Pizza Pilgrims: almost perfect

Best Pizza in Soho. Go now, beat the queues

I knew from the moment I got to Dean Street something was wrong. But I couldn't put my finger on it. As I approached Pizza Pilgrims my sense of unease grew. I stopped and stared at the place - somewhere I had thought about so much during the day, longing for the clock to strike six while time crawled along. The place looked right - all shiny, green and new, with big windows that let you see their roaring pizza oven.

That's when it hit me. I could see in. Where was the queue? The braying mob of Instagrammers, bloggers and wannabe media types? I was here, where were my brethren? This is PIZZA PILGRIMS for god's sake. Heroes of the street food scene. With their first pizzeria. On DEAN STREET.

I probably shouldn't have shouted that in the middle of Dean Street, but I was disorientated. Luckily not so much I couldn't find the door.

I’ve always wanted to try their van, but I work in the wrong part of town. Whitecross does many wonderful foods, but Italian is not among them. So at 6.30 we arrived at their pokey little restaurant on Dean Street – right opposite the behemoth of Pizza Express.

We weren't exactly welcomed – there’s no queue so we were ushered inside and asked to sit opposite a sweltering wood-fired oven. There we sat awkwardly on stools and waited. It was a Hello! Magazine short of a GP’s waiting room. Some of us were offered drinks, others nothing.

But within five minutes we were told to go downstairs by a nurse. I mean waiter. So we stepped into the cool, tiled cellar. It’s twice the size you’d expect, somewhere between a wine cave and a new gastro pub loo. I was brought a pint of the only beer available (sadly just Moretti) and left to peruse the menu, printed on the ubiquitous landscape brown recycled paper. There’s quite a selection of pizzas. Nothing as complicated as the Crate Brewery menu, but equally as tempting. Short of listing everything (click here for the menu) they had a something for everyone (Margheritas, nduja, salami, truffle), as well as something for no one (here’s looking at you marinara). They also had what turned out to be the best damned panzanella I’ve ever tasted, the secret being seriously thick dough, so that the moisture from the tomato doesn't cause the bread to fall apart but become clumpy like over-cooked gnocchi. Now THAT’S a texture you want in a bread salad.

The panzanella, which we had assumed was a starter, arrived at the same time as the pizza. This was made doubly bonkers because Pizza Pilgrim suffers from small-table syndrome, an affliction that affects 9 in every 10 Soho restaurants. There was simply not enough room for two pizzas, a salad, four glasses and the condiments. Because the panzanella couldn't go cold, we ended up eating it after the pizzas. In such a carb fest though, it mattered less.

Best pizzas in Soho

My friend and I went for the artichoke, ricotta and smoked garlic oil and the truffle and portobello pizzas, splitting them between us. In their determinedly authentic style, the dough was soft so you could roll and fold and stuff it in your mouth with glee, and the toppings were delicious. I'm not really a fan of pizza bianco, because it often loses the sweetness a pizza needs, but the truffle really sang through on the mushroom pizza. Sadly, the other was less successful. The artichokes were a little dry, and probably could have done with being chopped a little smaller so they weren't like boulders on a flat landscape, and there wasn't a hint of smoke to the garlic oil. Smoke was, in fact, lacking in its entirety due to the fact that their pizza ovens are fuelled by gas. I'd rather see the traditional methods, in keeping with the rest of the restaurant. Smoke also does wonderful things to cheese and bread - they're missing a trick.

I've heard it said that bad pizza is still pizza (I assume it wasn't a marketing slogan). Anyone who's picked up a Tesco value pizza can testify that's not true. But it's true that at its worst, Pizza Pilgrims do the best pizzas in London. Not the best bases (that goes to Chris Bianco at Union Jacks), not the cheapest (that's Franco Manca) and not in the best place (that's Crate), but if you want a purist's pizza, there's no where else you can go.

So where people are going I don't know. Take advantage of the lack of queues, it probably won't last.

   

Crate: a piss up in a brewery!

Great beer, great pizzas, Crate place

Well if ZAGAT says it's the trendiest new bar this side of the sun then I had to go. Because their business model isn't built on the opinions of idiots and the ramblings of trolls. Oh wait.

Describe Crate with even a hint of cynicism and it sounds like your average person's hell: "Ya, it's a microbrewery bar on the canal,

in a gentrified industrial estate in Hackney". There were more fixie bikes chained to the railings than there were railings to chain fixie bikes to, along with baggy sleeveless t-shirts (why? Why, why, why?) and rimmed glasses so thick Clarke Kent would have felt out of place.

But I do Crate a disservice – not something they deserve. It's a beautiful spot along the canal, where the sun catches the water, there are boats moored (that people sit and drink on!) and the inside is decked out industriously and beautifully. Kind of like an art gallery, but a little more soulful. More importantly, with the exception of the moronic trendies drinking white wine at a brewery bar, the locals and staff were friendly, fun and evidently beer lovers. The place was packed for a Wednesday, and not only because Crate's beer is damned fine (especially the kegged IPA) but because their beer fridge is a joy – three kinds of Brooklyn, Racer 5, Flying Dog and Kernel all made appearances and show that the customers know and respect beer almost as much as the owners.

But I knew all that. I was here for the pizza, which I have on a lot of authority (rather than good authority), are amazing. As you can tell from my reviews of Pizza East (in the east) and Pizza East (in the north), I like mine simple, crispy and quick. So at first glance Crate's menu is the stuff of nightmares. They're loaded with toppings – one's that would make a napoli man cross his heart and jump into the nearest wood-fired oven. But the more I read, the more I started salivating. Whoever wrote this menu knows how to combine flavours. I will never, EVER be sold on the laksa chicken ones, but the spiced lamb, pine nuts and spinach was essentially a turkish pizza, and the sweet potato, Stilton and walnut looked ridiculous but tasted incredible.

But we plumped for the caramelised onion, feta, courgette and mozzarella pizza (how good does that sound?!). Crispy almost to a fault, it left us with charcoal coated hands, like we'd been feeling up Dick Van Dyke from Mary Poppins. It was sweet, then salty, then oh so cheesy. And it went dynamite with our IPAs, where a plainer margherita might have been overpowered. The dough, it has to be said, completely lacked texture other than crispy – and definitely needs a bit more handworking by the chefs . It's needs to be elastic and not so dry, so you get the doughiness and the crispiness – but the toppings were flawless. Pizza is a meal made for sharing, and perfect for eating outside, and eating it al fresco by the canal was exceptionally pleasant, well worth going right to the end of the overground line.

Beer should be drunk fresh – ideally straight from the machinery – and this is as close as you'll get. And Crate have done themselves proud with their pizzas too. They may not be the best pizzas in London, but this might the best place to eat one.

   

Franco Manca: doughn't knock it

Best pizzas? No. Worst wine? Hell yes.

Isn't hype a wonderful thing? Well, it depends what side of the line you're on. Franco Manca is on the right side, so much so the line is a dot. It serves the "best pizza in Britain" according to an over-enthusiastic Sunday paper, and the original branch manages to attract 50-people long queues on a blustery Thursday, despite being located in Brixton Market - which has all the ambience of an Ikea warehouse.

Franco Manca though, manages to feel like an Italian pizzeria on a cobble street in Naples and, despite the market having roof, even attempts an outside cafe-style row of seating. It's cramped and lively, and actually pleasantly rustic to sit so close to other diners – except for when one needs the loo and a whole row of people have to go toe to toe in the aisles so they can escape.

Luckily that only happened once, because no one was drinking. The house organic white was hands-down, or on my heart, or to my throat, the worst wine I have ever tasted. I have seen no evidence that organic wine is any better than the normal stuff, and on this evidence it's considerably worse. It tasted like drinking apple juice straight after brushing your teeth. The only thing that stopped me spitting it back out was my proximity to the impressionable child to my left.

Another flaw in making people sit so close together is that the pizzas are massive, and you sit there knocking elbows, felling oil bottles and spilling glasses (not an issue if you're drinking the white). Cruelly they don't slice the pizzas, so you spend the first minute, elbows out, doing chicken impressions opposite each other.

The first thing you notice once you start cutting, other than that your neighbour has very bony elbows, is that this is a very unusual pizza. It's soft and doughy like a naan bread. In fact it looks like one too. The sourdough has bubbled and blackened but not crispened, so you get the slight burnt bitterness of an Indian bread. Now, most people would say a non-crispy base on a pizza is a sign it's undercooked. But traditional pizza (from Naples) is meant to be soft and chewy. Believe me it works wonderfully - you can roll slices up into glorious wholesome bites, or tear bits off for others to try, or forcibly stuff the whole thing into your mouth and chew it with a disgustingly proud grin on your face. It's utterly brilliant, but I have to say you miss the variation in texture you get on a crispy Roman style base.

Sadly, the gluttony of the dough doesn't quite stretch to the toppings, and while they are all specially sourced and truly beautiful, there's just not enough of them. With such a thick dough there needs to be topping to match, piles of tomatoes and cheese. The ricotta on my old spot ham pizza was spread so thin it looked like a watery excess from the mozzarella. My friend's came without tomatoes at all (on purpose) but as a result was pretty hard going over about 12 inches. Still, she managed it somehow, as I did mine, in about 5 minutes.

And so, with the pizzas demolished, we were left with the wine. Due to its bitterness we'd eaten our pizzas before we'd even finished the first glass, and had to spend 10 torturous minutes downing the rest of the bottle while intermittently grimacing then smiling sheepishly at the queue of 50 hungry would-be diners. Luckily, hype and incredible prices mean they'll wait. My advice would be take into account the hype, and get there before 6.30.

So is Franco Manca worth the plaudits slapped on it? Not really. Is it worth the £7 you'll pay for a pizza. Hell yes.

   

PizzaEast: given a pizza my mind

Good pizzas, bad ideas.

When it comes to food I'm down with experimentation. For example, I like chips with mayo and ketchup, and there are few things that can't be improved by the addition of Worcestershire sauce.

But perfection is just that, and I don't care if you're Chris Bianco or Mr Domino - you keep your pizzas simple, just as the Italians intended. What I don't expect is someone to put a porchetta on it, sliced up and laid across the pizza like some kind of upper-class kebab meat.

 But that's what I ate at the new PizzaEast restaurant in Kentish Town. Maybe it was on purpose - maybe it was meant to be a bastardisation of the Turkish pizza, but surely - surely - someone during the taste testing would have turned to the chef and said: "I mean, it's ok. But don't you think it's a bit much? Aren't there better things we can do with a crap load of pork and supposedly the best pizza in London?"

The answer would have been that yes, yes there are. A thousand better things. This pizza smacks of being one person's brilliant idea and someone else's nightmare. Wrapping up a pizza in meat isn't always a bad idea - with salty, delicate proscuitto it's glorious. And that's on the menu and I'm sure it's very good.

The main problem was that the porchetta (see the pic) was everywhere, but was super dry, borderline tasteless and completely devoid of the mandatory stuffing - unless you count the rosemary, which smacks you around the face about halfway through each bite. It's not that they used too much, it was that it had no other flavours to compete with.

To be fair the pizzas themselves are very good. I had to eat some of the sauce on its own so the rosemary didn't bowl me over, and it's a well-made sauce, and the slow-proved sourdough is excellent - so crispy you get microcuts on the roof of your mouth that last for days. In a good way.

And their beer list, as with all trendy London chains, is pretty good. It stocks Camden Town Brewery beers, although not the Wheat beer, which should be a no-brainer to go with the pizza. However, the Pale Ale does a great job of cutting through the big, bold flavours - although it couldn't quite cut through the rosemary onslaught.

One look at the menu tells you PizzaEast's management know a lot about good sourcing and Italian ingredients - and our starters of creamy burrata and beautiful lamb meatballs in an arrabiata sauce proved that. It's just a shame that they have taken the ingredients and none of its values. If you're headed there you'll have to be the philosopher - when choosing a dish, less is more.

79 Highgate Road
Kentish Town
NW5

http://www.pizzaeastkentishtown.com/

   

Pizza East: topping the velvet

The recession must have been hard on Domino's. Not only did they get looted during London’s re-enactment of 28 Days Later, but gone are the days when students would spend £15 on a layering of bread, tomato and cheese. As a failing food critic, however, this is exactly what I found myself doing at Pizza East in Shoreditch.

Many may scoff at the idea of a gourmet pizza, but that is what Pizza East claims to provide . As a converted warehouse, its rustic decor echoes the strong and simple flavours that dominate the menu. At least I think it did, but the lighting was so poor we were partially guessing how the menu read.

I chose the wood roasted garlic and fennel mussels to start. They were delicious: the fennel adding a more interesting tang than the traditional white wine. My friend seemed less impressed with her fried artichokes; the batter was light and fluffy but it was poorly seasoned.

Shortly after refilling our wine tumblers (yes, tumblers) the waitress delivered our pizzas. My topping of salami, chilli and red onion was well thought through. Pepperoni often overpowers pizza, so separating the meat from the spicy flavours was inspired.

But it was the tomato sauce that set the pizzas apart. It was distinctive, rich and perfectly seasoned. The base was crisp and slightly sweet, complementing the heavier sauce. It was a pizza from a different world to chains like Pizza Express or Ask.

For pudding I ordered the intriguing salted chocolate caramel tart. While the salt surprised the palette and brought out the caramel it was too powerful, and always the last taste to leave my mouth. On top of this, the base was so tough I had to put my full weight behind my fork, prompting bemused looks from our neighbours. My companion’s delicious fruit crustata, despite looking like an apple-filled Yorkshire pudding, made me envious.

So having been delighted by the savoury sections of the meal the question is, can £75 be justifiable for a meal in a pizza restaurant? With Easyjet you could probably fly to Naples and have an authentic one for a similar price. It seems not many people are doing this, however, and Pizza East has just opened its second branch on Portobello Road.
Our meal was by no means flawless, but by giving the impression of offering something entirely new to the pizza chain cliche, Pizza East has a claim to making the best pizza in London.

• 56 Shoreditch High Street
  London
  E1 6JJ
• 020 7729 1888
• Pizzaeast.com
•