Cocktails and pizza? Don’t get upset, no one will force you to pair up – which has its reasons anyway – margherita & Bloody Mary. Or even better DRY Bloody, the Bloody of the house with vodka, Tio Pepe, emulsion of fresh tomatoes and herbs, salt and pepper. A combo that has proved to be one of the best in town, especially for the quality of the cocktails and pizzas, courtesy of Simone Lombardi. We start from the bar, which welcomes guests before entering the pizzeria, but also lives its own life. Cocktails and furnishings are a tribute to the speakeasy – the underground bars that were formed in the U.S. during Prohibition to trick the cops, who were the first to sit at the counter with smugglers and politicians, even if at DRY you don’t need a password to get in: at most put on an elegant jacket, because here it is (also) Milan, the fine one. Among the drinks to try – all very elaborate, many of them created here or extracted from old recipe books – we recommend the Vieux Carré Fumé. The list of drinks is accompanied by a selection of focaccia, ideal to continue drinking without getting devastated: try the one with veal with tuna sauce and caper powder.
And here we connect to the pizzeria: probably if you’ve never been to Naples you’ll think differently, but in our opinion eating a decent pizza in the city is a challenge – between unleavened dough, poor quality ingredients and carcinogenic cookery you have to spend the whole night with a drip of carbonated water in your mouth. They must have thought this way at DRY, which deserves the merit of serving an excellent and digestible pizza (“Because pizza is not a sin to be discounted.”, say the owners). This is thanks to a dough leavened 48 hours (24 of which for the chariot) with Mulino Marino and Quaglia flour, from Stefano Ferrara’s artisan oven -obviously wood-burning, the fine ingredients -hand-picked and peeled tomatoes from Cerignola, fior di latte from Agerola, anchovies from the Cantabrian Sea and so on. The choice to propose a limited selection is also remarkable: only six “chef’s pizzas” and three bases (marinara, margherita and margherita with buffalo mozzarella) to be seasoned as you please with condiments served separately. Once the pizza is finished, there is nothing left to do but order another drink, forever and ever… until you run out of money.
During the glorious period of Peep Hole, the independent space curated by Bruna Roccasalva and Vincenzo De Bellis, Dry collaborated with temporary exhibitions and offered its spaces to them. Now the activity is over, but you can still admire some works that have remained there.
Translated by @silaskin
