Pizzeria Mozza, Marina Bay Sands

I'm skipping the introduction to this place since everyone else seems to enjoy writing about celebrity chefs and their restaurants. Didn't make sense for me to add another tiny voice to it. Pizzeria Mozza practices dual seating for their meals. I generally don't like that of a restaurant since the onus would then be on me to vacate shortly after I eat. It gives the feeling of being rushed through the meal even though there is probably sufficient time allocated into each seating slot. That being said, I liked this place (2 Bayfront Ave, #B1-42/46 The Shoppes @ Marina Bay Sands, tel : +65 6688 8522) and will make plans to come back another time.

chicken livers, capers, parsley and guanciale

We started off with an order of chopped chicken livers on bruchetta. Man this stuff was surprisingly refreshing for something that came with chicken liver, bacon and toast. The taste of the toppings were not as "livery" as I had expected. It was more of a balance between the tart and savoury married with a granular meaty texture riding atop the crisp of the bread. I am guessing that those flavours were probably because of the bits of parsley and capers. I could have sworn that there was lemon juice in there, but hey, I don't know any better. Good enough for seconds I'll say.

cauliflower fritti

In my mind, the cauliflower fritti I was envisioning looked a la Tenshin. Lol. The reality was that they came with a hard crispy batter that had fortunately not held on to too much of the grease. The batter was much harder and crispier than I had imagined. I doubted that they would have broken if I had dropped one of them onto the floor but I never found out.

I'm not generally a fan of deep fried batter so what helped this along was their spicy mint sauce which I thought was pretty good. A tart and minty dip that cut through all the batter.

crispy goat cheese with Umbrian lentils

This was a pretty respectable breaded and fried goat's cheese they had there. Again, it was a play of some of the basic flavours putting together savoury and the sweetness from the lentils. And also the bitter from the rockets if one liked them. I would have preferred more lentils here.

fresh goat cheese, leeks, scallions, garlic & bacon

The pizza was pretty impressive. It was quite a while since I've gotten excited over pizza. So the crust of the pizza that people talk about. That crust was very different from any pizza I've tasted. It reminded me a little of Taiwanese scallion pancakes (cong you ping), dough fritters (you tiao) and roti prata. It was layered, airy and had a nice crisp.

Was this good? Sure, if you like goat cheese. And melted bacon fat over sweet scallions and leeks. And sweet garlic bulbs that were baked till they would disintegrate into your mouth. I know I did. Even though it looked a little grassy.

caramel copetta with marshmallow sauce & salted Spanish peanuts

I made room for dessert because their caramel copetta sounded interesting. The gelato component was a little smokey and bitter while the marshmallow sauce was simply sweet. Topped with a rich bittersweet caramel and what I thought to be the best part of all - toasted and salted peanuts which added a new dimension to the texture and the "after-chew" aroma. Another successful marriage of saltiness and sweet if I had to make a call.

Mario Batali loves his salt!