I have never understood why pizza has a reputation as a junk food—except for its use of meats cured with sodium nitrate, identified by the World Health Organization in 2015 as a primary cause of colon cancer.
A meal this week at Giulia (just off Chapultepec in Guadalajara’s famed Colonia Americana) removed any trace of suspicion against pizza, as a friend and I savored one of the three types of “white” Neapolitan (Naples style) pizza offered there. Giulia’s menu has eight varieties of Neapolitan pizza in all. We also shared a large bottle of mineral water and later a sinful chocolate cannoli. All while sitting in a bright, minimalist dining room near a freestanding oven, trophies won by the chef Johnny Marquez, and a photo of Diego Maradona, the Argentine soccer star who played for Napoli for eight years, and is beloved by Neapolitans.
My friend is luckily a person with a very discriminating palate, who, though not Italian, has taken many trips around Italy with her Roman husband and other relatives. As soon as she started talking about the life of the above-mentioned soccer star and the beauty of the Bay of Naples, and continued with comments on the three types of cheese on our pizza and Neapolitans’ love of pizza with thick crust (compared to thinner crust farther north), I knew I had been rescued from writing about the fast service and the slightly over-loud music.
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