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Month: January 2018

Posted
January 31, 2018
Category
Urban Discoveries
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Urban Discoveries: Disco Volante

This is part of the “Urban Discoveries” series, in which we seek and discover interesting and well designed places to eat and drink around Europe and especially in Vienna. The article we present you today was written by my colleague and friend Maximilian Martsch, who is a researcher and works on the topic of food history. The pictures were shot by myself. Due to the longer text this time around we decided to change the format a little bit, the pictures are now included within the article and not placed in the end. Thanks to Disco Volante for the invitation and especially to Verena Piontek for the warm welcome and the interview.

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I still remember my visit to the famous Antica Pizzaria Da Michele in Naples and the sensational joy I had enjoying a purist pizza Margarita. The Soft, moist dough and fluffy crust, the rich marinara sauce topped with tasty slices of mozzarella cheese and perfectly balanced with a couple of fresh basil leaves. And it’s not only the food itself, but also the bustling and lively atmosphere. After all pizza is a fast dish, you get in, take a seat, order, eat, maybe round it up with a coffee, and leave again. In many ways it encapsulates the Italian lifestyle in a nutshell.
So in order to get that authentic experience of Neapolitan pizza you have to hop on a train or plan and travel down there, right?

Well, not necessarily…right in the middle of Vienna’s trendy 6th district in the busy Gumpendorfer Straße you can get a taste of Naples’s most iconic dish. The Pizzeria Disco Volante is dedicated dishing out flat pies, topped with all kinds of fresh ingredients right from their steaming hot wood-fired oven. Not only the pizza is all inspired by its Neapolitan models, but also the design of the restaurant.

The name Disco Volante is Italian and means “flying disc” which is first and foremost a reference to the pizza’s flat shape and how the dough is thrown in the air to stretch it out before it’s garnished and baked in the oven. But besides this rather obvious correlation, the name also hints to the true eye candy of the restaurant: the wood-fired oven in the design of a disco ball. We visited during daytime, the reflection of the sunlight in the small mirrors of the disco ball created a distinctive atmosphere. However, the use of colored spotlights combined with Italian disco music also make a visit during the evening worthwhile.


The design concept can be best described as purist and clean. The restaurant immediately reminds one of the unique style of Italy in the 60s, everything looks bright, clean, and minimalistic.
The owners work together with regional producers to ensure the best quality, but you also find imports on their menu like an assortment of delicious Italian lemonades.

The restaurant opened its doors back in 2013 and you might have heard of its sister location “Pizza Mari” located in the 2nd district, which is well known among urban pizza lovers. Both restaurants are owned by Maria Fuchs who fell in love with Naples and its pizza culture while spending an exchange semester there and decided to bring this experience back to Vienna.


All the pizza cooks at Disco Volante are Italians and they must go through a special training before the master the art of pizza making, and it’s really a form of art. The wood-fired oven reaches a temperature of 300–400° and is big enough for eight pizzas baking simultaneously. Due to the high temperature the pizzas can get burned very quickly and need to be rotated repeatedly until there are finished after a couple of minutes. The work requires a crafty technique and a lot of practice. The cooks at Disco Volante know exactly what they are doing and it’s a joy to watch them scurry around the kitchen while cracking jokes in Italian.

Disco Volante doesn’t do home delivery, so you best pick up the phone and order for pick up or you just put on your sneakers and run over there to get your hands on their delicious pizza and indulge in the busy atmosphere of southern Italy.

For opening hours and further info please visit http://www.disco-volante.at

 

Posted
January 25, 2018
Category
Austria
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A City in the Alps: Innsbruck

The scenery of Innsbruck in the western part of Austria is simply stunning. The capital of the historic region of Tyrol is situated in the Inn river valley between two mountain ranges in the north and in the south. No wonder Innsbruck is known as the capital of the Alps as well in Austria, there is just no place in the streets of the city where you don’t constantly see them. Innsbruck itself is beautiful as well, a quite colorful medieval and gothic town with beautiful sacral and civic buildings and the “Golden Roof”,  the cities most famous symbol with 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles. Take a look!

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Posted
January 15, 2018
Category
Urban Discoveries
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Urban Discoveries: Bros. Pizza

Prologue. This is part of the “Urban Discoveries” series, in which we seek and discover interesting and well designed places to eat and drink around Europe and especially in Vienna.

START GAME. You are in the center of Vienna, walking down Mariahilferstraße and suddenly you see an endearing sign of a Pizza with a Super Nintendo inside the room. You decide to jump in to the tasty world of BROS. PIZZA.

The Pizzeria started a few years ago as a project of two friends deciding to work together – hence the Bros. in the name. Legend has it when they saw the place with many ventilation tubes on the ceiling they thought of Super Mario and they came up with the video game theme of the restaurant.

At Bros. Pizza you order your meal at the bar, either for take away or for dining inside. There is a choice of around 10 pizzas, sometimes with changing additions. We decided for “L’Atomica”, a pizza with a hot toping consisting of Spanish chorizo, mozzarella cheese, caramelised onions and Red Eye hot sauce and for “Hot Goat” also called Pizza Bianca with spinach, mozzarella, goose cheese and pecorino. Both of them were delicious and crisp, the hot one having a nice spicy flavour to it. For drink we just ordered soft drinks this time around, but there is a fine choice of craft beer from the “Brussel Bier Project”.

During the waiting time (which usually is not very long) you are invited to play Super Nintendo, it’s not just there for decoration – indeed it is working actually! The available games are changing but when we were there we could play Street Fighter during the waiting time and after the meal. What a great idea! There are also other nice easter eggs referencing video game culture and especially the Super Mario Bros. in the room – just keep your eyes open.

BROS. PIZZA is open daily from Monday to Sunday from 12:00 to 15:00 and again from 17:00 to 21:00 and on Sundays from 12:00 to 20:00. You’ll find it at Zollergasse 2, close to U3 Neubaugasse. For more info check out their Facebook page.

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Posted
January 4, 2018
Category
Portugal
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Lisboa Urbana: The City of Fado

I will start the new year as I ended the last one, with a continuation of my Portugal series shot in last October. This time around though I will not set up the pictures themselves but talk about something you can’t spot on the shots, but which is intrinsically interwoven with Lissabon and the people living there. I am talking about the music of Fado. A very intense and melancholic kind of folk singing, which was popular in Portugal until the 80s but which is fading away now slowly. To understand the people of Portugal is to understand the nature of Fado.

You can listen to Fado on YouTube of course, but being in Lisbon you can also go to one of many Fado restaurants located throughout the city, though especially common in the so called Fado neighbourhood of Mouraria in the old town. Usually you pay a package price for the food and the musicians. The spectacle starts at around 8 pm and ends well after midnight. The combination of good Portuguese wine (and port wine), plus delicious local food and the music is a very special one.

One night a visit to a Fado Restaurant called Maria da Mouraria became magical though. After being served the second course the musicians went to the small stage located among the tables and started to play. We were all taken by surprised though who began to sing suddenly, it was the guy who just before introduced himself to us as the kitchen chef! Well it turned out he was the owner and also a very talented Fado singer himself. It wouldn’t stay the last surprise of the night.

As we watched him and his musicians we also noticed an older lady at the door whipping to the music. Later a friend went to the toilets downstairs and told us that she saw the lady singing in the basement with the musicians, it seemed like they were practicing. Indeed after the next course she came to the stage and what followed was a magical performance of a 95 year old lady singing like a 25 year old star. Her presence on the stage was just magnificent, the feelings and the joy she put in the songs were inspiring. A beautiful voice full of emotions in a setting almost private. It felt intimate. The lady had so much energy and fun she just wouldn’t stop, continuing singing even on the sidewalk while wandering with us through the nightly lit streets of Mouraria while she went home and we headed to the Metro.

As it later turned out we witnessed a spontaneous performance of a retired lady living in the neighbourhood. But this wasn’t any lady. She was the sister of the famous Amalia Rodrigues, an icon of Fado who died in 1999 and who is well known by all Portuguese. Celeste Rodrigues is a famous Fado figure in Portugal herself, having been often in television and given large concerts. It felt as for a moment in her life she was the star on the large stage again, her beautiful voice becoming a part of the history of Lisbon itself.

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