizzas ready to be cut and given to customers and finally you can also taste them if you stop to eat there. The place is a bit rustic imposing and rough, but humble and welcoming.
The staff is very, very friendly, available and warm. Sometimes it is a little bit slow, especially when we were waiting for the pizzas, we waited almost 45 minutes for our pizzas, but it’s understandable because it was 8 P.M. on a Friday.
The pizza it’s quite similar to the Italian style, even if from region to region the pizza changes. It’s cooked in a wood oven, dough thin and low, soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside. The selection of pizzas is really interesting, because even if a part of them respects the Italian tradition, others reflect American culture as well.
The quality of every product it’s high and fresh, the food is well presented, and the portions are normal. I heard someone complaining that they were small, but that’s an Italian pizza, not American, and there’s a huge difference of sizes between them. This pizza is the best I have ever tried here since my arrival in August and the taste was really good. I got the fichi pizza and it was delicious: crunchy and soft, the prosciutto was pretty fresh, the same for the arugula, the gorgonzola and the mozzarella was really high quality; there’s just a single painful button: the “fichi” or figs, were dried but they weren’t very good. They were too sticky and hard, and I had the impression that they didn’t belong in that pizza. However, as I said before, the Italian-American pizzas are too American for me, I could never eat pulled chicken, basil pesto, mozzarella, spinach, grape tomato, garlic, or shallot on a pizza, there’s no way. But the thing that I appreciated the most is the plain pizza dough with Nutella, a really common thing in Italy, especially at birthday parties at the pizza restaurant, it was very nostalgic.
Talking about the prices, I heard a lot of different opinions, there are people who say that it’s too expensive and who says that the price is right. I’m in the middle: compared to the Italians prices these are crazy, and also compared to the American pizza prices, but you have to understand that its an Italian restaurant that actually does true Italian food and recipes, with high quality ingredients and uses expensive techniques (wood oven, for example).
In conclusion, it’s a place that I would recommend, where I would go again and that I would call a true Italian restaurant. The atmosphere is really nice and light, the staff is smiley, the food is good and the prices are right.
