Pizzeria Via Mercanti

Ordered a Margherita pizza and arancini balls. Margherita was Decent, the sauce and cheese were both great as well as the crust. We had to return the arancini balls as they were cold from the inside, but even once they were brought back they still lacked flavour. The waiter also added some complimentary mozzarella balls which tasted much better than the arancini balls in my opinion. The service was ok. Our waiter was basically clueless when it came to the menu options and his communication was a bit off (don’t know if he’s just awkward like that). The place is at the heart of Kensington market and we did the mistake of dining out on their patio which was literally on the street (not in the back of the restaurant as I thought) and that meant having the view of crackheads to enjoy which can be quite uncomfortable. Overall, good pizza, and if I’d be back I’d dine inside next time.

Oh no! What happened to this place? It used to be my go-to spot for Neapolitan pizza. Not anymore.. pizza was cold and I had a bunch of mozzarella chunks under the crust (the cheese wasn’t even melted!). By looking around I saw a lot of flat-crust pizzas being served. Calzone was so flat too. They must be under a different management, probably not even Italian anymore. One thing is for sure- I haven’t seen many Italians hanging around and I’m not surprised at all.

They service was not great. The pizza is yummy the tomato based one were better we had marinera and the olive oil based vegetarian. The olive oil based one came out with burnt eggplants and nearly no sign of olive oil. We told our server the pizza is burned he said yeah I saw that! They eventually came and told us they can offer a new pizza but at that time we decided to just not wait and already were through half of the pizza. To be fair this was late at night and the pizza did look great and the marinera one was very tasty! The dough was really good quality. Our experience was certainly less than ideal though.

Used to love the place! This was an ubereats order and I cared enough to let them know of how dry and stale the food is even though ubereats refunded me. The bolognese was super dry with barely any meat and the rigatoni stuck to each other! The cheese on the pizza was very little. Unfortunately, all they managed to do is to tell me to request a refund from ubereats when I expected that they would take it seriously and know that this kind of quality can’t come out of their kitchen and offer to make it right! If it was just a one off or if the food was just cold because of the delivery, I wouldn’t have minded! But there were issues with quantity, taste, portions and lastly service! Disappointed!