Passione Da Ferdinando

Review

Hietzing Passion Play

No, they're not Neapolitans, says Daniel Stutzenstein and laughs, "we're just pretending". Five years ago, his father Ferdinand Stutzenstein opened a pizzeria in the center of Hietzing "because we thought it was a good idea". Which proved to be the case, Da Ferdinando's pizzas are selling like hotcakes. And when the opportunity arose to take over a cell phone store opposite the Kennedy Bridge, they didn't just turn it into a pizzeria, but went one step further: Passione Da Ferdinando became a "Pizzeria & Friggitoria", which means that it serves fried food. The fact that there is a great passion for fried food in Italy, and especially in Campania, is something we hadn't really put down in our culinary card index. Yes, okay, fritto misto, but quite a few followers of the pure Italo doctrine had reservations about it because it seemed so "imported". It wasn't until Raetus Wetter, a specialist in southern Italian food culture and as such beyond any doubt of lacking authenticity, had his panzerotti swimming in hot oil that it became clear in Vienna too: this could be something. Later, Andrea Cipriano, who is married to a Neapolitan, brought the deep-fried rice balls arancini to the menu in his fish restaurant Cucina Cipriano, and with the trattoria Riva Officina, deep-fried Napoli street food even became one of the main themes.
At Passione Da Ferdinando, however, you might be a little disappointed at first, as there is hardly anything on the menu apart from the classic pizzas and a few pasta standards: a kind of wrap called "rotolo" with various fillings, a few panini and a pizza fritta, which is filled with tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan but is rather unspectacular.
But first impressions are deceptive, because what else is on offer is either written in chalk on a board above the counter or simply on display in the cabinet: small, round arancini, which you can get with ragout (€ 3.20), large, onion-shaped arancini norma (€ 2.90), "cuoppi", or stanitzel, with vegetables deep-fried in batter (€ 7.50), seafood (€ 9.90), then twice-folded pizza called portafoglio and all sorts of other deep-fried dough with fillings and toppings. It's hard to know where to start, but you can skip the rotolos, which are a rather dry affair, but the stanitzel with the vegetables was great, especially the peppers and eggplants, but you never know what's inside anyway. And the deep-fried calconcino, filled with salsiccie, mozzarella and friarelli/cime di rapa (stem cabbage), is really fun: a kind of stuffed sourdough langoustines in Italian. To sum up: really casual Napoli street food of the deep-fried variety, but shyly hiding behind pizza normality.

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