Page 34 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

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TPRAODFEILTEALK
“If you do something good, you’re not a cowboy, you put a bit of passion into it and tick all the boxes of good ingredients, everyone should want to eat it.”
dough. Rather than using a traditional flame-powered oven, Stanton’s is electric but stone-based – the type of oven commonly seen in New York slice shops.
“I like all styles of pizza, I don’t have a favourite, but the thing is with the New York style is the crispness and dryness of the dough,” he says.
His sturdy pies are first topped with red sauce and a house cheese blend of Monterey Jack, mozzarella and provolone, before being smothered with toppings like fistfuls of fresh jalapeno wheels; or a weighty combination of sausage, bolognese, ‘nduja, pancetta, pepperoni, red onion, honey, thyme for his take on the classic Aussie meat lovers.
Leonardo’s kitchen team has worked to improve each element of the pizzas every week since opening at the end of 2018.
“You’ve got to have a love for the actual craft of making pizza,” he says. “Don’t just open a pizza shop because it’s a trend or you
want to make money. You’ve got to be obsessed with it because it’s something that has to keep getting nurtured.”
Using good ingredients is
the key he says. Rather than defaulting to “processed fucking ham and out-of-the-packet toppings”, Leonardo’s pepperoni is made from scratch and specially engineered by Gary’s Quality Meats so that each
disc curls into a cup when cooked – a throwback to the Australian pepperoni pizza dreams of his youth.
“Where I grew up in Tweed Heads, there was no Napolitana- style pizza. We had Eagle Boys, Domino’s and Pizza Hut and then your local takes on those styles,” says Stanton.
The Australian takeaway pizza, with its thick slices
of green capsicum, button mushrooms and strips of squishy luncheon ham, is not an evolution of the traditional Margherita. Instead, it spawned from the American chain styles, or, the middleman.
“We were brought up in this artificial world of pizza with packet everything, not fresh ingredients. Whereas those original guys in America [who started the major pizza chains] would’ve used good ingredients to begin with, but then they turned it into a franchise, and they had to find ways to cut costs,” he says.
Now he says the question of quality ingredients shouldn’t even be asked of chefs opening pizza restaurants.
When Stanton talks to foodservice, he’s a month away from opening his new by-the-slice pizza joint, Leo’s, in the former site of Ramblr in Prahran.
The pizzas will be directly influenced from the slices Stanton ate in New York on his most recent research trip. It’s “a slice version of what Leonardo’s is” but with a new slower 48- hour fermented dough that can handle being cooked, displayed, sliced, and cooked again to serve – the way New York slice is done. “I’m not reinventing
the wheel, but hopefully trying to bring something to the table that’s good for our city,” he says.
Melbourne’s few existing New York-style slice shops are mainly open late at night for takeaway, compared to New York itself where slices are eaten at any time of day. Shawcross on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, for example, doesn’t open until 5pm, “which
is a sign they probably sell to the footy crowd and people on their way home from smashing cocktails at the Black Pearl,” says Stanton.
Despite Leo’s 30-seat bar behind the slice counter, Stanton says “it would really be nice to feed people not ... just when they’re drunk”.
Melbourne has a hell of a lot of great pizza options, but with young chefs lovingly carrying it to new shores, Stanton is confident the pizza market will continue to grow.
“If you do something good, you’re not a cowboy, you put a bit of passion into it and tick all the boxes of good ingredients, everyone should want to eat it.”