I know great pizza and this is seriously good pizza, can’t wait to try other items on menu. Well priced beer on tap clean crisp taste and the staff are cool calm and very effective, in fact they make it a pleasant experience
Will G.
Place rating: 5 Melbourne, Australia
I don’t care how salty it is. The pizza is excellent. You should get the bingo bango or the spinner if you’re not into meat. But don’t get the gluten free even if your intolerant. Tolerate it in this case.
Brad W.
Place rating: 4 Abbotsford, Melbourne, Australia
Rita, I’ve stared across at you for six months now from Dr Morse — wondering but never game enough to try… There’s some seriously decent pasta and pizza being served up out of here. I reckon they’ve got Ladro pipped. Bases are fresh and crisp, toppings light. Have tried 6 varieties. They’ve all been great. Pasta dishes aren’t your hearty Italian sized servings, but they’re enough. Wine list is pretty good by the glass. Staff are always friendly. Service is prompt but can lag a bit when there’s takeaways flying out the door. There’s a new bar across the road that’ll order you Rita’s in(behind the Taranto shoe shop), forget the name… The pizzas aren’t cheap but everything is consistently good quality here.
Pat C.
Place rating: 3 Zephyr Cove-Round Hill Village, NV
Great atmosphere. The gnocchi duck ragout was yummy. But limited list of wines by glass. And the worst part, the lack of personality of the wait staff. Way too blah.
Phoebe S.
Place rating: 4 Melbourne, Australia
Great pizzas in a lovely, rustic setting. I came here for a weeknight dinner and almost forgot it wasn’t the weekend — I like that kind of escapism. The only minus for me was that the pasta menu was tiny in comparison with the pizza menu, although that was only because I had a Big Bad Craving for pasta.
Tim F.
Place rating: 3 Collingwood, Melbourne, Australia
Went here wanting to love it. The menu, location, design, staff — everything — seemed to be saying it would be great. Sadly the pizza was a bit bland and our table started talking about places that have amazing pizza. Not a good sign. I’d give Rita’s another go for bfast, but the pizza is just better elsewhere, yeh.
Jess C.
Place rating: 4 Toowoomba, Australia
This is not a familiar end of town for me at all. Rita’s Cafeteria, despite being under Victoria Park station and near the busy intersection of Johnston and Hoddle, there’s a bit of an out of the way feel to this place. The shopfront is minimalist and unassuming — several of my dinner companions actually walked past it — and the cleanness of design carries on in the décor, with warm woods and crisp white walls. Upon recommendation I had the Cavolo Nero — this is a pizza with silverbeet, blue cheese, walnuts and — the genius stroke — red grapes. The crisp base itself is also noteworthy — they add polenta to their mix, giving it a distinctive yellowish colour and rougher texture. Admittedly the base was a little too crisp for my knife’s liking — a sharper tool would have made my attack on the pizza a little more graceful. I also had the radicchio, pear and pecorino salad — the bitterness of the radicchio is a welcome change to the peppery but comparatively smooth flavour of rocket usually used in this kind of salad. A nutella calzone ended the meal on a sweet note — we shared one between four people and everyone declared that any more than that would have been the death of them… but a sweet, chocolately happy death. The owners also run a couple of places down in Lorne, and I hear this is their first Melbourne venture. The fact that they are not in a main dining thoroughfare can go either way for them — to tap into a captive audience or to go unnoticed. I know I was certainly happy to realise that the bus that stops at the end of my street in St Kilda is the same bus that buzzes down Hoddle and thus past Rita’s Cafeteria, so I might be making it down to this end of town more often than usual.
