There has, for as long as I can remember, been a restaurant at the end of the shopping area on Cowley Road in Oxford. This restaurant has always been dark and threatening from the outside – a slightly bizarre wooden facia with surprisingly small windows grimacing at the passer by. The look was, and to some extent still is, reminiscent of a cross between a North American log cabin and a Caribbean barbeque hut. It did nothing to entice one in, despite the fact it stood out from the rest of Cowley Road, architecturally speaking, like a sore thumb.

The reputation of this restaurant was as dark as its exterior. They also had the rather creepy habit of sitting dummies in the windows to give the impression of being full, which always made me worry that if I went in I would end up stuffed and sitting in a window, grinning my false joy to other suckers as they were drawn into the trap.

The restaurant that was once there has now come under new management, and has a new name – Fratelli’s Pizzeria. My blighted memory of the old place kept me away for a long time nevertheless, until I received a recommendation from a friend, which drew me and my fiancé to Fratelli’s on a dark and wet October evening. I was prepared for anything, but what I actually got was… a pleasant surprise.

The details:

Fratelli’s Pizzeria
247 Cowley Road
Oxford
OX4 1XG


We had:
1 x Calamari
1 x Homemade bread with oil and vinegar
1 x Margarita pizza with added chicken and courgette
1 x Quattro stagioni pizza
1 x Tiramisu
1 x some sort of mountainous ice cream thing
½ litre of “house red” wine, of uncertain provenance and grape

Total price: about £35

Food

There are, I have discovered, certain blighted persons in this world who do not like pizza. I am not one of these people: for me, life would lose a significant element of its lustre were I not able to have, from time to time or rather more often, a delicious combination of tomato, cheese and bread in pizza form. That is not to say however that I like all pizzas – in fact, I can be rather fussy in regards to them. In the words of food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille, (a personal hero of mine), if I don’t love it… I don’t swallow.

There are a number of disastrous failures which a pizza may suffer, all of which will result in my rejecting them. Among their number is chunky tomato sauce, a soggy base, an excessively dry base, not enough cheese, and the foulest of all: a soggy, drooping patch in the middle. The pizza at Fratelli’s suffered from none of these problems. The toppings were gorgeous; the base was thin and authentic, yet not dry or desiccated. I would go so far as to describe it as the best pizza I’ve had outside of Italy, if you like your pizzas Italian in style. If you’re a deep dish only person, and you expect masses of stodge, then you may be a little disappointed.

Fratelli’s is clearly a pizzeria in focus, so it is perhaps no surprise that the starters and puddings were less exciting than the main event. To be honest, they’d have had to be pretty good to live up to the pizzas anyway. This is not an accusation of incompetence though – my calamari and my tiramisu were fine -it’s just that the calamari was a little uninspired, and lacked a decent dipping sauce, and the tiramisu had too thick a texture, and too deep a cream layer. Those criticisms made, the general feel of the place was cheap and cheerful (in a good way), so I’m not going to dock too many marks for those minor let downs, seeing as in some way they helped maintain a consistent and undoubtedly enjoyable dining experience.


Food therefore gets 23 out of 30

Ambience

I think I made clear in my introduction to this review that the exterior of Fratelli’s is… hit and miss. It’s not the owners’ fault – they’ve inherited a difficult location. They seem actually to have done a lot to improve the exterior – the sinister dummies are gone, and the windows seem larger than before, opening the place up to outside scrutiny. It’s a shame that those windows don’t look out upon a very nice vista: Fratelli’s is at the far end of Cowley Road, beyond the Cowley Road shops and bars, and far away from the genteel centre of Oxford city. Most of the passers by are therefore cars, and the odd drunk stumbling out of the hideous yellow chain pub on the far side of the road. To give you an idea of the quality of the area, I used to live within a few hundred meters of Fratelli’s shortly after graduating. The other part of the semi in which I lived was inhabited by drug dealers who would operate out of the downstairs front window, and the shop on the opposite side of the road could be reached only by stepping over the recumbent forms of the drunks who would congregate there to alternate singing and sleeping throughout the waking hours of the day.

Inside though, Fratelli’s is rather nice. It’s warm and cosy, and filled with Italian-seeming posters and nick-nacks which help build a fun, friendly atmosphere. It’s also far bigger and more open than the restaurant looks from the outside, which although in some ways rather disturbing and tardis-like, at least improves the eating experience. I also noted with some amusement that the posters on the walls had been chosen for their look rather than with a more critical eye – many were dated between 1939 and 1944, and showed some rather attractive triumphal architecture, buxom ladies with the fruits of the harvest and the like…

Hopefully unintentional Fascist propaganda aside, the experience of Fratelli’s was very pleasant – it’s just a shame you have to wade through a slightly unpleasant area to get there.

Ambience, 19 out of 30

Service

Service at Fratelli’s is best described as enthusiastic. Within moments of sitting, some bright, invariably pretty young thing (of either gender) will spring up beside you, and thrust a menu in your direction while unleashing some well practiced bonhomie. This is a not entirely unpleasant experience, although it rather depends on how friendly a particular waiter or waitress is. If you don’t like being chatted to by your waiters though, you might find it annoying.

Leaving style aside though, service is swift and efficient. I felt obligated to leave a more generous than usual tip, which undoubtedly says something.

Service, 15 out of 20

Drinks

Fratelli’s is cheap, simple and wholesome, and I would want nothing but relatively cheap, simple and wholesome drink with it. Fratelli’s does not disappoint, with a selection of robust wines and a reasonable number of other things. The only thing that makes me a bit suspicious is an insistence on selling wine by volume in carafes rather than by the bottle – it makes me suspect that the wine might be coming out of a carton, even if I hope such a suspicion is unworthy.

Drinks, 7 out of 10

Price

Fratelli’s is cheap, and frankly, rather good value. They also have a rather cool special offer on some of their more expensive pizzas whereby the price becomes the time (before 7.00pm) that you buy it. I like to eat early, so that’s a nice saving. The only thing that’s a let down is that custom toppings are too expensive, although that’s not unusual in the least.

Price gets 8 out of 10

That gives Fratelli’s pizzeria an overall score of:

72%

Fratelli’s is both cheap, and excellent. No one has an excuse not to go here.