Pizzeria Cerere: A Family Pizzeria with Five Tables in Cagliari
We spent our last afternoon in Sardinia in Cagliari, on the way home. Except it was a Sunday - and Sunday and Monday are the days when Italian restaurants shut in droves. So we ended up in a place that takes its day off once the rest of the city has eaten: it closes on Tuesdays. Inside there were five tables, and not long after we walked in, there wasn't a single free seat left.
Pizzeria Cerere is a small family pizzeria in the historic center of Cagliari, on a lane climbing toward the castle quarter of Castello - one of the best-rated addresses in the capital of Sardinia to try the most typical dish of Italian cuisine.
Who Pizzeria Cerere Is Named After
Cerere is the Italian name of the goddess Ceres, the Roman patron of grain, harvests and farmers - the one the Greeks called Demeter. She had a temple at the foot of the Aventine as early as the beginning of the fifth century BC, so the pizzeria hung the highest imaginable authority on flour above its door. Why they picked her, you won't find out: the owners have never told the story publicly, and I couldn't track down the year it opened either. The one certainty is that the idea isn't theirs alone - a restaurant in Milan and a gourmet pizzeria in Sicily bow to the harvest goddess too, and neither took the name from the other.
Pizza itself is a newcomer to the island. Sardinia has been baking flatbreads far longer than it has known pizza - the shepherds' bread pane carasau, or costedda - but pizza in its present form only arrived after the Second World War, with Sardinians coming back from work in Campania. It settled in perfectly: Cagliari now has dozens of pizzerias, and several of them show up regularly in nationwide Italian rankings. The island even came up with a classic of its own, the pizza sarda, where a tomato base meets sheep's milk pecorino and Sardinian sausage. It went much the same way back home in Czechia: pizza arrived late, spread across the whole country in the nineties, and today nobody remembers a time without it.
Atesina and Sarda: All of Italy on Twenty Pizzas
The menu is modest by Italian standards - around twenty kinds, where the average pizzeria runs thirty or more. But you can travel across it. The pizza Atesina takes its name from the river Adige, which runs through Alto Adige at the opposite end of Italy - so in the south of Sardinia you order a pie named after an Alpine valley: roasted mushrooms, smoked prosciutto and arugula. The pizza Sarda stays at home, its mozzarella joined by slices of cured Sardinian sausage and shavings of pecorino the kitchen certainly didn't skimp on. The dough is thin and light, and it's baked in an electric oven; reviewers occasionally hold that against Cerere, though it clearly doesn't dent the 4.8 out of five.
Five Tables, Paolo and Rossana
A married couple runs the place - he works the oven, she works the room; in reviews they go by Paolo and Rossana. It is the oldest division of labor in Italian family pizzerias; the Italian 50 Top Pizza guide describes a family in a pizzeria as an unbeatable team. Cerere stands apart from the gourmet wave that put Cagliari on the national pizza rankings - while places like Framento or Sa Scolla collect points for long fermentation and experimental flours, here they go on baking twenty pizzas for five tables. On our visit you could see how much they both enjoy the work - and how pleased they were every time a compliment came over from one of the tables.
With the pizza you drink what the whole island drinks: unfiltered Ichnusa, the Sardinian beer brewed since 1967 just outside the city in Assemini, where the brewery moved from Cagliari in search of stronger springs.
Sunday Afternoon at One of Five Tables
We turned up without a reservation and got lucky; shortly after us, every one of the five tables was taken. The menus arrived almost instantly, the pizzas only a few minutes later - the service was lightning fast and flawless. The Atesina was 12 EUR, the Sarda 11 EUR, plus an ice-cold Ichnusa, because it was over thirty degrees outside. I'm no fan of the heap of toppings scattered over a pizza right before it's served, but here the combination of roasted mushrooms, smoky prosciutto and bitter arugula worked without a single reservation; the Sarda was saltier and sharper, exactly as pecorino and cured sausage demand. Framento and Sa Scolla bring national trophies home to Cagliari. Cerere simply opened on a Sunday afternoon, filled its five tables and had nothing to prove to anyone.
Pizzeria Cerere
