From morning until night, this neighbourhood diner celebrates the possibilities and deliciousness of pizza.
Pizza$
In these lawless dining times, it seems like anything goes when it comes to breakfast.
Craving Japanese-Italian pasta? Forklore at City West has the answers and mentaiko udon you seek.
Craving a bowl of sunrise pho, stat? Go directly to U&I Cafe in Northbridge.
Perhaps the decisions of the night before call for a morning-after steak sandwich or fried chicken? I know a place where you can get both.
But when it comes to breaking down the barriers between AM and PM foodstuffs, such Johnny-come-latelys can’t hold a candle to pizza. While humans have consumed leftover pizza for brekky since at least the days of Sizzler, local places like Canteen Pizza and the dearly departed Dank Pizza have done much to legitimise pizza’s place at the breakfast table.
Mima Pizzeria, a chirpy neighbourhood cafe in Dianella opened in March by Pizzeria de Leo co-founder Arber Alikaj, is one of the more recent inductees to the city’s breakfast pizza fraternity.
While this born-again coffee shop tiled in black splashbacks has served brekky pizza since opening, Mima only appeared on my radar following the arrival of Italian pizzaiolo Andrea Muru in August.
Born in Sardinia, Muru’s has spent more than a decade geeking out over pizza and been in and around hospitality for more than 20 years. He comes to Mima from Bayswater’s King Somm and brings with him, among other things, terrific breakfast pizza: crunchy, airy flatbread-esque slabs around the size of a film camera and blanketed with ruddy splotches of tomato sugo and dry splats of fior di latte produced by low and slow baking.
Think of it as a Grandma-style pizza from Long Island in New York, as prepared by a private chef employed in a Manhattan penthouse. Impressively, this quietly sophisticated breakfast is just one way Mima celebrates pizza’s potential.
From Wednesday to Sunday, the shop switches to neighbourhood pizzeria mode, BYO and all. (Staff at the nearby bottle shop tell me nights have been noticeably busier since Mima’s arrival: witness the power of a good pizzeria!)
The temperatures on the twin Moretti Forni stone-based ovens go up; the same dough is massaged into discs and topped with the same cheese and sugo used in the mornings; and the kitchen sends out a steady stream of puffy-edged pies of reassuring weight and gentle crunch to diners occupying the shop’s 60 seats as well as delivery customers.
Order the calzone (folded pizza) bulging with batons of Calabrese salami and cloud-like ricotta and taste the rewards of investing in artisan cheeses from local milk whisperers, La Delizia Latticini. (The parmesan and pecorino that the kitchen deploys on most pizzas stars in the calzone too, albeit gratinéed into a cheesy, caramelised mass crowning the pizza pocket.)
Wise heads know that a marinara pizza is the surest way to understand any pizzeria’s DNA. Mima’s anchovy-enriched version superbly highlights the airiness of Muru’s dough plus the fruity sweetness of his sugo made using fabled San Marzano tomatoes from Italy’s Campania region.
In addition to being turned into a “focaccia” – in reality, more flattened pizza bianco rather than puffy, oil-enriched bread – our man’s dough also features at dessert time where, following a costume change involving Nutella and crushed pistachios, it reappears as straccetti fritti: billowy fingers of fried dough that are seemingly above the laws of gravity and scarily easy to eat.
While the menu includes things-that-aren’t-pizza, they’re not, for now, of the same calibre as the headliners.
The spaghetti marinara – no relation to the pizza, alas – sees whole prawns breaking up a dry jumble of spaghetti spiked with chilli, garlic and diced tomatoes. The brightness of the house sugo helps perk up otherwise unremarkable arancini.
The chips are those short, chubby chunks of high-vis potato synonymous with old-school fish and chippers. Bresaola carpaccio does exactly what it says on the box. None of it is terrible, but let’s be clear: the star of Mima’s show is its pizza (although likeable, obliging staff deserve recognition too.)
Perth is no stranger to good pizza. Personalities such as Nunzio Nici (Il Padrino) and Theo Kalageceros (Little Caesers) made sure of that. But whereas these elder oven-tending statesmen made their name by cooking for popes and putting atypical ingredients on pizza bases, the modus operandi of Perth’s current crop of pizza savants is to study the dish’s history while losing themselves in the latest science and technology (see fermentation, new-school ovens and an interest in wheat varieties).
Fuse the two together and magic happens, as proven by the output of Maestro Sourdough Pizza, the pizza offshoot of Casa in Mount Hawthorn, plus roughly a gazillion backyard pizza warriors stoking and stroking their Gozney ovens.
All the signs suggest Mima has the potential to ascend into P-Town’s pizza stratosphere, not least because Muru has only been there a month and says, tantalisingly, that his long-fermented dough made with 10 different flours is still a work in progress.
I’m pumped to see – and taste – what’s in store, and to uncover more Mimas and Murus making suburbia ever more delicious. Is Perth experiencing a new golden age of pizza where anything goes? You bet. Bring it on.
The low-down
Atmosphere: a chirpy neighbourhood eatery putting Dianella on the Perth pizza map.
Go-to dishes: pizza marinara, straccetti fritti.
Drinks: coffees by day, plus soft drinks, juices and whatever BYO you packed in your esky or Décor wine cooler.
Cost: about $80 for two people
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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Max Veenhuyzen is a journalist and photographer who has been writing about food, drink and travel for national and international publications for more than 20 years. He reviews restaurants for the Good Food Guide.
