Ragazzi
165 Mill Street
Middle Park, Melbourne
03 9686 6777

Time to come the raw prawn because prawns are in the news right now. Or at least one giant one is. The Big Prawn that looms over the Pacific Highway in Ballina, New South Wales. Apparently The Big Prawn is on the nose. The owner wants to get rid of the prawn that spawned all those other kitsch monsters like the Big Banana, and the Big Pineapple and the Big Russ Hinze ( no, I made that one up).

There’s a Save the Prawn site on Facebook which has attracted hundreds of supporters and David Koch from Sunrise has been lobbying for a reprieve. But there is also a Kill the Prawn petition that has 100 kitsch-bashers. I’m surprised the pro-prawners haven’t adopted a good Aussie slogan like ‘Shell be right’.

Prawns dominated our dinner conversation the other night but it had nothing to do with the Ballina brawl. The Friday Family Fang Club lobbed up at Ragazzi’s in Middle Park. Mrs. Nosebag had had a recommendation from colleague Simone.

I was wary because her last rave review enticed us to a French joint where the food was so heavy and over-sauced I felt like storming the Bastille. Quel Horreur!

She redeemed herself with this Italian family restaurant. Mainly because of the size and quality of the wood fired pizzas. I love pizza but I’m a pizza snob. It has to be thin-crusted. Has to be wood fired. Has to be almost over-cooked. And I’m pretty traditional with hot salami and peppers. I can’t imagine chicken on a pizza or broccoli or clams. But they make ‘em these days and call them ‘gourmet pizzas’.

Everybody has their favourite pizzas place and pizza combination. The Pier in Port Melbourne makes good pizzas and so does the Dogs’ Bar in St. Kilda. My best ever was at a vineyard in the Yarra Valley where Guiseppe told me he’d been making them for about twenty years in a wood fired oven he built himself.

I like pizzas called il Diablo and Dante’s Inferno. Real bum burners.  At Ragazzi’s I had one called ‘pizza diavola’ with hot salami, ham, mozzarella, fresh baby tomatoes and tomato chilli oil. It was good although not of blowtorch intensity. I had a ‘small’ for $15. It was ‘only four slices’ they said. What I got was a hubcap cut into quarters.

So why were we talking about prawns? Well, Mrs. Nosebag loves seafood pizzas and she ordered a No.9: ‘prawns marinated with garlic, parsley, cracked pepper and mozzarella’.  She ordered a large. It was about the size of a street café  table and was cut into eight giant slices. It was twenty bucks.

Now, I’d noticed on the menu that you could order extra prawns for $3 each. Not that you’d need to. This pizza was covered, smothered, with prawns. Not little shrimps. Big, plump, fresh, sweet, prawns. I counted 23 of them. By that arithmetic we were looking at a theoretical $69 pizza. It would have to be the best value-for-money pizza in the country.

The big prawn at Ballina had nothing on this place.

August 30, 2009