Tags: Italian | pasta | vegetarian

Just a few years ago it was difficult to find a decent pizza in Prague.

Back then that crucial element, the crust, was often a pre-formed faux-dough which was then decorated with bottled ketchup, canned mushrooms and plasticky cheese. Microwaves completed the abomination. Decent pizza baked in brick ovens is now easy to find within the formulaic but comfortable Italian-style restaurants that dot any neighborhood. But these European-type pizzas, while often yummy, sport a crust that has more in common with soda crackers than with bread, and a distinctly continental theory of cheese and sauce.

A couple years ago, the now closed Thirsty Dog had a great American-style pizza, but no more. And the Italian restaurant with actual Italians in it, Trattoria Cicala (Zitna 43) has an inch-thick pizza al taglio fby the slice, but it's not like American pizza, it's like pizza al taglio. And to be fair, even though they're an evil megadeath corporate globalizing bomb-them-now canker sore, the Pizza Huts in town do serve the standard American-style slice, it's just you don't want to know where all that grease and cheese has been.

Now the most notable place to get a proper (if still not thick) crust with the full protocol of cheese gooing around chewy toppings above the right red sauce is a Nusle joint called Baretta, just off Nam. Bratri Synku at Belehradska 4.

It features a weird Native American motif, and in fact, if you catch one of the principles on a slow day, he might explain to you his version of the history of pizza (involving a traveling Italian and the indigenous people of the American Southwest). It's up to you to decide if your leg's being pulled. But what's no joke is the free delivery and other unique mainstays, such as their going to the mat on the whole calzone scam.

Yes, Baretta Pizza & Pasta have outed calzones once and for all as nothing more than a pizza that fell over on itself, and offer any of their pizzas prepared as a kapsa, or pocket-style. For delivery call +420 261 215 622, and be aware the minimum is a 150Kc order, local area only, and don't expect English. Try Navaho.

Reason to go: because pizza is a great Indian dish.