Paris, like any big city, has quite a few pizza restaurants, and unsurprisingly, like any big city, many of them are underwhelming. How complicated can it be to have a good bread base, tasty tomato sauce and fresh ingredients for the topping? Pretty difficult, it would seem.

Luckily, here at the blog, part of our mission is to help you find the tastiest pizzas in town! A couple of years ago we tried out Casa di Peppe, which was voted the ‘best pizza in Europe’ in 2022, but strangely disappeared completely from the list the following years, and there’s our fave spot A Braccetto, which isn’t strictly speaking a pizzeria, but does have a dedicated pizza oven and a menu full of other delicious propositions. Oh, and it’s just a couple of minutes away from our hotels.

You can also put your trust in the 2024 list of the top 50 European pizza places chosen by Top Pizza, four of which just happen to be in Paris and two of which – Guillaume Grasso and La Manifattura – are super close to us!

We fully intend to get down to these two establishments asap, but the reason we chose Inizio for this month’s review is that French national newspaper Le Monde mentioned it recently in an article entitled Three gourmet pizza addresses to try in Paris. That’s a short list! Only one of the places was on the Left Bank, and the story behind it intrigued us – the French chef, Marthe Brejon, regularly goes to Italy for produce, and trained in a number of Michelin-starred restaurants.

Another oddity was that the Inizio is in a street well known in Paris for… it’s crepes! 🤔

We decided to investigate, and see why Inizio is a welcome oddity in a sea of unimpressive pizza joints…

It’s proudly written on the front of the restaurant – Inizio‘s pizzas are made with sourdough bread, and to understand the difference this makes in taste and texture, you’ll have to read the explanation attached to the menu.

The dough is a clever mix of four things, including Canadian manitoba flour, durum wheat flour, and the restaurant’s organic sourdough preparation, which is nourished daily. Add to this the use of authentic carefully-sourced Italian produce, and is no surprise that the result would put most pizza places to shame.

But before we get stuck in, let’s have a look at the restaurant itself. It’s really small! Only 30 seats (try to get a spot on the terrace if you want a little calm), simply decorated but still welcoming, with numerous knick-knacks from Italy that show the chef’s deep love of the country.

We started off our evening of Italian food with an obligatory Campari spritz, a glass of Prosecco and some Leccino black olives from Tuscany, together with some other, rather large green olives that were very good indeed.

There is also pasta on the menu, but as we had come specifically for the pizzas, we chose one with burrata slathered in pesto, basil leaves, red salad and a proper homemade tomato sauce, with our second choice being a pizza with thinly-sliced spicy chorizo (or the Italian version of chorizo), once again accompanied by the wonderful tomato sauce (it’s amazing how much difference this can make to a pizza).

The size of our pizzas was impressive, but we valiantly managed to finish both of them!

Afterwards, we decided sharing a dessert would be more reasonable than ordering one each, and while the house tiramisu had all gone that evening, we went for a rum bab, served in a sweet-but-not-too-sweet syrup, with a copious amount of whipped cream and a drizzle of caramel sauce.

The baba was light and moist, and we didn’t regret our choice one bit 😋

To sum up, it’s obvious that the owner and chef of Inizio care about their dishes – sourcing quality products and taking special care of both the bread base and tomato sauce (the basic building blocks of a good pizza) makes a huge difference.

Also, the choice of pizzas on offer changes regularly. We’re ready to go back very soon!

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Inizio (here) is open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday – Saturday

Online booking directly on the website

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Une publication partagée par marthebrej (@marthebrejon)