The opening of this much anticipated new venture was accompanied by the kind of PR fanfare that saw journalists reviewing the restaurant before they’d even eating there. Happily, the hype has not been in vain; we went there towards the end of Franko’s first week of business and found plenty of positives and absolutely nothing to complain about. It’s a high-end pizzeria that delivers the goods, with ingredients sourced from Italian suppliers and a high degree of care invested in preparing the dough. Most of the toppings follow traditional Italian models although there’s a lot of artistic license; Sweet Sky mixes mozzarella with pear, walnut and pomegranate; Wild Wild Boar is garnished with wild boar sausage and truffles; Il Respire del Mare goes for prawns, pomegranate and lime. We opted for the Calabrian Red (88Kn) with spicy sausage and hot peppers, which came with perfectly crispy crust and plentiful springy cheese, and a real paprika-bite to the topping. Service is highly professional and well-drilled – this is one of the few places in the city where Time Out’s down-at-heel scribe was addressed throughout as cijenjeni gospodin (“the esteemed gentleman”), and to be frank we could get quite used to that.
For a city with hundreds of pizzerias, its suprisingly hard to find a good one in Zagreb. Only a handful of restaurants make pizza like it really should be - thin, flash-cooked with sloppy tomato sauce, while too many others think of sour cream and gauda as legitimate toppings. Thanks to some smart pizzerias that have popped up in recent years, you can now find margheritas in Zagreb that are every bit as good as what you'd get in Naples. Read on to get a pizza of the action.
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