Great pizza, as well as an original stylish interior and a professional pizza maker from Naples, make Pizzeria Napule a great new culinary attraction.
While there is no shortage of pizzerias in the city, there still aren’t that many that make you want to come back again and again and tell all your friends about. Pizzeria Napule – the latest addition to Kyiv’s Italian restaurant scene – so far looks like one of the latter kind.
Pizzeria Napule proved easy to find – its name was stapled on the side of the building in big letters. After we climbed a flight of stairs leading us to the second floor, we found ourselves in a spacious room with high ceilings – the actual pizzeria.
Though knowing that the place was still quite new and therefore couldn’t be very popular yet, I decided not to take my chances at 7 p.m. on Thursday and booked a table. And even though upon entering I saw there were quite a few free tables, I was glad I booked – otherwise we might not have gotten a table right by the big window that replaced a wall, looking down on the street. We were led to our table and served by a sweet, smiling lady. She brought us the menus, which were in fact just several sheets of paper stapled together – one of the few things I noticed during our dinner that indicated that the place had indeed just opened.
On the menu we found a few traditional Italian appetizers, soups, a number of salads, mostly made of vegetables and cheese, and 19 kinds of authentic Naples pizza, including classics like Marinara, Margherita and Calzone, as well also traditional Naples-type Fritta, which is a closed, fried pizza. Although I suspected that one pizza would be just enough for the two of us, I needed us to try some other, different dishes, so I insisted that we order a couple of light-sounding salads. I ordered one of my favorite Italian dishes, a salad made of tomatoes and mozzarella with basil and olive oil – which I learned from the menu was called “Caprese” (Hr 49) – while my friend asked the waitress for advice and picked a mixed salad with goat cheese (Hr 49).
As we sipped on our juices (Hr 9) – cherry for me and orange for my friend – I looked around the eatery and immediately observed that its design – created by the famous artist Kiril Protsenko, who is known to have decorated the interiors of quite a few eateries in the capital – was indeed something to look at. While one wall was made entirely of glass, the opposite wall was divided into segments, as if mimicking several houses standing side by side. One segment was decorated with a mosaic of tiles depicting a flowery composition, the second had a depiction of Madonna with a baby, and the third was painted with a joyful graffiti of a strange creature which had Angel wings and a nimbus over its head.
The ceiling was also unusual – it was painted black, as were all the different pipes running above its surface.
Finally, right across from where I sat, I saw the interior’s key element: a roundish stove, specially designed for cooking pizza. A young man, whom I recognized as a “pizzaiolo” from Naples from a picture I saw in a magazine, was hanging out by the stove the whole time, making pizzas and watching the scene.
Hardly ten minutes had passed when our salads arrived. The “Caprese” surprised me with its original preparation – cherry tomatoes and small round balls of mozzarella made a tiny mountain on my plate, generously sprinkled with basil leaves and olive oil. And it was as tasty as it looked. My friend, however, wasn’t equally pleased with her dish. It was the first time she had tried goat cheese and didn’t especially like it, while all the different types of salad lying in a heap on the plate, in addition to a sweet sauce that reminded her of jam, didn’t improve the taste much. Open to all kinds of new palate combinations myself, I simply offered to switch plates with her – I saw she was tempted by my tomatoes, and she thankfully accepted the offer. I had to conclude that her salad was indeed an unusual one, and although it was fresh and properly prepared, it wasn’t my sort of thing either.
I had hardly had time to take any notes for my review, when the steaming hot “Quattro Stagioni” (“Four Seasons”) pizza (Hr 99) arrived at our table. My idea was that by ordering this very kind, we were going to try several kinds of pizza at once; however, a surprise awaited me. My friend announced that she had had too much to eat already and couldn’t have any pizza. By “too much,” she basically meant tomatoes and mozzarella, and about two pieces of house bread, which was, in fact, delicious. I objected, saying that it couldn’t have been that heavy, and she confessed she also had a snack at home before leaving for the restaurant. Furious, I did make her eat one slice, but she refused to eat any more, and although I realized I couldn’t finish the pizza on my own, I made sure to try all four different kinds: a plain cheese pizza, one with mushrooms, one with ham, and one with salted fish and capers.
I thoroughly enjoyed the first three. It was indeed a wonderful pizza, with juicy filling and a very thin crust made from delicious pastry. I already didn’t like salted fish on pizza, which I had tried once before at another Italian pizzeria, and this time was no different, so I have decided to skip it in the future.
As I was finally as full as my friend, I asked the waitress to make me a doggie bag for the remaining pizza and took it home with me – I couldn’t just leave behind even a few slices of the wonderful thing. And though I still can’t honestly say that I know what Naples pizza is all about, I can already call myself a fan.

Pizzeria Napule (9 Mechnikova, 2nd floor (Klovska metro station), 461-9263). Open daily noon till 11 p.m.
English menu: Yes
English-speaking staff: Yes
Average meal: Hr 100