Bella Brutta, Newtown

Bella Brutta in Newtown is Sydney’s latest hotspot for wood fired pizza, a joint venture with LP’s Quality Meats’ Luke Powell and Porteno’s Elvis Abrahanowicz and Joseph Valor. The restaurant is surprisingly long, the bar lines the wall from the entrance with the pizza oven standing pride of place in the centre of the room. It’s Raff’s birthday and we are close enough to watch all the action of the pizza station with complete with pizza dough tosses.

We start with Cheese fritti with hot sauce ($4 each). The deep fried globes of goats cheese and parmesan are golden and crunchy on the outside with a scorching liquid cheese centre.

But it was just so tasty that we couldn’t help but keep on eating it and burning the roofs of our mouths. The wood fired green pepper salsa that came on the side has us exclaiming at the punch of flavour and saving the excess to dip our pizza crusts into later.

The Clam pizza ($26) has got to be my favourite pizza in Sydney right now. The crust is blistered and puffy, the surf clams are tender and the centre molten with melted pecorino cheese, a sprinkling of chilli and smashed garlic cloves that have an almost jammy consistency.

The special of the day was a 1 month aged ribeye ($40) sourced from the Riverina, done in a veal milanese style and crumbed in panko. The smoked beef fat and lemon vinaigrette was a touch on the too sour side but I can understand its presence for the fatty parts towards the bone. Speaking of the bone, Raff enjoying gnawing away and ripping every last juicy sherrick off until it was nekkid:P

We were stuffed buuuut we spied a Tiramisu ($16) on the menu and had to order it because yolo. Bella Brutta’s version uses both Disaronno amaretto and Amaro Montenegro liqueur and considering how much I hate both liqueurs, I actually really liked this tiramisu and thought it worked well with the generous layers of cream and mascarpone and is that hazelnut I detect? Delicious.

Bella Brutta
135 King St,
Newtown

Trading Hours:
Mon: Closed
Tues – Sat: 5pm – 11pm
Sun: 12pm – 9pm