Red Hot Mamma — Restaurant in Warwick

First, the good: the pizza and cocktails. The pizzas are tasty, inventive and authentic. The cocktails are nice too. Next, the bad: everything else.

We (a party of three) arrived for our booking at 9pm and were told, "tell my colleague 26". We went down the side passage and told his colleague: table 26. The man looked baffled. We have no tables, he said. I said "we booked a hut, 26 he said?" Oh, said the man, right, you're in hut 7. Then he left.

The huts are a nice idea, but are not being maintained. The wallpaper on ours was detatching in long vertical sections, revealing the charming OSB board walls - you're eating pizza in a garden shed built out of the stuff they use to cover broken shop windows.

After about 5 minutes, a waitress turned up with a grim expression. "Are you ready to order?" she asked. We were ready to order drinks, so we ordered some cocktails and a bottle of wine. These duly arrived. The wine was just dumped on the table, not even opened. I suppose we were lucky it was a screw top or we would have been left to try to pull the cork out with our teeth.

The waitress then asked if we were ready to order again. When we asked for some garlic bread to start, she interrupted us with a sigh and said that if we didn't order our mains at the same time we wouldn't get them, as they would take 35-40 minutes and the restaurant WILL CLOSE AT 10(!)

We ordered garlic bread and pizzas and waited. And waited. And waited. It grew dark. The continents drifted further together. Finally (after about 40 minutes), the pizzas and the garlic bread arrived. As mentioned before, the pizzas were very good, or at least they had been prior to being left out, as they had become very floppy with no crispness at all. But they were at least tasty, which is more than could be said for the garlic bread. Imagine a child's inflatable swimming pool, with the edges partially inflated and filled with a vast soup of flavourless mozzarella and a homeopathic quantity of garlic butter. Nobody could ever accuse me of not liking cheese, but I also like garlic (it feels like a key ingredient for garlic bread). It was tasteless and chewy and pointless.

As we ate, we noticed the waitress was passing our hut with suspicious regularity. Eventually, she must have picked up on the fact we were getting full and asked us if we were done. I asked for boxes and the bill.

She arrived with the bill and a stack of boxes. As I started to take the boxes from here, she said NO, ONLY THREE, as if I was a toddler out trick-or-treating. So I took three, and she left, returning within seconds with the card machine. We paid, and she disappeared without even a thank you. I went to fetch the car, leaving my two companions to finish their wine. I had only just arrived back at the restaurant when my companions appeared, having been harassed into finishing up quickly since THE RESTAURANT MUST CLOSE AT TEN. The cooks were all milling about on the pavement outside as if there had been a fire alarm in the kitchen.

Leaving aside for a moment my ongoing bafflement at a pizza restaurant that closes at 10pm on a Saturday night, this is basically an expensive takeaway with rude and unwelcoming staff. You know when you go to pick up your takeaway food and someone comes from the back with a bag and pushes it at you while yelling on the phone? That, except you're paying extra for it. A 10% service charge was added to the bill! What service? It very much feels like the owners decided they could make more cash from their business by using the inexperienced takeaway staff to pretend to be waiters and waitresses. At least robots aren't surly.

Our delightful evening was brought to the perfect conclusion when we realised some filthy former customer had stuck a piece of chewing gum onto the wall behind my partner, and it had stuck itself onto her back then onto the car seat, giving us a lasting memory of the night.

In case you are wondering: no, we won't be coming back.

I await the twee "Mamma is sad you had a bad experience" reply. MAMMA'S NOT SAD, SHE...

The food is very decent as most reviews suggest : pizza was very tasty but admittedly slightly sloppy, the olives we ordered as a starter were also very nice. The only downside with the food was the garlic bread with cheese which just didn’t taste right - too oily and the garlic was overly excessive. However, the pizza was pretty delicious and I guess that’s the main talking point of this place. The food was almost surprisingly well priced.

What brings my review down a couple of notches was the lack of professionalism. Only 1 waiter was dressed in uniform, which isn’t normally a problem, however the doorman was dressed in an Emporio Armini tracksuit and others were dressed casually. The service itself wasn’t very attentive however the servers were nice, including the doorman, but their ‘nice’ attitude did seem slightly forced (the servers used identical talking points/questions with all tables). The servers are also not 100% fluent in English either, I think the restaurant is run by mostly Eastern Asians which of course is no problem at all but just something I wanted to note.

The other point which brought the rating down was the atmosphere. The downstairs decor was nice, cozy, and not too forced. It’s zealous and vibrant, but upstairs it’s a bit too much. The toilets on the top floor were themed as a stp club which I found very inappropriate for a family restaurant and I quote : ‘this isn’t a pizza restaurant this is a stp club’. It was meant to be funny but it just felt forced and very tacky. Overall, it just feels slightly awkward and out of place in a town like Stratford.

The restaurant genuinely has a lot of potential but a lack of people knowing how to run the great place they have. It’s rough around the edges at the moment, but with a couple of team talks, toned down decor, and attentive service - this could be a great restaurant in the future.

I would recommend giving the pizza a go personally ; a takeaway is better at this...

Recent edit: Still amazing pizza but have they maybe started pandering to the heathen English pallet by using semolina as their floured surface for prepping pizzas? Semolina is courser than caputo flour and adds a lovely crunch and firmness to the exterior of the dough, it tends to be used in New York style pizzas. Mamma’s slices now hold there form better when picked up and you can see courser grains across the crust of your pizza. Before it seemed to just be the 00’ grade flour the pizzas were prepped on. I feel the finer flour made for a more authentic Neapolitan crust with the classic wetter less crunchy base near the centre but to be honest, this is a chef to chef choice and adding a dash of New York crunch to these fine pies may have actually made them better all round; if it were me, I might consider trying a 50/50 semolina/caputo mix for my surface prep to bring the crunch but not have it be overpowering...Then again, I could just be imagining that they have changed to semolina. However, I do now often dream of the crunchy exterior of the crust and base with the light and airy centre of the Neapolitan dough mix - It is to die for. The quality of sauce and toppings remains just as good as always and the leopard spotting char effect of a perfectly cooked pizza is always right on the money.

Sept 2020 - 1st review: Sensational pizza. Amazing quality ingredients, amazingly cooked, reasonable price for quality.

It’s so uncompromisingly authentic Neapolitan pizza, that any pizza lover must try this place. The Neapolitan style is wetter in the middle with a larger, fluffier crust than other styles of pizza, so the ill informed might say it was undercooked but don’t be put off by bad reviews, try it for yourself.

I don’t think I’d be any happier after a pizza if I’d have gone to one of the most established...