Lo Sciabecco, and the pizza we've never managed to replicate

There's a pizza, in a pizzeria in Imperia, that my family has been chasing for forty years without ever cracking it. It's made by Lo Sciabecco, five minutes from Oneglia. And behind that pizza there's a man with an even more improbable story.

It was opened by Salvatore Saiola. From Palermo, he came to Imperia in 1973 with pizza in his blood and an accent that never left him. On 14 April 1983, in Gardone Riviera, he entered a European pizza-makers' championship and beat more than a hundred and fifty competitors from across Europe: first prize, outright. The jury surrendered to something very simple: a Neapolitan of tomato, garlic and basil, that the papers of the day called "wonderfully fragrant". A Palermitan from Imperia, king of the continent's pizza-makers, and today hardly anyone in town knows it.

The part I love is that Saiola didn't even want to go: "I've got too much work in Imperia, too many pizzas to make, no time". Then he went, and he won. That kind of man.

Back then he made his pizzas at the Hobo's, down by the Marina. And the Hobo's, for us, was the place. Class parties, the swimming and water-polo team dinners, every celebration: they all ended up there. I went as a boy with my dad and my brother Francesco, and I always ordered the same thing: his pizza with spaghetti al pesto on top. Put like that it sounds like a gimmick; eating it, as a child, it was perfect. Then, year after year, Saiola opened Lo Sciabecco and we all moved along behind him. Because sometimes you don't follow a place, you follow the hands of the person inside it.

As an adult the ritual changed but it stayed. On Friday evenings I'd arrive from Turin, and before going up to my dad's (he lived in Via Gavi, he really could walk to Lo Sciabecco) I'd stop to pick up the pizzas. One was always the same: the eggplant one. And that one, in the family, never gave us peace.

Because the eggplant there isn't in slices: it's cut into little cubes, a funghetto, and fried, and it ends up on a sauce that has pesto in it (that much we worked out). The rest is a mystery we've carried for years. My dad sensed something round, something sweet; I always tasted milk, though I never had the courage to ask. We've remade it at home I don't know how many times: every time it comes out good, every time it's missing that something that makes it his and not ours.

Lo Sciabecco's eggplant pizza, cut a funghetto.

Maybe that's how it should be. Some recipes aren't made to be copied: they're made to take you back there.

At Lo Sciabecco, anyway, you don't go just for the pizza. You're a stone's throw from the sea and the fish is the serious kind; the Sicilian cannoli are the real ones, from a family that brought Sicily to Imperia without watering it down. And it's a big place, no hole in the wall. Yet in all these years I've never seen it empty. Book, and go in the evening.

Lo Sciabecco's fish, a stone's throw from the sea.

Me, whenever I'm back, I always drop in. Partly for the pizza. Partly, I admit, to try once more to figure out what on earth he puts in that eggplant.