Pizzeria Speranzella — Restaurant in Naples

We were really looking forward to eating pizza in Naples, but our first meal was a disappointment, both for the quality and for the service. It turned out to be the worst quality at the highest price of all the pizza restaurants we went to (including some of the most famous in the city).

The first sign that we should have turned around were the touts in the street drumming up business for the mostly empty restaurants. There was no wait to sit down when we arrived on a steamy weeknight in August.

We ate at four different pizza places (all rated 4.5 or higher on Google) during our three days in Naples, and Speranzella was the least authentic and the highest priced. The crust was too doughy and was also burnt more than others.

The biggest issue I had though was the upselling. We ordered from the menu and then the waiter in heavily accented English asked if we wanted buffalo or burrata mozzarella. We didn't realize that it was a EUR 3 add-on until after we saw the bill. We just thought it was an option. NO OTHER pizza restaurant we visited in Naples tried to upsell us. I suspect the reason no other restaurant tries to upsell you is because an extra ball of buffalo mozzarella overwhelms what is already a very thin crust pizza.

Further, we thought we were ordering still water from a sealed bottle (as shown on the menu), but what we received was water in an open flask. I still don't know if this is how still water is sold at this particular restaurant, but it wasn't how it was sold and served at other higher end restaurants we ate at in Naples (or Rome).

There are so many pizza places in Naples. I would avoid...

Absolutely NO recommendation! The service is an absolute disaster: starting with the very unfriendly, annoyed waiter, who does not manage to meet his guests with a little smile to forgotten orders and long waiting times. We sat at one of the outer tables and had to wait a long time to order at all, only to be forgotten. Only after repeated requests did we received our incomplete drink order. The same with the pizza, which was incorrectly ordered by the waiter. The tables around us had the same problems. For Central and Northern European standards, the prices are fair - but you should not expect a highlight. The pizzas are okay. Who wants authentic Napolitan pizza is still wrong here. This place lives from a 100 year history, but is nothing but a tourist trap nowadays. One star for the price-performance ratio and the very eager...

We were pulled in by a person telling us the pasta was homemade it was not. It was undercooked and the carbonara was inedible. The mammas pasta is described as coming with meatballs and it had one small not very good meatball. It is situated on a very busy road and we saw 2 people get their foot ran over while we were there. We ordered a liter of red wine because all the house wine we have had in Italy had been amazing but this was such low quality and overly sweet that we couldn’t even give it away to the table next to us. When we tried to ask the waiter about something else to drink he just brushed us off. It’s so unfortunate to waste a precious night in Italy on bad service and horrible...