Old Scuola restaurant - Rotterdam, Netherlands

‘Minimal’ and ‘industrial’ are two words that spring to mind when surveying the new production kitchen-cum-restaurant for Dutch pizza evangelists, Marco Zander and Daniel van der Stel, who began flexing their culinary muscles with a festival food truck five years ago.

On a mission to create the ultimate pizza, which recently involved a ‘fact-finding’ visit to Naples, they have been purveying pizza to the crowds ever since and the vaulting, double-height space is their first fixed location.

The monastic, light-filled interior is the work of Bastiaan Kalmeyer and Chantal Schoenmakers of Rotterdam’s Instability We Trust, who have chosen to leave the raw concrete shell largely ungilded, pragmatically separating the stainless steel kitchen and its two wood-fired ovens from tables with wrap-around polished terrazzo bars. With street front seating and expansive views over workings from the mezzanine, dining at Old Scuola may not be intimate but it definitely delivers a buzz.