Review: Potaci

Aside from a cute kitchen, spunky service and an interesting story, a one-dish snack bar must also have good food. It is on this most important point that Potaci falls short.

Hailing from the area around Venice, Potaci (“easy snacks” in Italian) serves up thick pizza by the slice. From behind a tiled counter, ovens churn out square offerings in an assortment of flavours. Per-slice prices hover in the RMB23-29 range with all the expected toppings from pepperoni to ham and pineapple alongside a couple of less routine options like salmon.

Two should be enough to fill most bellies. To be honest though, we were overwhelmed and slightly bored by the thick, chewy and sparsely topped slices halfway through the second slice of ham and mushroom (RMB25). They’re also experimenting with items on the menu. Today’s pizza dough wrapped sausage (RMB25) was curious, and not great.

Potaci is a moderately cute place and certainly earnest. If only this were in the otherwise snack-sparse Yongfu Lu area then taste misgivings could be overlooked (and clubbers would probably be queuing out the door). Here on the fringe of Dagu Lu where good-easy food is just around the corner, they need to up their game in order to serve up slices of heaven worth searching for.