This review took place in May 2016 and is based on a visit to the restaurant without the restaurant's knowledge. For more on BK's review policy, click here.

A collaboration between French restaurateur Frederic Meyer (Issaya Siamese Club and Namsaah) and Italian chef Luca Apino (La Bottega di Luca), this is a pizza restaurant with a difference: the menu makes the occasional reference to the French coastal city of Marseille on top of its classic Italian fare.

The dining room at this Ruamrudee location (the restaurant started life as a pizza truck) is also a faux-French mix of show fireplaces, baby-blue walls, and parquet floors that makes for an unusual setting to sit and eat simple wood-fired dishes. Apino has imported two massive pizza ovens from Italy—and a chef, Flavio Argenio, whose past experience working in Marseille makes him an ideal fit for this “Italy with a touch of Provence” concept.

There are only two places in town with these fancy, imported pizza ovens—Peppina and Pizza Massilia—making comparisons inevitable. Versus Peppina’s billowing crusts and charred bases, the pies at Massilia (starting B250) are a refined affair but no less tasty. While there’s a certain pleasure to the restaurant’s most creative offerings—think pizza topped with rich sea urchin doused in salty-sweet yellow tomato sauce (B690)—we still find the simpler numbers the most satisfying. The piquant Italian tomatoes and delicate dough (Argenio mixes it with Minere mineral water, keeps his flour air-conditioned and uses only natural yeast) come through most strongly in varieties like the Buffalina (B490), on which distractions are limited to a creamy Salerno buffalo mozzarella, basil and extra virgin olive oil.

Stray from the pizzas however and it’s hard to detect the same level of love in Massilia’s other starters and mains. A rendition of tomates farcies (tomatoes stuffed with sausage on a bed of couscous, B490) is a rather  flavorless affair, as is their unremarkable lasagne alla Bolognese (B390).

But these wrong steps are of little consequence: Massilia’s pizzas are good enough to justify a visit on their own. Finish the meal with a charmingly kitsch citron givre (lemon sorbet and pistachio crumble served up in a hollowed-out lemon, B290), knock back glasses of Peroni (B180) or a bottle of the 2013 Monferrato DOC Barbera Nebbiolo Merlot (B1,700), and you’re guaranteed a satisfying meal.