Disco Volante. I was wracking my brains to remember where I’d come across the name before, but luckily Madame Mohr, the design studio behind this Austrian pizzeria, put me out of my misery. It was of course the name of Emilio Largo’s boat in the James Bond story Thunderball, and a futuristic Alfa Romeo car from the 1950s. As it turns out, Fleming’s novel isn’t relevant. From the Italian for “flying saucer”, Disco Volante could have several meanings here in Vienna: there’s the round shape of the pizza, the rotating wood fired oven and the giant disco glitterball that houses the oven itself. There are no evil megalomaniacs involved in the project as far as we know, but then again they do normally operate in secret.
Madame Mohr’s Lukas Galehr subtly incorporated the red and green of the Italian flag into his mainly white and black interior. During renovation, the former grocery store revealed itself to have another metre of ceiling height beyond the false one that was removed, and as a result the dining area is a spacious, canteen-like one – utilitarian and austere. Of course there is no getting around what is the centrepiece of the restaurant; wood fired ovens are the heart of Italian pizzerias, but you won’t see a less traditional example than this huge discoball. Once the dough is inside, the internal mechanism turns at one revolution per minute, ensuring the pizza is cooked evenly, and in some style. Hot stuff baby…
Photography © Lukas Schaller
