Why we stop at 100 pizzas a day.
Not a marketing rule. A dough that was mixed two days before you decided to come.
The number is a decision, and it does not bend.
On the home page it takes one line: max 100 pizzas a day, good is not a factory. Short versions always sound like a slogan, so here is the long one — because the cap costs us something, and once in a while it costs you an evening.
Nobody counts to a hundred and stops for effect. The number is what falls out of three ordinary things: one oven, one small room, and a dough that has to be made two days ahead. Change any of the three and more people could eat. Each change would also produce a different pizza.
So the honest phrasing is not that we choose to make only a hundred. It is closer to this: a hundred is what a place built this way can make properly, and we would rather run out than find out what the hundred-and-fortieth tastes like.
Saturday's dough was mixed on Thursday.
The dough starts as a biga and ferments for 48 hours at 77% hydration — 77 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. That fact appears in a few places on this site, always as a point about flavour. It has a second consequence that nobody mentions: it settles the quantity long before anyone sits down.
A dough made two days ahead cannot be topped up on the night. The moment Thursday's biga went into the tray, the number of pizzas available on Saturday was already fixed. There is no spare batch in the back, because a spare batch would have had to be started on Thursday as well.
The alternative is no secret: more yeast, a few hours, dough on demand all evening. It rises. It also eats differently, and it is exactly the shortcut this kitchen was built to refuse. The cap is what the 48 hours cost, paid in the only currency a kitchen has — how many people it can feed.
A copper oven takes one pizza at a time.
The oven is copper, fired by gas, and runs at 400 degrees. Pizzas go in one at a time and come out the same way. That is not an inefficiency waiting to be engineered away, it is what the form is: a Neapolitan pizza is something that happens alone, in a very hot oven, briefly.
Service runs from six to ten — four hours. A hundred pizzas spread evenly across them is twenty-five an hour, one every couple of minutes, without a gap, all evening. Evenings are not evenly spread, of course. They arrive in waves, which is why half past eight on a Saturday is a different proposition from six o'clock on a Tuesday.
And the room is small. We took the room next door, which helped, and it is still a small room. Behind every capacity number there is a floor plan doing the actual arguing.
Come early, and earlier still at the weekend.
The practical part is short. We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 18:00 to 22:00, closed on Monday, at 1 Aristotelous in Larnaca. Early in the evening is the safe time to arrive, and the gap between early and late is wider at the weekend than midweek.
When the day's pizzas are gone, they are gone, and somebody gets told no. We are not going to pretend that never happens — it is the visible cost of the rule and the only part of it a guest actually feels. What comes out of the oven usually turns up on Instagram, at @filomena.pizzeria.napoletana, which is the closest thing to a live view of the evening.
The wine is the part with no cap on it. The natural wine list rotates, so no page here will tell you which bottle is open tonight. Every bottle and every grape has a page of its own instead: read one before you come, or ask nothing at all and let it be poured.
Come early. Then judge the rule.
Filomena is at 1 Aristotelous, Larnaca. We are open Tuesday to Sunday, 18:00 to 22:00, and closed on Monday. The site is written in English, Italian and Greek, so read it in whichever one you think in. If you want to see what came out of the oven lately, it is on Instagram at @filomena.pizzeria.napoletana.
Questions about the hundred
Q.How many pizzas does Filomena make in a day?
Filomena makes a maximum of 100 pizzas a day. The cap comes from one copper oven, a small room in Larnaca, and a dough that is mixed 48 hours before it is baked.
Q.Why not simply make more?
Making more would mean a faster dough or a second oven. The 48-hour biga settles the quantity two days ahead, so the evening's number cannot be raised on the evening itself.
Q.What happens when you sell out?
When the day's hundred pizzas are gone, service stops for that night. It is the visible cost of the cap, and arriving early in the evening is the way around it.
Q.When is the best time to come to Filomena?
Early in the evening, and earlier still at the weekend. Filomena serves Tuesday to Sunday from 18:00 to 22:00, closed on Monday, at 1 Aristotelous in Larnaca.