World champion pizzas on The Palm

Danilo Sangrigoli is the three-times World Pizza Champion. Courtesy Beach House

Dubai normally loves to have a world record to shout about, but last week saw a world record breaker come to The Palm, with relatively little fuss made.

Danilo Sangrigoli is the three-times World Pizza Champion, the only competitor to ever win both the acrobatic and baking sections of the Italian Pizza Championship, and the current Guinness World Record holder for speed pizza making, having made a whopping 540 pizzas in 103 minutes – that’s made the bases, topped, cooked and served. If 103 minutes sounds a strange figure, it’s because it’s normally a 120-minute time slot for the record attempt, but Sangrigoli ran out of dough after 103, having already comfortably smashed the existing record!

Last week, Sangrigoli was guest chef at the Beach House Restaurant at Anantara, The Palm, Dubai. The convivial Italian was wowing guests with his acrobatic displays of dough twirling and high velocity pizza creation – he even treated us to an explanation of the physics behind why his flashy routines actually make for a better pizza base, but you’re not interested in that, you care about the pizzas which, as you’d expect from the World Pizza Champion, were impressive.

Sangrigoli kindly served up a selection of his specialities, with the chicken curry pizza a surprising stand out – it sounded so wrong, but somehow the multicultural melange of the best of the best of India and Italy worked. The seafood too was far from your usual ‘handful of tuna and a token prawn’ affair. There was a veritable ocean’s worth of huge prawns, calamari, mussels and more and it was tough to know where to begin, and even tougher to finish it (we didn’t!)

If you’re disappointed you missed the opportunity to see Sangrigoli doing his tricks, don’t be too sad. There was a more serious side to his visit too – training the Beach House staff and making sure the pizzas they create are worthy of the ‘Danilo’s Pizzas’ branding, which they now carry. We can’t promise that the Beach House kitchen staff will now whip you up 540 pizzas in 103 minutes, but we can promise they’ve been taught their pizza-making skills by a man who can, not to mention the three-time World Pizza Champion, which should bode well for future visits by Dubai’s pizza lovers.