The Italian island Lampedusa is closer to Africa than to Sicily, a fragment of limestone and prickly pear adrift in the Mediterranean, better known to the world for shipwrecks than for supper. It is the kind of place a person leaves. But it is also the kind of place that leaves something in a person, and in Matteo Ernandes it left pizza. His father was the pizzaiolo of the family pizzeria, and Matteo was tossing dough before he was old enough to understand what he was doing. “Pizza has been in my life since before I was born,” he says.
From that smallest of Mediterranean islands, Matteo has travelled to the largest island in the world, so large it is a continent, and somewhere along the way his pizza knowledge has expanded to match the width of the landscape. Today he stands at the counter of Regina La Pizzeria, in the new Wunderlich Lane precinct of Redfern, Sydney, governing a team of pizzaioli who move around him like the hands of a clock. The work he has done at that counter has, in the space of a single year, already been crowned.
The Man Who Sleeps on His Ferments
To understand Regina La Pizzeria, you must first understand that Matteo Ernandes is a fanatic, in the most affectionate sense the word allows. His colleagues describe him as a man who “lives, breathes and sleeps flour and preferments,” and the description is barely a metaphor. Matteo cultivates his own leavens: lievito madre refreshed by hand, bighe built and rebuilt, living cultures he carries with him in crystal jars and tends with the devotion others reserve for pets or children. 
His Instagram is not a gallery of finished pizzas glistening for the algorithm. It’s an album of doughs and ferments, of bubbles and crumb, an open diary of an obsession. He has been known to carry his starters with him, feeding and refreshing them on the move. He once said, with no trace of irony, that for him pizza is life.
This matters, because the cooking is downstream of the obsession. Matteo arrived in Sydney in 2014 and earned his stripes at the woodfired ovens of city institutions, Matteo in Double Bay, Da Orazio in Bondi, before taking the reins at Avoja, the much-missed Neapolitan project of LuMi’s chef-owner Federico Zanellato. He is thirty-two, and he is, by every account around him, in a state of perpetual experimentation, refining and adjusting and refusing to stand still. The results speak with the eloquence of awards.
A Pizzeria Born Inside a Kingdom
Regina did not appear from nowhere. It is a province of one of the most remarkable culinary operation in Sydney: the eleven businesses that Federico Zanellato and his wife Michela Boncagni have built across Australia’s biggest city, from the Italian-Japanese precision of their flagship LuMi to the bakeries of Lode Pies, the trattoria Leo and the frozen-yoghurt counters of Freo. LuMi was named Best Italian Restaurant in the World by Gambero Rosso International in 2019; Zanellato was the Sydney Morning Herald’s Chef of the Year in 2017.
The thread that runs through every one of those operations, from the thirteen-course tasting menu to the ten-dollar tub of yoghurt, is a single conviction: that the same care and the same attention to detail are owed to a pizza as to a lobster. Zanellato is fond of quoting his idol Ferran Adrià to the effect that there is no difference between cooking a carrot and cooking a lobster, and at Regina, the principle is made edible.
But Regina, crucially, is Michela’s domain. The couple are, as Federico likes to put it, “professionally divorced”: for years they ran LuMi together, until Michela wanted a business she could call her own. Regina (Queen in Italian) was the answer. He helped her set it up and still develops the menu alongside Matteo, but the floor and the life of the room are hers.
At the centre of the open kitchen stands a monster from the Vesuvius slopes: a wood-fired Fazzone oven, hand-built in Naples, clad in jade-green tiles, its dome lined with volcanic stone. It’s the only one of its kind in Australia. Its low ceiling and small mouth give it ferocious, even heat and an efficiency that astonishes Matteo, who reckons it burns a third of the wood of a conventional oven. Around the corner, in the kitchen proper, a Moretti deck oven does the patient work the Fazzone cannot. Two ovens and two temperaments are rarely seen under one roof.
The room itself wears its references with ease, cream and emerald throughout, from the half-tiled walls to the chequerboard floors, a mid-century Italian elegance that never tips into pastiche. And the menu is laid out like a chessboard: the Classiche under the King, the Speciali under the Queen, the twice-cooked and the pan-baked beneath the two Rooks, all under a motto with a gambler’s swagger — where each pizza is a move, each bite a checkmate.
The pizzas themselves carry the names of Italian icons, a roll-call of the country’s twentieth-century glamour: a Bellucci, a Versace, a Rossi of roasted pumpking purée and nduja, a Bocelli heavy with cheeses, a Vasco. To read the menu is to be reminded that this is a part of a culinary kingdom with a sense of humour.
A Question of Dough
For a man like Matteo, the point of Regina is that it refuses to choose a single style. Most serious pizzerias plant a flag; Napoletana, Romana, Siciliana; and defend it for life. Regina offers several at once, which is harder to do and easier to get wrong, and the distinction between them is, above all, a distinction of dough.
The contemporary base is his reading of the Neapolitan: a dough kept within a controlled range and developed through long fermentation, so that it carries a light structure and a clean bite without the heaviness that sends you home defeated. The padellino is pushed higher in hydration and baked in a pan, which gives it a crisp base beneath a soft, aerated interior; in Matteo’s hands it has become something unusual, blind-baked in advance and then opened and filled, a small open-faced marvel that Ernandes says he has seen nowhere else in Sydney.
The twice-cooked is the showpiece: fried first, then finished in the oven, so that it stays crisp outside while remaining impossibly light within, nothing at all like the leaden fried pizzas the name might suggest. And newest of all is the scrocchiarella, the thin, low-hydration Roman style also known as pala romana, baked for a crackling, glassy crunch. Four grammars of the same mother tongue, each spoken fluently.
A Believer Is Made
I came to Regina sceptical of nothing except, perhaps, my own appetite, and I left a convert on at least one count. I began with a Supplì Rossi, a croquette made of rice, tomato, mozzarella and Parmigiano Reggiano fried into a small Roman benediction, and then surrendered to the dough.
The Bellucci, the twice-cooked pizza everyone tells you to order, deserves its reputation. Stracciatella, mortadella and a macadamia-and-rocket pesto sit on a base so light it approaches the condition of a cloud: fully souffléd, crisp, and without the faintest memory of the oil it was fried in. The Vasco, a padellino of aubergine, San Marzano tomato, provola, basil and a Parmigiano Reggiano cream, was all comfort and depth, the crust giving that promised contrast of crisp shell and tender interior.
The Marinara, built on the new scrocchiarella base, was the Mediterranean itself made edible: San Marzano tomato, oregano, basil, dried cherry tomatoes, good extra virgin olive oil, and Italian anchovies of a quality high enough to compete with the Cantabrians. Those were elemental flavours, in the noblest sense, that carry you straight to the Mare Nostrum.
And then the Margherita. Contemporary dough, San Marzano, fior di latte, basil, oil, humble ingredientes which did the thing I had assumed impossible. I have always, in my ignorance, found the Margherita a touch dull, too simple to bother with. Regina’s converted me. It made the case that the Margherita, built on this dough and these ingredients, is one of the most interesting pizzas on any menu. I became a believer.
What stayed with me, beyond any single pizza, was the lightness, the sheer digestibility of these doughs, which leave you satisfied rather than bloated; the intensity and quality of the toppings; the smoke the wood-fired oven breathes into the crust; and the theatre of the counter, where Matteo’s brigade work with the calm of people who have done a difficult thing ten thousand times. I would urge anyone to book a counter seat. The pizza is the better for being watched.
Michela Holds the Room
If Matteo controls the oven, Michela Boncagni holds the room, and she holds it with the particular disinvoltura of an Italian who has decided you are now family. She greets, she seats, she reads a table in a glance. The Sydney diner can be an exacting creature, quick to grumble over nothing; Michela handles the lot with warmth and an unflappable efficiency, and the evidence of her success is written in the digital margins. A brief search online turns up a long trail of contented guests describing, without apparent exaggeration, the best pizzas they have ever eaten.
Her presence at Regina is the resolution of a personal arc. After years in the rarefied air of fine dining, Michela found herself missing the direct, unbuttoned, popular warmth of the pizzeria and here, in this rolled-up-sleeves atmosphere that runs at times to the tumultuous, a room full of happy and noisy people that might look like chaos were it not so plainly under control, she is a fish returned to water.
She is also a certified sommelier, a microbiologist by training, and the wine list bears her signature: Italian from end to end, with a leaning towards the aromatic whites she clearly loves: a Garganega-blend Soave from Adalia, a Verdicchio from Fattoria San Lorenzo, a Carricante from Cusumano’s Etna Bianco, a Pigato from Liguria, the sun-soaked Zibibbo of Valdibella… alongside chillable reds like the Aglianico and Piedirosso of Mastroberardino and serious bottles that run from Nebbiolo to Nero d’Avola, Barbera to Carignano.
And, because an Italian meal must end the way an Italian meal ends, a thoughtful parade of amari and digestivi waits at the close: Averna and Montenegro, a biodynamic Fernet from Walcher, a Ratafià, the house limoncello and its crema. Matteo is a great pizzaiolo; Michela is a great host; together they are a formidable double act, and the partnership is the reason the room runs the way it does.
The Crown, in a Single Year
In May, one year after opening its doors, Regina La Pizzeria was recognised among the Top Italian Restaurants by Gambero Rosso and awarded Tre Spicchi or “three slices”, the highest distinction in Italy’s most authoritative pizza guide. It became one of only two pizzerias in all of Australia to receive the honour, the other being That’s Enrico in Lobethal, South Australia. The guide cited Regina for its excellence across ingredient sourcing, service and, of course, dough.
That it should arrive so fast is the part worth dwelling on. Reputations of this kind are usually the work of years; Regina earned its crown in twelve months. A pizzeria barely a year old, in a shopping precinct in Redfern, judged by the Italians themselves to be among the finest expressions of their own national dish anywhere on the continent.
I will not be the one to claim that Regina La Pizzeria is among the best pizzerias in the world. I don’t need to be. Gambero Rosso has, in effect, already said it, and a boy from Lampedusa who has spent his life chasing the perfect ferment across half the planet, with an Italian sommelier at his side who turned her back on fine dining to run a room full of joy, has the medal to prove it. The queen, it seems, is only beginning her reign.
Regina La Pizzeria, Wunderlich Lane, Redfern, Sydney, NSW
www.reginalapizzeria.com
