Restaurant Review, Oliveto, London SW1.

Oliveto, 49 Elizabeth St, London SW1W 9PP

Contact: 020 7730 0074; olivorestaurants.com

Price: Three courses with wine and coffee (or fresh mint tea): about £35 per head

Ever since mankind learnt to walk upright and sprinkle oregano on dough, nothing has captured the futility of human existence like the search for the perfect pizza. Ascetics might posit that there are graver challenges on the journey from cradle to grave, but for those whose banality is matched only by their rapacious greed (do feel free to picture your reviewer’s chubby hand duly raised), this disorder can tend toward the obsessive, nay, compulsive.

The standard text here is American Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten’s essay, in his magnum opus The Man Who Ate Everything, entitled “My Quest For The Perfect Pizza”. Lack of space precludes more than a passing reference (order it if you can; it’s a total joy) to how he never went to a pizzeria – and he went to many – without packing a “non-contact thermometer gun” purchased at vast expense from a firm in Santa Cruz. This he would point at the oven to take the temperature to within a 10th of a degree in the hope that, if ever he were to encounter perfection in a restaurant, he could reproduce that perfection at home.

Without coming within a million degrees of Jeffrey’s commitment, in my indolent way I too have long sought the holy grail of cheese on toast (“Italian Welsh rarebit”, as pizza was amusingly styled when it reached Britain in the Fifties), always finding some flaw with even the best of them. If the crust was perfect, the toppings were mediocre, and vice versa. If the herbiness was just right, the mozzarella wasn’t. Whether in the traditional hotbeds of southern Italy and New York City, or in more recherché pizza-making hot spots such as Patagonia, Antigua and Yeovil, my quest inevitably ended in disappointment.

Read more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk