When you think of authentic Italian food, your mind might not immediately jump to a restaurant in St David's shopping centre in Cardiff serving pineapple on pizza and something called 'Cardiff Sauce'. But Ciliegino is a labour of love by two Italian men who are trying to balance authenticity with their crowd-pleasing dishes in their first UK restaurant.
Surrounded on almost all sides by chain restaurants, Ciliegino has to do something to stand out - and has managed to become Cardiff's top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor. Owner and managing director Giuseppe Portella told WalesOnline: "I think what is making the difference in our restaurant is we are one of the few really authentic Italian restaurants.
"We are not a chain, we are really independent. The ingredients we take are coming from Italy, some of them we import directly and many others we have a local supplier. Food at chain restaurants sometimes is frozen or prepared before... our pizza dough is proven for 48 hours and our pizza chef goes there every night with the flour to make the dough and prepare our sauces."
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Ciliegino was first born in Italy in 2005 with a first restaurant opened in Sicily by Giuseppe and his business partner Tonino Morgante. Since then, the business has expanded to contain five restaurants in Italy and (since 2017) one in Cardiff. Giuseppe explained why they chose Cardiff: "The reason for Cardiff was very simple.
"We had a really good friend of ours that wanted to be involved in this project and he was living and working in Cardiff. We went to meet him and stayed in Cardiff, fell in love with the city, and decided our first place in the UK should be there."
Italian food in the UK always feels like a bit of a compromise - the methods might be authentic, but you often get the sense you're not tucking into the same dish as a local in Florence or Naples.
A glance at Ciliegino's menu shows a few moments of this compromise. All the favourites are there - carbonara, arrabiata, salads, pizza and cannoli, but so too are dishes popularised outside Italy like New York cheesecake and (to an extent) spaghetti Bolognese.
Giuseppe explained how he found a happy medium: "At the beginning, I am very honest, we were like a bit strict on this - we would say: our cuisine is this, we don’t want to revisit, to adapt… but then eventually we said: it’s not true that Italian cuisine cannot be a bit adapted.
"For instance, just to make a joke, we go a bit crazy when someone wants to eat pizza with pineapple and many Italian restaurants say: 'we’d never do it.'
"But we said, if our customer likes it, why be so strict? We have 95% of our authenticity, but you also have kids or someone that really likes to have the pineapple so why should we not allow them to do it?
"Even if I do a pizza with pineapple, we do it with passion, we use our dough and sauces we made inside, we put the best pineapple we can find in the market… we adapted a bit but not changing the original recipe."
That sums up what we liked about Ciliegino - the restaurant doesn't overcomplicate things, but instead produces crowd favourites to a high standard. Scroll down to read our review.
Giuseppe has a "dream" to open more branches in the UK. But, he said: "We are very normal people with not a lot of money but with patience… to open a new one means to have some money aside and we would love to do so."
He said he would love to open a restaurant focused more on "fine cuisine" serving things like lobster and white truffle. Any expansion, though, comes with a caveat: "We never want to become a chain."
Giuseppe explained: "Even if we have many, what we’re going to keep in each restaurant is our authenticity, being Italian, using fresh ingredients. That’s what we’re going to replicate - maybe the method, but never standardise everything, never a central kitchen sending things out frozen.
"We may lose margins, but that’s why we’re not rich. Ingredients from Italy are expensive at the moment with Brexit, and we increased our prices just a few - to keep on doing fresh things we need to say bye bye to a bit of the margin, but we don’t care because we don’t want to sell our soul to cook something that is frozen or not authentic… that is my and Tonino’s way of seeing the business."
He admits that being in a shopping centre isn't ideal in some ways - although it's "a good thing because you have a lot of people passing by," it means "you cannot have a really nice and fancy place". But, Giuseppe said: "We don’t care that we are in a shopping centre, we just want to do as if we were in the high street or a really high-end restaurant."
To get to the heart of the food, why not ask the chef? Daniel Capitano has been Ciliegino's head chef for just over six months, and said he "didn't expect" to become Cardiff's top-rated restaurant, joking: "Maybe we do the best food, I don't know? The people know! I think we do nice food."
As might be unavoidable growing up in Italy, he has a culinary background: "I saw my grandmother and my mum cooking every day. We are famous for food in Italy so I always watched them, how they cooked... slowly slowly, and then I had an opportunity to work in the UK."
He's been working in the UK for 10 years now, and in Ciliegino for a little more than a year. He explains the secret to their success. "We do everything homemade, freshly... we use Petra flour, fresh dough every day. I think the lasagne is the best pasta we do... my personal favourite dish is the Ciliegino pizza with Parma ham, basil - the first ingredient in Italy - and mozzarella."
Our verdict
Three of us went to Ciliegino for lunch to try it out - and my main criticism lays with us; we didn't sample enough of what the menu had to offer. Ciliegino's location is slightly nondescript among all the big chain brands in St David's centre, and I'd walked past it before without paying it much attention.
The menu is pretty varied, with eight pasta and 13 pizza options - including the classics like carbonara and pepperoni pizza, more "British" dishes like spaghetti bolognese and Hawaiian pizza, and some more adventurous stuff like a curry pizza or a 'Cardiff Sauce' pasta (featuring double cream, egg yolk, parmesan, chicken, blue cheese, parsley, and pepper - we're not sure what makes it 'Cardiff'.
It's all relatively well-priced and clocks in at around the same price as most Italian restaurants, with most pizzas costing between £11.90 and £14.90, and generous helpings of pasta between £11.50 and £16.50 (the latter and more expensive containing several different types of seafood).
Two of our party of three opted to share a starter of calamari, which at £8.90 only gently raised our eyebrows cost-wise but ended up being fantastic value as the plate was absolutely loaded with squid. We only just got through it between two of us, and it tasted fantastic - salty enough and pleasantly chewy, with the batter making way without much of a fight.
The accompanying garlic mayo was nice and punchy, too. The only complaint, and it's really a matter of preference, was there were several individual tiny squids among the squid rings, which was a bit much for me.
On to the main courses, and between three of us we went for the chicken arrabbiata (£14.50) and two pizzas - one margherita (£11.90) and one pepperoni without cheese (£12.90). In hindsight, we'd gone a bit basic, missing the menu's more adventurous-looking 'Chef Recommendations' but what we ordered did the job perfectly well.
The pasta was served in a garlicky tomato sauce that was rich but not overpowering, with the individual pieces of tomato helping it to feel more substantial and adding little punches of flavour. The portion size was deceptively big, and the chicken pieces - nothing special but with a nice smoky flavour - were generously heaped in.
The highlight of the two pizzas was the dough, which Ciliegino's website boasts is prepared over 48 hours which helps it to taste better and lighter. To be honest, I don't pride myself as a judge of what is and isn't authentic, so I couldn't tell you what difference 48 hours makes, but whatever they're doing is working.
The dough was lovely, stretchy and light, but still had more substance than the type of stone-baked pizzas that seem to disappear with a light breeze. I'm reliably informed by the cheese-eating member of our party that "the cheese to tomato ratio was good," and by the cheese-averse member that the tomato sauce made up for it, and the pepperoni added enough flavour that it didn't matter.
This is no sleight to the brainy people behind chain restaurants and the hard-working staff who make their food, but sat in Ciliegino, as your eyes drift towards Pizza Express and Prezzo across the way, I struggled to think of anything that would make me choose one of them over Ciliegino itself.
There was a small chain of Italian restaurants near where I grew up called L'artista. The name doesn't really matter, because everyone knows restaurants like this - waiters who know every member of your family by name, food that tastes like it's homemade and dodgily-painted facades of Italy on the walls.
Nothing will ever top your favourite childhood restaurant due to the value of nostalgia alone - and Ciliegino skips out on the gaudy decor - but the greatest compliment I can pay it is that it's the closest place I've found in quality to L'artista. If I'd had to guess, I would've said Cardiff's top-rated restaurant was a fine dining venue or something incredibly niche and unique - not an Italian restaurant playing the greatest hits.
But they're hits for a reason. Good pasta is good, and great pizza is great. Ciliegino does the basics very well, at a decent price, in a central location. There's no need to ask for more.
The atmosphere is a little odd, with the buzz of a shopping centre going on outside, but I'm sure it's better at dinner rather than lunch and in any case it was to no real detriment. The decor is unassuming and the crockery perfectly nice, and we couldn't fault the service at all (friendly, plus impressively quick, albeit at a fairly quiet time).
The meal was topped off with tiramisu (£6.50) and cannoli (£6.50), both of which were top quality. The cannoli were incredibly sweet, which might not be to everyone's taste, but the biscuits were more muted and balanced out the ricotta filling nicely. As someone who'd willingly eat buttercream icing directly from the bowl, I was this dessert's exact target audience.
As for the tiramisu, take it from my colleague who ate it: "I've never had tiramisu before but I'd definitely have it again if it tastes like that. It tasted fresh, like it had just been made."
I'll admit - and you'll probably agree - we barely scratched the surface of the menu here. If I visited again, I'd push the boat out a little more, because the rest of the food looks fantastic. What I tried was at the more basic end of the spectrum, but there's nothing wrong with the basics done well. Plus, I'm tempted to find out what 'Cardiff Sauce' actually tastes like.
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