#AD. The list of food bloggers who have opened their own restaurant is a short one. In Paris you have Bruno Verjus with his two Michelin stars and caviar on anything, whilst there was Mark Wiens whose obsession with one Thai dish led to the opening of Phed Mark. There was the guy who opened Hedone before realising that maybe he should delete the blog that slags off restaurants, bloggers, and diners in equal quantity. And that’s about it. We’re bloggers; we don’t open restaurants, we turn up, ruin everyone else’s meal and get the facts wrong afterwards. We can barely describe food, nethermind produce it. We deal in likes and shares, not physical customers who could hurt our fragile egos with real opinions. More importantly, opening a restaurant requires actual work that far exceeds a digital persona of sharing a fake life online. Sticking your brand name to a festival doesn’t cut it, in the same way that me proving I can cook by whacking a few sadsack bloggers with their sadsack cooking books in a sadsack cooking competition doesn’t cut it. Opening a restaurant takes bollocks. Massive bollocks that I don’t have.
The two blokes – Gerry and Paul, if you are familiar with them – from Bite Twice Food Reviews have opened a restaurant at the top of Upper Street in Islington. Carmela’s it’s called. I was sceptical in the same way that I’m sceptical of just about everything, though we went, greeted by a charming Italian man at the front, who walked us through the tardis of a restaurant to the back, got me a quite exceptional negroni, and look, it’s Paul at the back, or at least I think it’s Paul. I’ve never met him, and this has the potential to go in the same way when I met Barry or Paul Chuckle in The Victoria. He is tall, lithe, and more shredded than those fleeces suggest. More importantly he has the furrowed look of someone putting in a big shift with a hot oven in a busy restaurant.
Bite Twice started off reviewing pizzas all over the country before realising that Grimsby, a town still coming to terms with the invention of electricity, doesn’t have quite the same social media pull of nine million Londoners. They now almost exclusively review the capital, from the cheap eats to the fancier stuff. I’m waffling, but you get the idea: they should know pizza. The menu is appealingly short and we skip the starters and head straight to the main event, riffing off the small menu to create our own. Sophie adds olives and chilli to the Vodka, I take the Pep and add fennel sausage. Spoiler alert; it is extremely good.
The style is an ode to a certain kind of New York pizza, baked hard and fast with a crisp bottom and sturdy crust. Think Lombardi’s and Joe’s if you know the city, and if you don’t, just imagine your pizza is a little more stretched and is slimmer than usual. The tomato sauce on mine is deep and fruity, the vodka sauce on Sophie’s arguably better. The toppings are mostly superb (the black olives could be more premium, but the fennel sausage is the best example I have ever had on a pizza), but what amazes us both is how light the dough is given the almost biscuity nature of the cook. You don’t get overly full despite the size of it, don’t have the breadiness that makes it a chore to eat. We fly through ours, taking the crusts through a quite brilliant ranch with a surprising tarragon twist, to a chilli ricotta one that could take more heat. Sophie half jokes about getting another one for the train. I very nearly call her bluff.
I ask for the bill to be told there isn’t one. Ask to pay for the two cocktails and glass of wine as a minimum to be told no. In the end I leave all the notes I have as a tip, collect the bags, and leave, hence the hashtag AD thingy on the front. And I know that won’t make enjoyable Reading to some of you, but it’s the facts, so thanks, gents. The bill wouldn’t have been a lot, maybe thirty quid each, and I’ll gladly pay that in the future to eat here again, trebling up with the same run back to Angel station of here, Homeboys, then 69 Colebrook Row. For all of the new wave pizza joints in London, this is my favourite thus far, way more than others who have got national acclaim. Maybe the critics don’t want to admit that two bloggers with an iPhone can do it this well on the other side of the counter. Well they can and have. Fair fucking play to them.
9/10
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