Desano Nashville

This casual pizza joint is part of a small chain. The Nashville branch is on a quiet street, with a small parking lot attached. You enter and place your order at a counter and get an electronic tag. You then take a seat in the cavernous dining room and wait. When your order is ready, a waiter will track you down using a geo-locator within the tag. The owners have not lavished money on the decor: there is an Italian flag, a few TV screens at one end of the room, and the open kitchen at the other. In between are a series of communal wooden tables and benches. The kitchen has three large wood-fired ovens, with a team of pizzaiolos tossing discs of dough the air, building the pizzas and feeding them into he the hot ovens. The pared down decor extends to the plastic cutlery and metal trays for the pizzas, so this is definitely not a place for a sophisticated evening. There was a queue for orders on the Monday night that we went, so the place is clearly popular. A pizza margherita was priced at $12. 

The pizzas themselves are of an altogether higher class than the surroundings. The Naples style base was thin and very pliable, with not too much cheese and with good toppings: artichokes that tasted as they should, tinned San Marzano Italian tomatoes, nice quality chillies on my pizza, decent ham. Ingredients, including the flour, are imported weekly from Italy. They claim to strictly follow the very explicit rules for Naples style pizza making laid down by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana in Naples, rules that define everything from the oven temperature to the acidity level of the dough. We tried two different pizzas, a diavola and a capricciosa, and both were excellent. The base of the pizzas in particular were top notch (both 13/20). Less good was a side salad, with good spinach leaves and basil but with a dressing served in a little plastic jar that was murky brown in colour and had a bit too much vinegar. The bill per person with beer to drink came to $27 (£21), which seemed to me good value. The surroundings may be very basic but these are proper pizzas.