Pizza East

We were in the area coming from the Experimental Food Society Spectacular so decided to tick off one of my to-do list restaurants. Pizza East has been on my list for over a year! so I’d forgotten the reason that I wanted to go there – heh heh. I think I remember being attracted by the promise of American style pizza maybe? Or the fact it was located in Shoreditch – whatever the reasons here we were for Saturday lunch.

The space inside is vast, but somehow there were still people waiting for a table when we left. It was lucky we’d arrived relatively early for lunch so we were pretty much sat straight down.

There is a lot more to the Pizza East menu than pizza though that was what we had come for. But first, we enjoyed some starters – a gorgeous Fig, Honeycomb and Ricotta Bruschetta and a fairly average Calamari. The calamari was small in portion (£7.50!) but the Bruschetta was worth every penny. I would have happily ordered another!

Moving on to our pizzas – Pat had a Ground beef, scarmorza, dried tomatoes (Pat was tempted by the fact the scarmoza was smoked) while I opted for a San Daniele, tomato, ricotta, pesto, ruby chard (my choice was purely for the pesto!) Our pizzas, when they arrived, were attractive enough for our neighbours to ask us what they were!

Sadly the pizzas looked better than they tasted. Well, Pat’s pizza was pretty good, but I should have known that, my love of pesto notwithstanding, the prosciutto on my pizza was going to ruin it for me. If it had been cooked in the oven along with the rest of the pizza that might have been a different story because then it would have become like a toasted bacon – but after a while of eating the pizza lack of strong flavour was too much and I couldn’t finish the pizza. PS both pizzas had way too much of a base versus ingredient ratio to my liking.

Because the menu has lots of stuff beyond the pizza I would probably consider coming again. Its not too bad for value and the service was efficient and friendly. Good vibe as well because of the open space though I could see that it had potential for getting too loud for my liking.

Experimental Food Society Spectacular

There are all sorts of random events being held revolving around food recently. The last one we went to was the Bompas and Parr: The Complete History of Food which was truly interesting. Today it was the inaugural Experimental Food Society Spectacular.

The Experimental Food Society was started at the beginning of this year as a front for showcasing gourmet artists interested in more than just swallowing food. Bombas and Parr are members of this group.

It was crazy crazy busy when we turned up and you could hardly move for all the people inside. If it wasn’t for the fact I was keen to see what kind of genius creations people could come up with I would have bypassed the event altogether. Here are some pics of the things I saw today:

lovetocake’s Gorilla cake

Sharon Baker’s Body and Breast bread casts

Carl Warner working on his Lobster Landscape

Chocolate from Paul Wayne Gregory was just plain gorgeous. They were giving out sample lollipops which I nearly got stampeded over from girls trying to get their grubby mitts on them. This was one part of the event that I really hated – all these pushy people who didn’t care who they were pushing around.

This suckling pig look pretty rested …

Some sugar and butter sculptures

Oh, and look who we came across. Sam Bompas.

And some of their creations (in ethanol) in conjunction with the Robin Collective.

You got to play this ring toss “game” and then you’d get to sample some ethanol jelly … think it was nicer in concept than in taste. Very strong!

You’ve probably seen this guy’s work in an email forward somewhere. Takashi Itoh. Pretty brilliant carvings in watermelon.

Malcolm West’s Paul O’Grady in Jelly Bellies.

And finally, some live art. This dude started painting random people in the audience in chocolate. A brown guy in white chocolate, and a white gal in brown chocolate. Really funny.

PS Don’t you just love the pictures in the background!

We didn’t cough up the £75 for the banquet (which was basically grabbing whatever you could and eating it) afterwards but I’m sure it would have been interesting dining on the food that we’d all been looking at all day. I mean, imagine hacking at Sharon Baker’s Body of Bread. Ha!