La Succursale
££££│ Pizza, Eat in or Takeaway
Evenings │Directions & Opening Times on Google
La Succursale (literally ‘the branch’) is the Lecce outpost of Barrueco in Santa Caterina. This younger sibling is not quite as picture perfect a location as the original for a pizza, but still without a doubt one of my favourite places (possibly my favourite place) to go in Lecce.
The pizza here isn’t the cheapest in town but it’s well made with good quality ingredients. I’m struggling to write why the pizza is so good because it’s quite hard to explain succinctly without decending into pizza dough obsession. Well here goes. In the world of (round) pizza at the one end of the pizza spectrum there is the very fluffy and chewy pizza from Napoli. Pizza Napoletana uses a good amount of yeast, and is flash cooked at extremely high heat so as to retain flavour and moisture inside the dough (as well as it being lightly crispy and charred). These are generally my favourite types of pizza, however sometimes they can get a bit gummy. At the other end of the spectrum there’s Pizza Romana, slightly less aggressively leavened, and cooked a tad lower, these are the classic ‘crispy and thin’ bases from Rome. They are also mind blowing and usually a little easier to digest (Neapolitans will disagree with me here). Anyway, it is possible to make a pizza that lies firmly in the sweet spot between these two worlds, but very very very few places actually nail it. La Succursale is one of the places that does, it’s always delicious and I never feel bloated after eating one of their pizzas.
Aside from food there’s a small selection of really excellent wines. Beer on tap is the rather disappointing Carlsburg, but there are good local options by bottle.
It’s a classic narrow old Leccese building with simple star vaulted ceilings and a large outdoor seating area in the middle Viale dell'Università. Most of the interior fit-out is pretty minimal wood/iron/steel, and it’s about the closest thing you can find in Lecce to the better places in Shoreditch or Williamsburg. This may be one of the reasons I feel so at home here as a native of the noughties era metropolises. Although it’s not in the old city, it’s literally two minutes from Porta Napoli and right next to the main University campuses. It’s got a kind of hippish vibe to it, maybe not hippy, but…there’s definitely less c**** here than in other places.
I’d try and visit here at least once on your holiday, or it’s equally fantastic older sister in the extremely beautiful Santa Caterina. You’ll have a top quality and truly relaxing evening.