How NOT to visit the Eat Pray Love Pizzeria

It’s storytime. Many travel writers will give you advice about how to visit the famous Eat, Pray, Love pizzeria, Pizzeria L’Antica da Michele, in Naples, Italy. Good for them for enjoying their visits. We did not enjoy ours. It was a comedy of errors, but it did yield some tips that, in hindsight, would have been good to know in advance. So without further ado, please learn from our mistakes, and learn how NOT to visit the Eat Pray Love pizzeria.

Why is Pizzeria L’Antica da Michele so famous?

The Eat Pray Love pizzeria, or Pizzeria L’Antica da Michele, is one of the oldest pizzerias in Naples. It’s also known as one of the best. Given that Naples is known as the very birthplace of pizza, this is high praise indeed. As Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in Eat, Pray, Love:

“He gave me the name of a Pizzeria in Naples (“Da Michele”) that I had to try, because he informed me, it sold the best pizza in Naples. I found this a wildly exciting prospect, given that the best pizza in Italy is from Naples and the best pizza in the world is from Italy, which means that pizzeria must offer… I’m almost too superstitious to say it… the best pizza in the world?

“Please go to this pizzeria order the margherita pizza with double mozzarella. If you do not eat this pizza when you are in Naples, please lie to me later and tell me that you did.”

Thanks in large part to Elizabeth Gilbert, this restaurant’s popularity has soared in recent years. It helps that it’s a Michelin guide restaurant, too. How did they get so good? Part of the answer might lie in the fact that there are only two pizzas on the menu: margherita and marinara. When you make just a couple of things over and over again for 100+ years… you’re bound to perfect them. And at just €5 each, they are a relative bargain.

How do you get to the Eat Pray Love pizzeria?

We had a 3-hour stopover in Naples en route from Rome to Sorrento. Just long enough to stow our bags at – aptly enough – Stow Your Bags – and then head for L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele for lunch.

The sky was dark, and threatening rain, but we didn’t think much of it. Surely we’d be inside and eating soon enough.

What we found at the Eat Pray Love pizzeria

20 minutes later, we arrived at the restaurant to find a sea of people. The smarter ones were carrying umbrellas, as the first fat drops of rain began to fall. Others tried to cozy up under the eaves of the nearby buildings to stay somewhat dry.

We were not surprised to see the crowd. After all, it was midday at possibly the most popular restaurant in Naples. We were, however, unprepared for the chaos. People lined up along the block, and clustered across the street, and also kitty-corner to the restaurant. There wasn’t just one line – there were many. There was also a restaurant employee in a white apron, handing out numbered paper tickets. And there was an electronic sign flashing digital numbers behind him.

As we eventually learned, the paper tickets are the queuing system to gain access to the eat-in portion of the restaurant. Once you have one of those, you’re free to roam, which lends to the chaos. The people lined up along the wall were in a first-come-first-served queue awaiting takeout pizza.

We started off on the right foot, by drawing a paper ticket immediately, number 28. Much to our dismay, we soon realized that we weren’t just 28 numbers back in line… we were 128 numbers back in line. Still, the line was moving. I suppose when you’re only making two things, you’re pretty efficient at turning customers over.

However, 45 minutes later, we were still waiting. There were less than 100 customers in front of us, but things weren’t moving fast enough for us to believe we’d be served before we needed to get back to the train station. So we decided to change our approach and get in line for take-away service.

That’s pretty much where the story ends. We stayed in that line as long as we could, but we never did get served. It was close – there were probably less than 10 people in front of us when we left. But Italian trains are punctual, and we knew we couldn’t be late returning to the train station.

It also dawned on us, as the rain fell even harder, that it would be miserable trying to eat a takeaway pizza out of a box out on a street corner in the rain. We really didn’t have anywhere to go.

So we reluctantly got out of line, and walked back to pick up our luggage and return to the train station. We bought the most uninspired sandwiches ever and got our soggy selves back on the train in defeat.

What should we have done differently at the Eat Pray Love pizzeria?

If I were to do it again, I would pull a number for table service and then immediately hop into the take-away line. Our big mistake was not waiting for both table service and take-away simultaneously since we had a time constraint. Some people report getting in for a table service lunch in just 45 minutes; others report waits of 3 hours or more. It seems to vary significantly from day to day.

One more, slightly unscrupulous tip: you could, upon arriving at the restaurant, befriend someone who’s picking up a takeaway pizza and see if they pulled a table service ticket that they won’t be using. It would have a more advanced number on it than the one you would pull. But I can’t guarantee how your comrades in line might react.

Regardless, that’s our tale for how NOT to visit the Eat Pray Love pizzeria, Pizzeria L’Antica da Michele. I suppose it gives us a reason to return to Naples someday.

Over to you – have you been? What was your wait time like? And most importantly… was the food worth it? Let us know in the comments below.