‘We need cheaper options’: Two-hat Italian restaurant to open waterfront pizza spin-off

Alessandro and Anna Pavoni are behind six of Sydney’s most renowned Italian restaurants, including Ormeggio at the Spit, but they’ve never put a full-sized pizza on the menu. That’s set to change on April 22, when Pizza’Mare launches at Crown Sydney.

“I was just waiting for the right moment,” chef Alessandro Pavoni says.

Pizza’Mare will open on the upper mezzanine level of the Pavonis’ fine-dining restaurant a’Mare, which received two hats in The Sydney Morning Herald 2026 Good Food Guide.

It’s an affordable alternative, forgoing a’Mare’s signature tableside service and labour-intensive dishes to cut the price of pasta by around 50 per cent. And while there won’t be a waiter available to theatrically mortar-and-pestle each serving of pesto, there will be the same waterfront views, house-made pasta and culinary oversight.

Pavoni’s kitchen team, including Puglia-born pizzaiolo Paolo Lacarpia and a’Mare executive chef Giuseppe Fuzio, have spent the past year refining their pizza dough recipe and cooking technique at Manly restaurant Cibaria, which serves smaller, simpler “pizzettas”.

The “biga” base they landed on takes three days to make. Pavoni says it’s not quite Neapolitan, not quite new-school (“too much cornicione (crust), let’s go back to normal size”), and undergoes a long pre-fermentation process (“so it’s light, and doesn’t keep fermenting in your belly”). The result is crisp on the outside, soft on the inside, and bubbling with pockets of air.

“We all feel the stress of the [rising] cost of living, so we needed to offer cheaper options,” Pavoni says.

“Fine dining is becoming harder and harder because it requires a lot more labour and the produce is a lot more expensive, but there’s only so much customers are prepared to pay.”

The menu features a selection of antipasti (fried buffalo mozzarella with heirloom tomatoes, finely sliced prosciutto), alongside classic pasta dishes (spaghetti aglio e olio, rigatoni cacio e pepe), but the focus is firmly on pizza.

“I didn’t want to be too creative, but I also wanted to have a few pizzas that were unique and driven by fresh produce,” Pavoni says. “My favourite is the Napoletana, which is a traditional three tomatoes pizza with [the option of] Cantabrico anchovies on top.”

There’s a classic margherita with San Marzano tomatoes and fior di latte mozzarella for the purists, as well as elevated options such as the amar’inara (yellowfin tuna crudo, confit cherry tomatoes, stracciatella, lemon zest and basil) and the gamberi e zucchini (king prawns, yellow cherry tomato salsa, fior di latte mozzarella, zucchini flower and orange zest).

Pizza’Mare launches as part of a larger overhaul, aiming to transform a’Mare into a colourful “Italian hub” with three venues across two floors. Vista’Mare, a dedicated aperitivo bar with outdoor seating, rounds out the offering, and features NSW’s only Campari Seltz machine − a high-pressure drinks dispenser, originally from 1915, that combines and aerates Campari and soda to create a frothy, ice-cold cocktail − imported from Milan.

“[Pizza’mare is] the kind of place we always felt was missing here,” says Anna Pavoni. “Barangaroo is full of people looking for a great, relaxed meal.”