Shëtitorja Spile 5 · Himarë
The oven
One arch, cut into the kitchen wall and painted the same deep red as the band that runs across it. Everything below is what that arch does, and what comes out beside it.
A dome, not a deck
There are three ways to bake a pizza commercially and they produce three different objects. A conveyor moves the base through a fixed heat on a belt. A deck oven bakes it on a heated stone shelf behind a door. A dome does neither: the fire sits inside the same chamber as the food, off to one side, and the hot floor cooks from below while the roof throws heat back down onto the top.
Enigma's is the third kind. It is a rendered masonry dome built into the wall, fired with wood, and in the photograph above the fire is still burning at the right-hand side of the chamber, with a pizza standing on a metal tray at the mouth. That is the whole explanation for a thin, crisp, quickly-cooked base — there is no other way to get one.
Wood takes an hour to bring a dome up to temperature and a few minutes to bake anything in it. That is the trade a kitchen like this one makes, every day, before service.
And the rest of the board
The sign says Restaurant first and Pizzeri second, which is the right order. Pasta, salads, fish and seafood all come off the same pass — and they are plated, not just served.
A whole prawn set over squid and mussel, with carrot ribboned into a nest, radish and pink grapefruit cut thin, and a yellow oil pooled on the plate around it. That is a restaurant plate, sent out of a pizzeria, on a promenade.
Two bottles
Both Italian, both named for the ground they are grown on rather than for their colour: a Primitivo from the heel of Puglia and a Lugana off Lake Garda.
The terrace opens straight onto the Spile promenade, at number 5.