Napoli Pizza

This is the beginning of a series of posts on that perennial favourite: pizza! In Sydney, Cape Breton, people take their pizza loyalty seriously. Very seriously. In most cases, you're either a Napoli family or a Kenny's family. You'll find few other pizza places in the city. Napoli pizza is located on Charlotte Street in Downtown Sydney (although they've a new location opening up soon as well). It's a small little pizzeria with, as I said, a very loyal clientèle, and it can be quite busy at times. Two things distinguish Napoli from other pizza places: 1) The crust: Nova Scotians, and especially Cape Bretoners, like their pizza with a thin, floppy crust. Napoli delivers on this wish- a piece of pizza comes nowhere nearing supporting itself if you hold it by the crust, and the crust itself is flavourful and soft. 2) The cheese: Napoli uses Saputo mozzarella, and is not skimpy on the cheese; this is exactly how pizza is on TV, with cheese that slides off if you hold it, and stretches when you bite it. I once even had a friend who had lived in Italy tell me, while visiting Sydney, that Napoli's cheese (and the pizza overall, really), was the closest she'd ever had to real Italian pizza here in Canada. Aside from these two star features, the toppings are delicious and plentiful, and prices are quite reasonable. Without a doubt, Napoli is the best pizza in Sydney, if not Nova Scotia.

Papa's Pub and Eatery

We finished working and pulled in to Port Hawkesbury pretty late one night. By the time we got settled in a hotel and went to look for food, it must have been near 10 o'clock. Port Hawkesbury is a small town, and at that hour our options were pretty much limited to pizza, Chinese food, or fast food. Having had two of the three above fairly recently, I opted for pizza. You don't often associate a pub with good pizza, but Papa's was right across the street from our hotel. The staff were friendly to us, and we loaded up our pizza with a wide range of toppings, and added cheese sticks, hoping that it would be both enough food, and good tasting. Both criteria were more than met. We ordered one of the larger sizes of pizza which, with cheese sticks, came in around the thirty dollar range. The pizza was absolutely fantastic- I really couldn't believe how good it was. The toppings were fresh and very very plentiful, and the crust and cheese were just right. The slices were very generously proportioned, and we could barely finish all we had ordered. The cheese sticks were also fantastic. With this in mind, we took lunch a little earlier than usual the next time we came through Port Hawkesbury, just so that we could go again. There was something on the menu that I had to try. The restaurant calls it the "messy donair fry bake." I think of it as donair poutine - donair meat and sauce, on top of fries, with green onions and peppers, smothered in cheese then baked in the oven. And oh my God, did I ever make the right decision. This has to be one of the most delicious junk food meals I've ever had. The donair meat is made on site, and it shows. Donair meat, donair sauce, and cheese all come together very nicely and, although it's on their appetizer menu, really ought to be listed as an entrée. The total cost was around 13 or 14 dollars after tax, and well, well worth it. The only critique I will give is that the fries were maybe not the best I've had. But it hardly mattered, because what really shone in this dish were the donair meat and the cheese; you could almost even skip the fries.