A queen, a pizzaiolo, and a flag – and the letter proving it is regarded by historians as a forgery
PizzaLuxe at Principal Place holds a 4.6 from a hundred and seventy-two people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and the pizza on the menu has a founding legend that is probably fiction.
The story
In 1889, Queen Margherita of Savoy visited Naples.
And a pizzaiolo named Raffaele Esposito was summoned to make pizza for her – and he made three, and the one she liked best was topped with tomato, mozzarella and basil.
Red, white and green. The colours of the Italian flag.
And he named it after her.
The letter
The evidence is a letter, from the royal household, thanking Esposito and confirming the Queen enjoyed the pizzas.
It hangs, framed, in the restaurant that descends from his.
And it has been examined.
Historians who have looked at it have raised serious questions about the paper, the seal, the language and the dating – and a substantial body of scholarly opinion now regards it as a later fabrication.
The pizza with tomato, mozzarella and basil also appears to predate 1889 in the record, under other names, which is rather the problem.
Which is the finding
Six postcodes. Six hundred and thirty-six articles. And it has never once varied.
The tellable version wins.
The Elephant and Castle is a cutler’s badge, not the Infanta de Castile. The Churchill Arms was named forty-eight years before Winston was born. Old Speckled Hen is a car. Nickel is a goblin. St George was Turkish. Absinthe never made anybody mad. Wolves do not howl at the moon. The bistro is not Cossack. Dom Perignon never said it.
And the margherita is very probably not a queen.
Every one of these stories is better than the truth. That is why they exist, and that is why they will outlive every correction anybody ever prints, including this one.
What is true about Neapolitan pizza
That it was poor people’s food, sold in the street, by the slice, to workers who ate it standing up.
That the elite of Naples regarded it as disgusting and said so in print.
And that it is now protected by a consortium with rules about the flour, the water, the oven temperature and the time – which is eighty-nine seconds, at four hundred and eighty-five degrees, in a wood-fired oven.
A food that was beneath the notice of anybody respectable is now regulated by a committee.
Verdict
Good pizza, cheap, honest number.
Go, and enjoy a queen who very probably had nothing to do with it.
The eighty-nine seconds
Which is not arbitrary and is worth understanding.
A Neapolitan oven runs at around four hundred and eighty degrees, and at that temperature a pizza cooks in roughly ninety seconds.
Which is fast enough that the base blisters and chars in spots before the moisture in the dough has cooked out – so the crust is puffed, blackened in places, and still soft.
Cook it slower and cooler and you get a biscuit. The whole texture depends on the heat being violent and the time being short.
It is the same principle as searing a steak, and the same principle as the ember rather than the flame, and it is the reason a domestic oven cannot do it.
Cyndi Himmelstiere is a satirical journalist at Prat.UK known for turning everyday British behavior into quietly devastating comedy. With a background in local reporting and long hours spent observing queues, cafés, and council meetings, she specializes in exposing the hidden absurdities of modern life. Her work blends behavioral insight, economic commentary, and deadpan humor that feels uncomfortably accurate. Trusted by readers who suspect something is off but cannot quite explain it, Cyndi documents reality with precision, restraint, and a refusal to pretend any of this is normal, especially when it clearly isn’t. She is the author of Could Modern Doctors Have Saved History’s Greats?
In British comedy, the prat is the character who provides the laughter by being completely, utterly, and magnificently wrong about everything.
A news director complained that it was making reporters question their institutional approach. Someone asked if that questioning was warranted.