Alce Nero Berbere

Excellent pizza! We had a really amazing white pizza with cheese, zucchini, almonds, and balsamic. It was awesome — sweet, tangy, crunchy. Also, the crust was awesome — it was a special one for the day and it was just really good. We had some greens as an appetizer and they were awesome. Really great place!

Feels just like Brooklyn — but in a totally good way! The menu has all the feel good shit, and the layout is fun and clear just like the design graduates make. The shop is half high-​end grocery and the rear is a simple, great quality restaurant. The pizza has like 10 kinds of flour and they are aware of all the bad shit bad flour does to you… so they are all about that. This was the only Neapolitan-​style I had there but it was great and had no stomach issues after.
I would definitely recommend this casual place, but I couldn’t feel comfortable telling you to go if you had any less than 4 meals in Bologna. I would say it is a solid 10^th meal — or if you are a local, a weekly.

After many times I visited Bologna I wanted to experience new restaurants, so I picked up this one. The waiters were very nice and immediately talked to us to find a good spot in the restaurant.
The food quality is great, all the ingredients are natural and very healthy. They don’t have many options in the menu but the ones we tried were delicious.
I would recommend to make a reservation because it’s pretty crowded.

Really nice place for a pizza or pasta. Super friendly staff and fast. The option of the tasting menu for pizzas is perfect. When you’re there with a group and you want to share the pizzas, the staff brings them one by one, from ‘light’ to heavy. So when you finish one the next hot one arrives and you’re never eating a cold pizza:) The house wine is also good value.

Good pizza, a little expensive and service is so so. Salad is just bitter lettuce so avoid that. I would come back and I am a picky American.

Bologna has three names in Italian, one being La Grossa — the fat.
At Alce Nero-​Berbere, the restaurant + shop focuses on light pizza and food. Totally not grossa!
I would not have found this place if not for my Italian friend B, who lives in Bologna.
We met for dinner and she chose this restaurant/​food place.
We ate a seasonal vegetarian pizza on their natural «mother dough» crust and also a main dish (we shared) which was grilled octopus on mashed potatoes. The pizza was really flavorful and the crust crisp. The combination of octopus and mashed potatoes made my brow knit. Was this duo going to work? Yes, it tasted terrific. The firm texture of the grilled octopus and the soft creamy texture of the mashed potatoes paired really well.
Overall, the food was wonderfully fresh and the natural ingredients had such a true flavor. The chefs cook to bring out the essence of the product and don’t try to mask each ingredient in any way.
Is this a change in Bologna? Yes, sort of.
According to the restaurant:
«The cuisine of Alce Nero — Berberè enhances the taste of ingredients, respecting them and ‘transforming’ them as necessary to not alter the original taste. The choice of organic seasonal ingredients favors healthy and balanced eating.
Dishes are based on meat and fish, but always accompanied by an extensive vegetarian offering, in a constant search for innovative combinations of vegetables and fruits.
The menu also captures the best of the world of cereals, from rices to various traditional grains, like spelt and Senatore Cappelli durum wheat.
No chemical yeasts are used for our pizzas, but rather mother dough, obtained from the natural fermentation of flour using fruit sugar (apple and pomegranate), for 24 hours in a constant temperature between 20 and 24 degrees.
The dough is light, guaranteeing maximum digestibility. Flours with different nutritional values — like rye, spelt, and kamut — are selected and mixed together to allow for a balanced nutritional intake, and stone-​ground to preserve their rich fiber content.
The ingredients are always creative and seasonal, with a very basic treatment of the primary materials to avoid altering their flavor.»
This bio-​focused restaurant is the new culinary culture of Bologna. Having sampled the food at Alce Nero-​Berbere, the future of food here looks very promising.