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About nine months ago, when this column was just a series of enthusiastic, half-formed suggestions on a very long email chain, I wondered if a potential future subject might be the question of whether, perhaps, London had reached peak pizza. There’s something almost adorable about the naivety of that, isn’t there? Rather than a peak and a precipitous drop, the intervening period has brought an ever-rising tide of newcomers including Ace and Carmela’s, Slayer and Vincenzo's, All Kaps, Connie’s and Crisp at The Marlborough; it has brought us new outposts of Alley Cats and Berberè and Napoli on the Road and Fatto a Mano and Gracey’s. Beyond that, London’s sprawling multiverse of pizza has stratified and fragmented to the point that the city now sustains distinct, highly niche subgenres including, but not limited to, pub pizza (Short Road, Slice Circle), wine girlie pizza (Weezie’s, Ria’s), and, somehow, Swedish pizza (Swede Stop).
Zoom out of the capital and it could just as well be one sprawling expanse of bubbling cheese and vodka-spiked San Marzano, bounded by an M25 of blackened Newhaven-style crust. To think pizza might ever approach some form of tipping point is to underestimate our apparently bottomless appetite for different expressions of this centuries-old culinary form. And yet, this explosion in pizza openings has run parallel with a detectable rise in pizza fatigue among the restaurant-obsessives in my orbit. Heads are scratched as grown adults wait hours for grandma-style squares, hot honey slices or pesto-drizzled tie-dye pies. “Honestly, I’m completely over the pizza thing,” said an acclaimed chef and recipe developer (who I won’t name) to me last week, with a weary, mildly pained sigh.
This is the somewhat contradictory atmosphere that Bar Etna – a steadily hyped Newington Green pizza spot from Four Legs chef Ed McIlroy and award-garlanded Philadelphian dough-whisperer Joe Beddia – emerged into the week before last. That it has already been drawing thick, rabidly excited crowds in its first fortnight (a half-price preview on May 6 reportedly had the febrile, pavement-clogging atmosphere of a Black Friday sale with added Negronis) shows that a new pizza joint can still prompt intrigue and excitement. But it is still worth asking the obvious questions. What exactly does Beddia and McIlroy’s transatlantic link-up bring to an already crowded table? And what does Bar Etna tell us about where London’s interlinked pizza scenes might be heading?
The first assumption to disabuse ourselves of is that Beddia – whose Philadelphia flagship Pizzeria Beddia is a Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded point of pilgrimage for American pie aficionados – is coming over to show the Brits how it’s done. “I want to be a good neighbour and add to the neighbourhood I’m in,” he says when we meet in Bar Etna’s slender, already buzzing, space. Also relevant: he, McIlroy and the rest of the founding team quickly realised that the different environment and availability of ingredients meant Etna would need to evolve into something distinct.
“The dough recipe is completely different – we couldn’t get the Utah American bread flour I normally use so it’s a mix of Shipton Mill and Wildfarmed, and I think I changed it eight or nine times,” he explains, nudging his glasses up his nose. “Getting that right seemed to take forever, was a bit brutal and [gave me] the most heightened imposter syndrome ever. It was like [the rest of the team] were sort of looking at me like, ‘Aren’t you meant to be the expert?’”
Ushered to a table, and handed a pointedly concise, four-pizza menu, I soon get a sense of what that long deliberation alongside McIlroy and Mike Stampler (a designer, craftsman and London-dwelling Philly native who introduced the two chefs and is the third, key player in Team Etna) has yielded. Tomato pie, an Italian-American nonnacore staple, brings springy, dramatically aerated focaccia, faintly brushed with a piquant, oregano-flecked sauce. The Number One with pepperoni expands the same broad flavour profile, plus a melted twin hit of mozzarella and Neal’s Yard coolea cheeses, across a crisply scorched, deeply flavoursome expanse of dough. The Etna Curry Pizza – a fittingly incendiary, spinach-laden riff on saag paneer – is both lethally hot and dangerously addictive. “I wanted that one to be properly spicy because I think maybe people here can take it a little bit more,” said Beddia, stopping by my table and looking mildly concerned as I desperately swigged water and blotted my forehead with napkins.
So will Bar Etna’s pies have people revising their personal London pizza power rankings? Almost certainly. Beddia and McIlroy’s direct, emphatically comforting slices and memorable, idiosyncratic supporting dishes – creamy, fat Spanish beans anointed with good olive oil and lemon zest; a towering pile-up of salad leaves slicked in a fish sauce and birds eye chilli-laced dressing; high-gloss, transcendentally creamy coffee soft serve that may legitimately be among the city’s best – make themselves part of the conversation. But the fact people tasting them will still inevitably ride for their particular favourites (I’m especially devoted to the profound, sweet savour of Vincenzo’s and the much-missed ASAP Pizza) shows how far both the floor and ceiling have been raised when it comes to London’s pizza standards.
What feels most radical and prescient about this place is not the food, so much as the aesthetic and the ambience. Inspired by a trip McIlroy and Stampler made to Milan, Bar Etna swerves the usual pizza parlour kitsch for a Northern Italian, mid-century fantasia of mirrored surfaces, wood panelling and clamped paper tablecloths. Cocktail shakers rattle behind the sweeping bar. Provocative vintage movie posters loom in the washrooms. The spritz-drinking crowd with double-decker pizza trays on their tables – bar a few rampaging north London pre-schoolers, on the edge of overtiredness – are generally well-dressed, interestingly tattooed and chicly grown-up. A rapidly fired circle of dough and toppings may possess hyper-palatability, childish appeal and the kind of perceived value that plays particularly well in economically strained times. But, as proven by spots like Weezie’s, Ria’s and even Brillo, the late-night listening bar guise of Hackney’s Forno, pizza’s next act feels like a pivot towards the decidedly adult-coded and glamorous.
“It’s affordable luxury, really,” said Beddia, at one point, not long before he slipped out through the evening’s growing crush. You can scratch your head about pizza’s continued popularity; you can speculate about precisely when the 72-hour fermented bubble might burst. Or, you can help yourself to a third slice, pour yourself another glass of wine, and give in to the pleasure principle of the foodstuff that London just can’t seem to quit.
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