Standard Italian fare at Osteria Mozza

NEW RESTAURANT

Osteria Mozza Singapore #03-14B/15B Ion Orchard 2 Orchard Turn Singapore 238801 Tel: 8049-6381 Open daily: 11.30 am to 10 pm

IF YOU cut off your right arm, would the rest of your body notice? If you open a pizza restaurant without a wood-burning oven, would your diners care?

Well, kind of. Especially if you’re Osteria Mozza and built your career on crisp yet resilient sourdough-based pizzas that brave the flames of almond wood like a rite of passage. When it first opened in Hilton Orchard in 2022, we waited months for them to put pizza on the menu. 

But now that it’s newly relocated to Ion Orchard, the pizzas we used to hanker for have been replaced by a toasted flatbread equivalent. And like the appliance salesman who sells you a toaster oven and conveniently forgets to give you the free rack he promised, you feel slightly shortchanged.

It’s not entirely its fault. Ion apparently has the same aversion to wood-burning ovens as airlines do to portable chargers, so Mozza has had to make do without one.

In its place, it’s introduced something called pizza alla palla, which “reimagines Roman street food culture through a long pizza with a light and crispy crust”.

It sounds about as manufactured as the hostess’ perfectly bubbly “Hi guys!” American twang, which reminds you of Mozza’s Californian origins. But she’s friendly enough, handing us over to her colleague who guides us through the bustling, brasserie-like dining room to our tiny table tucked way inside.

Although it’s adopted a shopping centre persona with an all-day menu, it still retains a polished air that’s aligned with Ion’s upscale tenant mix on the third floor – far from the basement Uniqlo levels we’re more familiar with. 

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The menu isn’t going to shake your core; it looks comprehensive, but it’s really just many different variations of the same theme.

Permutations of pizza alla palla fill one column, while burrata in different flavours fills almost half of the antipasti section. Add salads, pasta, one representative of each animal group, and that’s about it.

Service is selectively friendly and efficient, depending on who the manager-type servers decide to dote on. Our servers are nice enough if forgetful, at times in denial.

We order the salame pizza (S$30) with the hot honey (S$3) our server recommends. But when ours comes with no trace of the sweet stuff, she insists that it’s already been drizzled over the pizza.

Just as we’ve convinced ourselves we still have traces of long Covid that have robbed us of our sense of taste, another server comes with a little dish of honey. 

It makes a big difference, countering the saltiness of the salami on the “pizza” – which isn’t the real thing but still a decent substitute if you have a craving for thin-crust dough with a decent bite, smothered in tomato sauce and plenty of melted cheese.

Mozza has always served good burrata – and it still does. Think creamy, mild, wobbly cheese, topped with lao gan ma-like chilli crisps laced with garlic and dried shrimp, drizzled with chilli oil.

No cooking talent is required in making this dish, but there is well-toasted thick sourdough to mop up the oil with.

We order a Coke. Not once, but twice, but maybe someone had to go down to Basement 4 to buy it, and we know how long it takes to get up so many escalators.

It comes just before dessert, before which we have made our way through a pile of pleasingly fresh-enough mussels (S$34) steamed in wine and butter, dunking toast wedges into milky, alcohol-tinged broth.

There’s also rigatoni in vodka sauce (S$22) that’s pink, creamy and ordinary.

Dessert is crowd-pleasing soft-serve, Madagascar vanilla ice cream. For some reason, Mozza’s menu writer seems to think that vanilla and a multiple choice of toppings accounts for creativity. The price varies accordingly, and our drizzle of black forest honey costs S$13.

If you want to give the kitchen a more complicated task, get the skillet chocolate chip cookie (S$18). It’s a brownie cross-bred with a soft cookie, so you get this chewy cake topped again with soft-serve ice cream.

Going mass-market has cost Mozza a bit of its identity, but it serves its purpose as a place for passable bistro fare with some American-Italian flair. It may not be pizza, but if you can stretch your imagination the way it does its dough, then the difference won’t matter.

Rating: 6