Page 33 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

FRESH BLOOD AND RED SAUCE
MELBOURNE IS CURRENTLY GOING THROUGH MAJOR PIZZA REFORM. ONE CHEF TAKING PIZZA OUTSIDE ITS REGULAR CONVENTIONS IS NICK STANTON OF LEONARDO’S PIZZA PALACE, WHOSE INSPIRATION COMES FROM AUSTRALIA, NEW YORK AND ITALY. AHEAD OF THE OPENING OF HIS SECOND PIZZA JOINT, LEO’S, ALEKSANDRA BLISZCZYK AND STANTON DISCUSSED DOUGH, OVENS AND DRINKING FOOD.
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Melbourne has been bogged in Neapolitan pizza dough for a while. Fermented
dough blistered into charcoal bubbles in a woodfired oven, topped with an undercoat of San Marzano tomato puree, pellets of fior di latte, and three big basil leaves. This pizza was invented in 1889 by Neapolitan chef Raffaele Esposito to honour queen Margherita with the colours of the Italian flag, and it’s the pizza that droves of Italian immigrants brought to Carlton, Melbourne’s little Italy, from after the Second World War onwards.
For years, we’ve been told this is the best pizza in the world. It is bloody good, but now a new generation of Italian restaurants is defying the Margherita laws laid down by the offcial pizza body, the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN). Fresh hands are grabbing the tipo 00 flour and pushing pizza beyond its origins with new vitality.
Melbourne’s Capitano, Takeaway Pizza, Wolf and Swill and Leonardo’s Pizza Palace,
to name a just few, are taking measures of inspiration from the city’s pizza forebearers and
throwing their own spanners
in the works in the forms of brussels sprouts, bone marrow, caviar and “Chinese bolognese”.
“There’s some great chefs out there grabbing the torch from the old-school guys and injecting a bit of fresh energy into the cuisine without destroying it,” says chef-owner Nick Stanton
of Leonardo’s Pizza Palace – responsible for topping pizzas with Chinese bolognese sauce, a handmedown from his now- closed hatted restaurant Ramblr made with beef, gochujang, shaoxing wine, black vinegar, master stock, ginger and garlic.
“Melbourne already has such a rich Italian community that’s been making amazing pizza for a really long time,” he acknowledges, but now “there’s a little bit of room” for careful, considered experimentation.
His part-restaurant part-party bar in Carlton is recalibrating Australia’s takeaway-shop style of pizza; taking cues from
pizza culture in New York; and adopting the Italian approach to great local ingredients.
Each hefty two-person pie is constructed with 420 grams of thin, lightly charred, crackly
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