Five-star hotel serves £200 truffle-topped pizza - it was delicious
It's part of a seven-dish tasting menu that would cost £630 in total
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Your support makes all the difference.Pizza. It’s simple fare. Just dough, tomato and cheese, surely?
Well, not always.
The Wellesley hotel in Knightsbridge, London, is serving a pizza that costs a whopping £200.
But how can a pizza cost so much?
The answer: truffle. And not just any truffle, but an especially rare white truffle from a small town called Alba, in the Piedmont region of northern Italy.
We went along to the five-star hotel to sample the pricey pizza and chat to the head chef Sebastiano Cioffi.
The pizza features a crisp sourdough base and creamy burrata cheese, but no tomato, and is finished with the white truffle shavings.
Thanks to the lack of tomato, the intense truffle flavour has no competition and is complemented by the mild burrata. It’s also a thoroughly decent-sized pizza.
The hotel receives truffle deliveries twice a week to ensure only the freshest truffle is served, and it’s stored in airtight containers with dry rice to prevent it drying out.
Cioffi revealed that the pizza is particularly popular on weekends, when he’d usually sell around 12.
It's part of a seven dish white truffle menu which includes beef tartare served with confit egg yolk and hazelnut sauce for £80 and parmesan risotto for £70 - each dish is served with at least five grams of the rare truffle.
The white truffle season is short - it only lasts for a couple of months at this time of year, and as such the Wellesley’s menu is only available seasonally too.
Although many people would be very happy with a £6 margherita, the Wellesley isn’t the first place to serve a significantly more expensive pizza - Gordon Ramsay created a £100 white truffle-topped pizza at his restaurant Maze, London, and Pizza Go Go also offer a £500 pizza which features gold flakes, lobster, beluga caviar, fantail prawns and white truffle oil, but that comes with butler service and red carpet delivery too.
So after truffle mac 'n' cheese, truffle chips and truffle pizza, perhaps it won't be long till we're all eating truffle toast too.
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