Tag Archives: Pizza

Little Pizza Kitchen

There is nothing I like more than a simple menu, one that’s short, just a few items, a menu that has intent, a menu that clearly defines what a restaurant does. Too many times have I pored over too many dishes in the name a culinary base covering, too many times have I spent 15 minutes just trying to grasp all the options available to me. Choosing a meal should be easy, a simple task and not a hoop through which to jump to get your food. Little Pizza Kitchens menu is short, and shows the intent of a restaurant that know what it does well.

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TriBeCa Bar and Pizzeria

The Building that TriBeCa currently resides in, has a varied past, for several years it was Ziba, one of the first quality restaurants to begin the revival of the culinary scene in late 90’s Liverpool. After that restaurant’s closure and reincarnation as the Racquet Club, it was, for some time, Shere Khan indian restaurant, which never achieved anything better than mundane. So a year or so ago, the venue reopened as TriBeCa, named after the fashionable and upmarket district of New York City, it promises a cool friendly atmosphere and great pizza, a combination few can argue with. Pizza, this rustic Italian dish, is a tricky skill to master, influences from far beyond Apennine peninsula have shaped this ubiquitous meal into forms of varying quality. So the real questions here are, does TriBeCa do it justice? Is their pizza worth spending your money on? Continue reading →

My Tip for Perfect Pizza

My not quite perfect pizza

There are a lot of meals, when you make them at home, are never as good as in a restaurant/bakery/cafe. Pizza is one of them, no matter how hard you try, the pizza you make at home is never as good as your favourite italian restaurant. To be totally fair, it never will be, and perhaps giving up making your own pizza is the surest route to avoiding disappointment. However, a good approximation is possible, and despite it not being the same as a something plucked from a wood fired oven of a pizzeria, it’s still worth the effort. Continue reading →

Pizza Perfection

Originally a dish from southern Italy, the humble pizza has spread around the world. But why? And What do we expect from a pizza?

In Italy a pizza was a peasant food, meaning a basic pie with either dough or pastry1. One variety, a simple bread with tomatoes and cheese, designed to feed you modestly and cheaply, has become known today as ‘pizza’. Even this basic concept takes many forms, due to its greatest strength; there are no rules. Unlike other traditional dishes originating from Europe, there is no dogma, or sacred rules saying what should top a pizza or how the base should be made. Thus walking into a pizzeria you can never now what your going to get. Pizza can be an artificial, rubbery and processed disk from the frozen section of your local supermarket. On the other hand it can be considered the height of haut cuisine, with Maze in London famed for once offering a white truffle pizza for £100. Its this great variety that has allowed pizza to become so successful,

In Liverpool there are several restaurants offering pizza, in fact too many for this review, but I tried 6 of them to see what was on offering. If I’m in a restaurant I like my pizzas to have, what some may call, an Italian style. Thin bases with good quality ingredients, following a more traditional style.  However make a pizza too thin and the middle becomes soggy and difficult to eat, too thick and the dish becomes too big to finish. The worst curse of pizza is APC or anonymous pizza cheese, the tasteless rubbery substance that seems to act more as material for holding the pizza together, than a vehicle for flavour.  So as I wandered around Liverpool’s pizza restaurants I hoped to avoid APC and find a base to the appropriate thickness.

After eating a lot of pizza I came one certain conclusion, the best pizza in Liverpool is from Il Forno. To read the full article and see what I make of the other restaurants, including one place to avaoid click here.

Sid

1. Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery.