Napulé Ristobar Pizzeria, Bath

The last time we visited 16 Windsor Villas was back in 2021, just after the third national Covid lockdown put the UK into ‘an enhanced national tier 4 situation’ which basically translated as stay at home (again!) unless you’ve got very good reason for leaving the house, as in popping out to pick up a takeaway. 

One bleak, chilly evening, we masked up and meandered over to Lower Weston to get pizzas from what was then the Indian Pizza Company; I vaguely remember one of us having the New Delhi Feast which felt slightly incongruous on top of a thin crust, stone baked base but hey, who cared? Somebody else was cooking for us.

Three years on and I’m reliving a scene from Groundhog Day. It’s another bleak, chilly evening and we’re setting off to grab another pizza (to eat in somebody else’s kitchen this time around) which, what with the name of the restaurant that’s magpied into the premises vacated by the Indian Pizza Company being Napulé Ristobar Pizzeria, I’m guessing will be far less incongruous than the previous, short-lived funky fusion mash-up. Then suddenly…

What the hell is that noise that both our phones are making? Ah, it’s our good friends in the government issuing an emergency alert and almost causing several car crashes by telling us to stay at home; Storm Darragh is, it seems, the new lockdown. Our response? Keep calm and carry on! We’ve done it before, have we not? And anyway, we’ve almost reached our destination and so far, it’s all quiet on the Weston front. 

Napulé looks like the kind of downhome Italian diner that you’d find in a suburban neighbourhood on the edge of Naples, or Brooklyn, or Hackney: a brightly-lit little beacon of cosiness lighting up the corner of an erstwhile prosaic neighbourhood junction. You can smell what’s cooking as you approach the front door: that heady mix of freshly-cooked dough, oregano and melting cheese calls you in from the cold. But baby, it’s warm inside: a smart, fresh cafe-style set-up with cerulean blue furniture, an open kitchen and a huge, muted TV on the wall screening an Italian prime-time TV channel. Owner Claudia greets us like we’re old friends; her co-owner husband Alfredo takes a break from his duties beyond the pass to nod and smile.

We chat about the weather, and the storm alert, and how so many restaurants in Bath are closing early tonight, and how we might as well stay put where we are now we’ve made it to the restaurant and hope we can get home afterwards. Personally, I don’t mind if we don’t; as long as the heating’s left on, I’m happy to hole up until the storm passes, for as long as that might be.

We order a glass of fizz and a Negroni and start our Napulé feast off with massive, oozy balls of Arancini Siciliana and fat, frangible Calamari Fritti. Both dishes are good – very, very good. 

We order a bottle of Syrah and forge on: a proper lasagne for him, which comes laden with silky-soft, herb- and tomato sauce-laden meat wedged in between gratifyingly perfect pasta and loaded with cheese. I opt for the La Lorena pizza, a Special writ large on the dinky little chalkboard on the evening we visited: smoked cheese and generous slivers of smoked Italian ham on a white base (“Bianca? Nessun problema!”), the all-important dough crisp, charred and puffy in all the right places. Our dishes are wholly satisfying incarnations of the homemade, authentic Italian ristobar/pizzeria genre, free of attempts to show off anything other than what they claim to be: generous portions of really, really good classic Italian food.

Claudia and Alfredo are, as it turns out, seasoned aficionados of Bath’s Italian restaurant scene, with decades of hospitality industry experience between them – and that experience shows. They know what we want from a casual Italian supper, and they know that that isn’t always about the sparkling chandeliers, flashy grand designs and complicated reconstructions of classic Italian dishes that increasingly define the wave of new Italian restaurants currently dominating the Bath restaurant scene. 

By the time we reluctantly waved goodbye to Claudia, Alfredo and a merry band of cheerful current or former Italian restaurant owners who, like us, weren’t going to let a weather warning rain on their parade, the winds had properly whipped up, the rain was lashing down and Darragh was gearing up to be devastating. 

But as Lord Byron – a man who was as big a fan of both Italy and over-wordiness as I am – once (sorta) said, “find the rainbow in the storms of life: the evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.” 

We found that rainbow at Napulé.