????Han Ximin ????ximhan@126.com ????A FEW days a week Dimitri Albino wakes up around 5 a.m. and brings a cart to the Meilin Farm Produce Wholesale Market. The crowd stares as he haggles with farmers and inspects their products, with an eye for fresh vegetables and meat. ????“It wasn’t easy in the first two weeks when it was windy and rainy and I wasn’t familiar with the road to the market in Meilin. You have to get there early with your cart to purchase directly from farmers before 7 a.m., the time they already leave the market. In this way I am sure what I give the client is the best quality and at the same time I can control the cost,” said Albino. ????“In this way I am sure what I give the client is the best quality and at the same time I can control the cost.” ????All of Albnio’s efforts are for his new pizza shop, Ciao Pizza, located on Keyuan Road in Nanshan District, which opened March 6. The shop is about 30 square meters in size and attracted several groups of diners last Saturday evening. ????Albino, an IT research engineer who has lived in China for 10 years, came to Shenzhen to open a shop selling genuine Italian pizza. ????“Real Italian pizza must be handmade from the very beginning. We start early in the morning mixing the flour with the other ingredients all by ourselves, in order to be ready at lunch,” he said. “It is cooked directly on a stone plate in the oven, instead of a steel plate. It has no oil and is not sticky.” ????“In Italian real pizza, we never mix more than two ingredients as topping, to keep the original taste. If the client wants to add ingredients to taste more things, what we suggest is to make two half pizza with more ingredients, but not mix together, so the customers can try, experience different taste,” said Albino, who moved to Shenzhen for his wife’s job and for his 5-year-old daughter’s education. ????“I move back from Italy to Shenzhen most for the education of my daughter, because Chinese is the most spoken language in the world. In addition, China can offer more opportunities to do new things. A lot more can be done in China than in Italy,” said Albino. ????Finding quality food at reasonable prices is a problem for workers at Shenzhen Software Park, which opened in 2014. ????The restaurants there are expensive and often use low quality ingredients. So Ciao Pizza is focusing on its delivery service. ????“In Italy, pizza is made at bread shops where people buy for breakfast, midday break or lunch at school. We keep the shop as little as possible as we don’t know if people can accept our concept of food,” he said. ????Ciao Pizza has five employees. Delivering to office buildings during lunch time and nearby neighborhoods for dinner is the main business. They plan to launch a WeChat store in April. ????“The hardest part is to make employees understand we make pizza and pasta the real Italian way. American pizza isn’t the original pizza. It has rich ingredients but is unhealthy. Italian pizza is more natural, with less oil and fat,” said Albino. ????Albino hasn’t promoted the shop in order to keep business limited. ????“Before we receive an order of 20 pizzas an hour, we have to make sure we can guarantee the best quality products with the correct taste for each client,” said Albino. ????“In pricing, we try not to look what others do and we focus on the real cost for us to make the products. We try to offer the highest quality possible at the price that most can afford,” said Albino. ????Albino sometimes eats a bit of raw meat before making sausages, something the Chinese employees baulk at. ????“There is nothing to be scared of. I trust the meat. Taking sausages for the pizza or pasta for example, I am sure of the quality because I make it. I don’t need to trust a supplier that promises to give me fresh sausage because I make the sausage by myself and this allows me to avoid any use of chemicals. All our products are natural and fresh,” said Albino. ????Albino said mothers take their children to eat in his restaurant, showing they trust his ingredients. “I have total control of what I feed them, the highest quality I can provide and control,” said Albino. ????When Dimitri Albino came to China 10 years ago, the shop was just an idea in his mind. “It is the right timing as we are able to do it and also is the time we want to do it,” said Albino. Upper crust italian pizza lands in Shenzhen | 