Pizza less your thing than hyper-nerdish and sustainability-focussed tweezer food? Worry not – St James’s Fallow is your gal.
Or if you’re after the city’s most slap-up dining options, feast on our guide to the best restaurants in London.
What is it?
'International Pizza Consultant' Anthony Falco at work
Buried in the basement of Holborn’s urbane (and confusingly named) Hoxton hotel, Rondo La Cave is a slickly rustic natty wine bar and test kitchen, from which the brand – in a canny tweaking of the ‘pop-up’ restaurant model – plans to roll out food concepts to its global network.
Currently in residence is Four Corners – a Detroit-style pizza get-up, dishing up gargantuan deep-pan pies. It’s all the brainchild of one Anthony Falco: self-styled ‘Pizza Czar’, late of Roberta’s in New York and now an ‘International Pizza Consultant’ (a title which I, frankly, intend to bestow on myself the next time I sing the unprompted praises of places like Copenhagen‘s Baest or Seirinkan in Tokyo).
In terms of calorific extremity, ‘Detroit-style’ is only a place or two right of the Chicago deep dish in the broad pizza litany. Apocryphally, the Motor City’s trademark pies were cooked in square metal trays borrowed from automotive plants, giving them the distinctive geometric shape and the dispersal of toppings that runs right to the edge of the base, providing the crucial chewy, cheesy crust. So it goes here, though not before we’ve worked through a few of the fine snacks and starters. A tiny dish of piquant pickled anchovies were a delicate anomaly to what followed. Dense meatballs – swimming in a chilli-spiked marinara sauce – and a chicken parm special – that Northern amalgam of fried chicken escalope, more tomato sauce and melted cheese – less so. They were all excellent.
But the pies were a step up. It’s hard to evoke, in words, the heft of the pizzas at Four Corners. The dense, focaccia-style base means a ‘medium’ size could feed a small family – I daren’t imagine the consequences of attempting to finish a ‘large’ without a cohort of starving pals, though there’s no doubting the spectacle.
But we persevered: through a classic ‘Red Top’ slice; another dotted with concave, oil-filled discs of pepperoni; and a full slab laden with mortadella and buratta (and mozarella, and parmesan), sans tomato but made moist and cakey with pistachio pesto instead. A sliver of amaretto tiramisu down, and I’ve rarely felt so comatose, or sated.
Detroit pizza is a rare find in London, a city still utterly in thrall to Neapolitan and New York styles. It threatens to stay so: Four Corners, as is the remit at Rondo La Cave, is set to shut at the end of March (though it’ll be rolled out as a permanent fixture at the incoming Hoxton hotel in Barcelona). Best get a move on.
What should I order?
The cheese-crisped Detroit crust in all its glory
Well, we just went through this, but definitely start with the anchovies – swimming in decent oil and dotted with crispy capers.
A basic cheese and tomato pie is a canny litmus test for the elaborate pizzas on offer at Four Corners. The ‘Red Top‘ is a sort of inverted margherita with the sauce ladled on top of the cheese, and not remotely the worse for it.
Outré it might sound, but ‘vodka sauce’ is an Italian-American classic. Here, the ‘Vodka Meatball‘ sees it slathered on a pillowy base with (duh) meatballs, cheddar and basil oil, among other things. A perfect vehicle for the house garlic dip too.
Why should I go?
Pre-oven pies wait their turns
For a lesser-seen but textbook take on the more decadent reaches of the pizza pantheon – plus natural wine.