Pizza is a BIG deal in our house. It’s our Friday night tradition – I knead big floury bases and cook thick tomato sauce to make huge margheritas with sweet, sweet cherry tomatoes and mozzarella – and R is a bit of a pizza connoisseur (it’s his favourite food and he can name and rate every pizza joint in central London).
So it’s quite a neat fit that I was invited to try out the pizza menu at Marylebone restaurant Getti yesterday. Our visit to Getti coincided with the Marylebone Summer Fayre and happily the rain held off as we cycled over. When we got there, the streets were rammed, kids with balloons and food stalls a plenty, and we picked a table outside the restaurant, hoping to soak up the sun and people watch – only predictably, minutes later the sky clouded over and we were shivering over our paper menus.
Since we were specifically there for the pizzas, we glossed over the pasta dishes and settled for two of the veggie options – I had a fiorentina (£11.95), R had a vegetariana (£10.95). I overheard the couple next to us order just one pizza to share between them, and it momentarily passed my mind that perhaps we’d over ordered – but oh well. Suffice to say that when they arrived, both pizzas certainly weren’t lacking in size.
The pizzas looked great – the bases thin, crispy and not too overdone. My spinach tasted fresh and earthy and wilted just so, and my knife was all poised to pierce a perfectly runny egg… but sadly it turned out to be dry. R’s vegetarian pizza was topped with mascarpone which added a creaminess you’d not normally get on a pizza, but he found it lacking in flavour and was disappointed not to have been offered chilli oil or sprinklings of black pepper. For dessert, R ordered apple strudel (tangy, spicy, with cinnamon and plump raisons) and I nibbled on the edges of a Sicilian pastry (cannolo) filled with rich ricotta cheese – a little too rich for me but between us, we still managed to polish it off.
After we were done, we took to the fayre . Molly Bakes (who I’d interviewed before for a cake feature) was there with GINORMOUS whoopie pies that looked like mini burgers stuffed with thick lashings of sweet buttercream filling and the prettiest cakes, while the Darling Bakery had dainty little cakes on glass stands too. And up the street, Toast had set up a mini stall outside its shop, lined with rows and rows of glass jars full of gorgeous-looking jam.
Despite the sun playing hide and seek for most of the afternoon, everyone stayed out – the jubilee may have been and gone, but the street party vibe certainly lives on (long live the summer, hey).
