Saturday 7th October 2009
Restaurant: Pizza East, 56 Shoreditch High Street
Price per person: £30 exc service
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Currently Munching: Toast with Marmite and a hard boiled egg (best hangover cure)
I took my dad and my sister to this new pizza restaurant on the recommendation of my friend Nick. It is in the old Tea building on the corner of Bethnal Green road and Shoreditch High Street. Walking into the entrance you feel like you are entering an unpleasant car park in the centre of Hammersmith, all concrete walls and peeling paint. The stencilled walls state that ‘Pizza East’ does indeed lie behind these doors, so with a deep breath we enter…the inside décor is clearly where the money was spent. It is gorgeous, very rough and ready New York loft/warehouse style. The light fixtures are big and glamorous and makes for a lovely contrast to steel tables and chairs. There are red leather booths which link in to the rags to riches aesthetic, and large wooden tables where groups of people have all joined up to dine together, much like Wagamama’s do – this kind of informal eating arrangement is great and creates a very lively buzz of conversation and laughter in the darkened restaurant. In the middle a station is situated where hangs large prosciutto, Bresola and mortadella, with chefs slicing away platters of thin wafers of meat, an option for a cold antipasti starter; you can chose from three to eleven of the meats and cheeses and they are presented on a platter – not just for starters, this is a great idea too for a Sunday nibble session with the girls! The bar area sitting behind the reception area is another large wooden table, and here feels like a rustic Italian kitchen, a slightly more cosy and homey feel than the large restaurant which is fitting for the purpose and again adds to the gentle hum of comfortable conversations. They have Peroni on tap to my father’s delight; no cocktail menu is offered just a beer and wine list which is an error as I know one is available. Still water is brought to us when we ask for tap – as the water is all in the same glass bottles whether tap or mineral, we are not sure until we see the bill if we have been charged – of the two bottles ordered we were charged for that first one £1.50 – not the end of the world but poor when we specifically asked for tap water.
Garlic bread is ordered while we read the menu and delivered very quickly. The ciabatta base is dripping in hot garlic butter and is absolutely delicious. We decided to choose a few antipasti starters to share on the table, and then have our own mains which we are assured by our very friendly and knowledgeable waiter is the ‘done thing’. The starters take no more than ten minutes to arrive, and do come staggered which as we are sharing is not a problem. We have lightly fried calamari with a caper aioli, a little over cooked but the flavours are there. Squid is very tricky to not get rubbery, and unfortunately the calamari is tough. We have lamb meatballs in tomato sauce, which is delicious. The sauce is very rich and fresh and not too sweet. Finally we have the wood roasted mussels, with garlic and fennel aioli, which is by far the nicest of the dishes. There are at least fifteen mussels served with toasted bread, the rich wine and garlic sauce is perfection, and the cool aioli is full of flavour.
I opt for a carafe of the sangiovese ‘on tap’ for my main course, at a £10 cost. It is exactly how you would expect – weak, young and bitter. I do commend a restaurant offering value wines so that you do not isolate any clientele who may want wine with their meal but not be able to afford something more pricey, but I think that wine on tap is effectively the same as sticking a £10 box of wine on the table and squirting it into a glass – now when in life do we buy these boxes of supermarket wine…for New year’s parties when we don’t know any of the guests? As a joke? Never? In truth you can buy good tasting bottled wine now for a very low cost, therefore there is no need to drink wine from a tap and if there is no need to do so in your home, there is certainly no need to go to a restaurant and lower your standards as such!
For mains my dad takes the waiter’s recommendation of Salami, tomato, mozzarella, red onion and chilli flakes for his pizza topping. The base sauce was again spot on, the pizza size was big but not daunting, the cheese was plentiful and the base was crispy and rustic; all in all a fantastic pizza. My sister was not as happy with hers: she had the speck, mozzarella, tomato and rocket. The base had too much sauce on it, not enough cheese and far too much rocket thrown on top (it seems rocket is the noughties answer to the eighties over use of parsley). It was an average affair compared to the flavours of my dad’s pizza. No one was brave enough to try the duck sausage pizza! There comes a time in ever pizza restaurants life when the base of the pizza becomes less a part of the flavours of the dish and more a plate to serve a totally unrelated topping on – next visit I will take someone more adventurous to see if this is the case with the duck option! As I have a wheat allergy, I went for one on the ‘none pizza’ options, of which there were a good mix of hot and cold dishes. I went for the Middle White Porchetta with cannellini beans, kale and fennel apple sauce. It was a really good size portion, the flavours were rustic and fresh, and the meat was lean which was a nice surprise considering the cut, meaning that the quality of ingredients remained as high as on their pizza’s. A real delightful mix of flavours, and a dish I would love to enjoy again.
Totally stuffed we decided to share a bowl of ice cream for pudding. There was a choice of around seven flavours, which they change which was good to know – we were offered three scoops and opted for pistachio, honey and brown sugar crème fraiche. The pistachio was out of this world, the most amazing creamy flavour with a soft nutty tone – it was so good we ordered another bowl and I would go back to Pizza East and just eat the ice cream it was so amazing!
The service was great, atmosphere fantastic and value for money that you don’t often find in London. For a venue that has only been open for three weeks, I see great success in its future if it keeps the quality of its ingredients and service to the same standards it has opened with and I will be going back there again very soon.
