La Bufala

Every morning La Bufala's pizzaiolos knead, stretch and separate hundreds of pizza-dough balls. All of these doughy pizza babies will then ferment for at least 36 hours.

Why do they go to this much effort? They’re determined to use a healthier, unrefined flour with a natural yeast (lievito madre). While many of Sydney's more passionate, artisan pizzaiolos use ultra-refined Caputo flour (type 00, the easiest one to use), La Bufala uses a stone-ground, less-refined flour, called San Felice (a type-one flour).

With it, La Bufala's owner Nicholas Sottile and his veteran pizzaiolo Francesco Moramarco (ex-Merivale, Rosso Antico and Da Orazio) hand-roll a new style of Neapolitan pizza. They still have the wood-fired oven and the same thin, floppy base with a puffed, blistered crust, but these pizzas are smaller at the edge, more elastic and sort of gelatinous. The bases are as flavoursome and complex as one would expect from a good sourdough and their toppings are fresh and classically Italian.

A burrata comes with pureed San Marzano tomatoes, long sheets of prosciutto and a single fat blob of semi-molten burrata. Another, the Genovese, is covered in blobs of fior di latte (Italian soft cheese), potato chunks, pork sausages and pesto.

The oven, imported from Italy, is at the restaurant’s centre, with dark furnishings and blackboard-menu walls shaped around it.

La Bufala also serves homemade pastas, grilled fish and focaccias.