I finally found a good Italian Napoli-style pizza in Seattle (Nirvana Food Truck in Ballard)

TLTR: As an Italian, I struggled to find a good Italian pizza in Seattle for almost 4 years. Nirvana Food Truck in Ballard (it doesn’t actually move) is the typical pizza that you would eat in my country (Napoli style). It’s cheap (< 20$), healthy, and per person. Not to be mistaken with American pizza, which is a completely different product. More details below.

I recently tried Nirvana food truck (it doesn’t actually move) in Ballard, which is owned by a single family (2 people). The guy inside I think is from the Maghreb area but I might be wrong. He learned how to make pizza in Boston and bought a wood-oven from Italy. He uses fresh, high quality ingredients, and wood. He is also very competent with the wood-oven and with the dough preparation (Napoli Style). Here some explanation of what Italian pizza is and main differences with others:

In my country, pizza is served per person and was born as a poor food (it’s only made of water, flour, yeast and salt), which is why to me it’s an insult to see 25$ pizzas, especially if ingredients are local and not imported. First report of the word pizza in written documents is from 997 AD in Latin (reference at the bottom), but probably was made even much earlier, so there weren’t any fancy expensive pizzas at the time. For today pizzas (prince range: 4-15 euros), we use fresh tomato sauce, which is supposed to taste very fresh and sweet (not acidic or bitter, nor spiked with ketchup); fiordilatte mozzarella, which naturally contains less water (shredded mozzarella doesn’t really exist in Italy) or it’s dried in-house; extra virgin olive oil (“olive oil” is an ultra-processed food); and Parmigiano Reggiano or Pecorino (“parmesan” also doesn’t exist. It doesn’t respect the standard of cow nutrition, milk quality, methods and aging of Parmigiano Reggiano consortium, hence they cannot use the name), and there is a lot of attention on how the dough rest and leaven. If done correctly, the dough should have incorporated a lot of air and should be very digestible. Typically, it also has very few ingredients and you should be able to taste them all. These are some of the reason why a single pizza per week is even integrated in many of our weight-loss diets.

I am making this post because it’s great to see someone that is not even from Italy treating one of our most famous dish with the respect it deserves. They put the effort and the money to buy good ingredients (e.g., fiordilatte mozzarella) and they are very knowledgeable. I included some pictures from Nirvana, with the last being a pizza I had in Italy with the same style, just for reference! I hope they manage to stay open as long as possible!

Reference: https://www.ilmessaggero.it/latina/castelforte_proclama_citta_nome_alla_pizza_napoli_consiglio_comunale-5361983.html)