ravenbrk's Reviews

Chez Luciano Pizzarea on Moorea, French Polynesia

Besides being astounded by the sheer beauty of the island of Moorea, French Polynesia, your next biggest surprise will probably be how expensive everything is there – especially the food. You can easily expect to spend two or three times the amount of money for an equivalent meal in the United States. While many of the restaurants on the island will send a driver to pick you up for dinner, we were fortunate to be staying at the Moorea Pearl Resort, which has several restaurants within walking distance. While we tried several of the restaurants during our week-long stay on Moorea, our most memorable and our most affordable dining experience was found at Chez Luciano.

Chez Luciano was in a building with a couple of other businesses a five-minute walk from the Moorea Pearl Resort. The quaint pizzeria is decorated with a cat motif and the chef – who apparently speaks only French – frequently belts out a meow or cat squall for the amusement of customers as he makes their pizza in full view of those sitting at the counter. The menu provides both French and English descriptions, however, each pizza is made from scratch with fresh ingredients at the time of order and we found that our vegetarian pizza differed from the menu description slightly. (Warning: the olives are whole and do have pits!) Approximately $20 USD bought a very large pizza that was enough to feed the two of us for two meals with some left over. We found the pizza at Chez Luciano to be both filling and delicious, and since it was easily the most affordable food we found on the island, it was well worth a second trip. Our second visit at the end of our stay resulted in another vegetarian pizza that was still slightly different from the first and the menu. On our second visit we also found the seating area packed with Polynesian families, which really made the establishment stand out from the other restaurants we had seen with more expensive menus catering only to the tourists.

Reviewed on: June 19, 2007