You asked. SevenStreets delivered. When questioned on venues you’d like to see us review, you asked us to review Deli Mamma. So we did.

The portents were already good. Friendly service, good food, wood-burning oven and a superb tea-time deal. We’ve mused before on the difficulty of finding a simple, tasty and inexpensive place to eat in town, but Deli Mamma ticks all the boxes, we were told, and more.

So, armed with SevenStreets reader recommendations, we took ourselves down there after work one day to see what all the fuss was about.

The set-up of this take-away-cum-cafe on Newington is simple: a few tables and chairs and condiments with a large open space for the kitchen. As a result you can see pretty much everything that’s going on and chat with the proprietors while waiting for your food. Still peckish? Here’s some free olives to keep you going.

There’s more room upstairs and there’s internet during the day and takeaways by night. Stagger out of a boozer on a Friday or Saturday night and you can get yourself a pizza as late as 5AM too. And the deal, oh the tea-time deal. A fiver for a 10” home-made pizza and a beer.

And then, as if you needed any more reasons to have a look at Deli Mamma, there was Antonio, a garrulous and welcoming host originally of Portugese stock and having arrived in Liverpool via London, Peterborough and Middlebrough of all places.

What we could tell you Antonio. He speaks five languages, he also has a day job and runs the pizzeria while his wife is away. While we’re eating several other customers come in for food, or a drink.

One chap has his dinner in the oven waiting for him, and simply makes for the upper floor with a book. Deli Mamma seems like a home from home for them, and that’s exactly how it feels - as if we’ve popped around to see Antonio for tea.

We’ve never sampled a pizza baked in a wood-burning oven before and were a little unsure about it ay first. There’s certainly a smokey quality to the dough that lends a nuttiness to it, and the sauce is full of flavour. It seems vaguely ludicrous to review a pizza, but it was sufficiently different to flag up. Antonio has different kinds of meals planned for the future too, so if pizza ain’t your thing there’ll be something else.

Good as it is, the food seems almost incidental. We’re pleased to have found such an unpretentious, unfussy, inexpensive, welcoming and intimate place to go for tea in Liverpool.

And when you think about it, isn’t that exactly what you’re looking for most of the time when seeking a bite after work?

Deli Mamma
Newington (off Renshaw Street)
0151 709 7911