No, It Is Not a Wood Oven
Copper, gas, four hundred degrees. We would rather tell you than let you assume.
You are allowed not to care what heats the oven
Plenty of people eat here without ever wondering what the oven burns, and the pizza does not ask either. If fuel is not your question, skip to the address at the bottom of this page and come and eat.
This one is for the other kind of visitor: the person who has read wood-fired on a hundred menus and noticed that it does not appear on ours. That absence is deliberate, so here is the plain answer with its reason attached.
Copper on the outside, gas underneath
The oven is copper, it is fired by gas, and it works at 400 degrees. That is the entire specification, and it reads the same on every page of this site. A detail that changes depending on who is asking is not a detail, it is a sales line.
We have never called the pizza wood-fired and we are not going to start. What a menu says is a promise about the room you are sitting in, and ours has to survive a guest walking past the oven on the way to their table.
Naples wrote its rules around a fire, and around heat
The tradition is open about where it comes from. The European specification that registers Pizza Napoletana as a traditional speciality guaranteed describes baking in a wood-fired oven, and the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which certifies pizzerias to that style, publishes its own regulation at pizzanapoletana.org.
What those documents are really defending is a way of baking: a floor hot enough to set the base almost at once, and a dome hot enough to colour the rim before the middle dries out. Gas reaches that temperature and sits there through a whole evening without anyone stopping to feed a fire.
So the honest sentence has two halves. We bake in the Neapolitan way, in an oven that does not use the traditional fuel. Leaving off the second half would be the easy thing to do, and it is the thing every guest would eventually find out anyway.
What you can taste, and what nobody can promise you
The heat is visible before you taste anything. The dark blistering along the rim comes from a very hot oven and a very short time in it — temperature and timing, not a log.
What a wood fire adds on top of that is smoke, and how much of it reaches a pizza that spends barely more than a minute in the oven is argued over by people who cook for a living. We are not going to settle that argument on a web page. We will tell you what we run, and let the rim make the case.
Come and judge the rim
Filomena is at 1 Aristotelous in Larnaca, open Tuesday to Sunday from 18:00 to 22:00 and closed on Monday. The natural wine list changes, and every bottle on it has a page here if you like reading first. If you would rather see the oven doing its work, there are photographs on Instagram at @filomena.pizzeria.napoletana.
Questions about the fire
Q.Is Filomena's pizza wood-fired?
No. The oven is copper and fired by gas, and it runs at 400 degrees. The phrase wood-fired appears nowhere on this site because it would not be true.
Q.Does gas make it less Neapolitan?
The European specification for Pizza Napoletana describes a wood oven, so the fuel is not the traditional one. The biga, the 48 hours of fermentation, the San Marzano and the fior di latte are.
Q.How hot does the oven get?
Four hundred degrees. That is the only oven number we print, because it is the one we can read off our own oven rather than borrow from a specification.
Q.Why does the temperature matter more than the fuel?
Because a Neapolitan pizza is built around a very hot floor and a very short bake. Heat is what shapes the rim; the fuel is only how a kitchen gets to that heat.