I met my lovely friend Lucia last night for a meal. She suggested going to The Resto near Highbury & Islington tube as this is a sort of halfway point from my home in SW London and hers in Hertfordshire. The Resto is a pizzeria serving Neopolitan pizzas and food of the Aegean.

Well, I almost didn’t get there. Arriving at Richmond station to get the London Overground train to Highbury & Islington, I found the line suspended due to trespassers on the track and no train expected on the District Line for at least half an hour. Fortunately Richmond is a great hub for train choices, so I literally ran round to the main line platform where a semi-fast train for Waterloo was coming in. I jumped on, then got off at Vauxhall where I was able to get a direct Victoria Line train to Highbury. This all led to the discovery that this was actually the quickest route anyway … the direct Overground seemed a straightforward choice but is slower. Phew! Serendipity! But how would the pizzas turn out?

The Resto is situated on St Paul’s Road just off Highbury Corner and almost within sight of the station. It’s a busy area. It’s where I lived back in the 1980s and thus very familiar to me. There are a few restaurants along that part of the road: Trullo, which I went to with Lucia, her husband and my son a couple of summers ago; Prawn on the Lawn which I’m still to try having loved their Cornwall branch back in 2016. The Resto is quite small and I managed to walk past it at first before a quick check on my phone’s satnav took me back to the right place. Inside, it’s a simple, cafe-like place.

Now I’d been telling my family that Lucia always takes me to the best pizzerias, being Italian, but on arrival at The Resto I learnt she’d not been there before, but had suggested trying it not just for its convenience to us both, but because she had a 50% discount for it via The Fork, an online booking platform – a discount she kindly shared with me.

It was quiet inside – though it was an early Monday evening – and Lucia had discovered the owner was not Italian but Iranian. The menu offered us choices with ‘unusual’ pizza toppings. Hmmm …. how would this turn out? I have to confess we weren’t optimistic at this point. However the staff were wonderfully friendly, the wood-fired pizza oven was in full blasting operation … so we made our choices.

I chose Napoli Frollino (£12.90) – tomato sauce, anchovy, capers, roasted corn and taralli. We did wonder how taralli (one of my family’s favourite little breadstick-like snacks) worked on pizza. Well, we found out, it’s crushed and sprinkled over the top. When the pizzas arrived there was a ‘wow’ reaction from us. They looked fabulous. And, for the first time ever in my pizza-eating life, they came with scissors on the side. Sharp scissors to cut your pizza slices. This was amazing. It worked so well. Why don’t all pizzerias do it? And the pizza tasted as wonderful as it looked.

Lucia had the Parmigiana pizza (£10.90) – tomato sauce, parmesan, smoked aubergine, fresh basil. This looked fabulous too. It was a choice I might have had myself but I don’t like smoked foods (other than smoked salmon!) and was worried it might be too smokey for me.

The pizzas were truly wonderful. The crust was perfect: beautifully crisp with the signature ‘charring’ on the outside but soft – as a Neopolitan pizza should be – on the inside. We both agreed they were perhaps one of the best pizzas we’d ever had. And that’s saying something when you’re eating with an Italian friend!

We’d drunk Peroni beers with our pizzas and although now quite full, decided to share a Tiramisu (£5.90), which was also delicious.

We chatted happily for two hours as we ate. The restaurant was ready to close up as we left – a quiet Monday night. We talked to the owner and his girlfriend. They were so lovely and Lucia promised she’d be back with her boss – an Afghan refugee and journalist.

Well it may not have been Italian pizza but it was truly fabulous, very authentic, and definitely a pizza worth a journey for!