The photo was taken by Andrea Chu Takeoka at the Lazy Ox Canteen in LA’s Little Tokyo. Los Angeles Times restaurant critic S. Irene Virbila called it the best burger in town.

Could the great lyricist Johnny Mercer have had pizza in mind when he matched these lines about love’s uncertainties to a Hoagy Carmichael melody?  The fatalism in the song How Little We Know reflects my own doubts ever since I fell madly in love, almost nine hours ago, with the pizza at Pizza East, a two-day-old restaurant in the Tea Building (56 Shoreditch High Street, London – see map. Tel 020 7729 1888).

Lunching in a near empty venue where the staff outnumbered the customers by a ratio of perhaps 15-to-1, my Margherita pizza (£6) was the best I’ve ever had in London. It was more distinctive, stylistically, than the pizzas at all but one of London’s more accomplished pizzerias, Story Deli. Rather than merely emulate the Neapolitans, Australian chef Bernie Plaisted has looked to pizzerias in Sydney and Los Angeles for some crisp thinking. His pizza is crisp to the core, unlike its soft-centered counterparts in Naples, yet extremely light, airy and delicately chewy. Evidence suggests that the charred, blistered and bubbly cornicione (puffy outer rim) was inspired by the sourdough crust at Pizzeria Mozza in LA. It compresses exquisitely to the chew. The English difference entails dusting the dough with fine Maldon sea salt. It the pizza too salty? Maybe. Would I like them to use less salt? No. The Maldon almost becomes a flavour as much as a seasoning. I love it.

The mozzarella is Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP – the best that GBP can buy. Pizza East drains the cheese, as it must, only not excessively so. The scattered patches of cheese do melt and ooze some as the pizza bakes in the wood-and-gas-fired oven, but the transformation from solid state towards a liquid one does not turn the whole disk into one milky mess. Devotees of Franco Manca pizzeria at Brixton Market take notice: the surface geology of a Margherita requires molten masses of mozzarella floating alongside fresh basil atop a shallow pool of sweet roma tomatoes over a lunar-like landing. If the cheese is dry, chewy, stringy, tough or otherwise detached from those other elements the ensemble suffers. (I appreciate that Franca Manca’s Giuseppe Mascoli can not afford to use such an expensive cheese given his incredibly low prices. But it would be nice to have the option to pay a couple of pounds more for something better.)

My second pizza at today’s lunch was an extraordinary vongole variation (£12) topped with clams, oregano, cherry tomatoes, garlic, red chili flakes, butter and, most controversially, grated pecorino. This violation of the no-cheese-with-seafood mandate was immediately overshadowed by the defiance of not so much a rule as an unspoken trust assuring all, regardless of age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or economic standing, that every pizza topping be edible if not palatable. Pizza East baked the vongole pizza with the clams left in their shells and then served the it that way. I could understand their removing the clams from the shells after the pizza had been baked but couldn’t fathom their leaving this chore in my hands. This would only slow me down when speed was of the essence. From my experience eating clam pizzas at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut I’d learned that no pizza variety loses more of its appeal as it cools and dries. And that’s why leaving the clams in their shells is such a clever bit of total insanity. It keeps them warmer longer, in their broth. (Some entrepreneur, maybe a Dragons’ Den aspirant, should invent a pizza-sized clam shell to replace the thermo insulated pouches now used by pizzerias for home delivery.)

So why am I concerned that Pizza Love will burst my bubble? First, hands-on consultant Bryant Ng, who was chef de cuisine at LA’s Mozza and has overseen the development of the Pizza East pizzas, leaves after dinner service on Monday – day 4. Plaisted, a capable and serious chef who cares about the quality and compatibility of his ingredients, may be able to manage for awhile without Ng at his side. But will his brigade of freshly trained pizzaiolos be able to maintain the high standards as word spreads and this ground-level warehouse fills up with Shoreditch trendhounds? And can they avoid cornicione creep – the infringement of the bubbly crust towards the middle of the smallish pizzas?
These are open questions that even Nick Jones of the Soho House Group, the backer of this venture, may not be able answer. For now I must take comfort in Johnny Mercer’s wise words of resignation:

Maybe it’s just for a day
Love is as changeable as the weather
And after all, how little we know

Because thick hamburger patties don’t toughen much as they cook, grill cooks cannot apply the finger test to check for doneness as they can with steaks. Most err on the long side, which is why burger lovers from LA to London have grown accustomed to getting medium-rare when they order rare, medium when they order medium-rare and so on. 

The burger I was served at The Counter was that rarity, a rare that’s actually rare (see photo above). They know what rare is and, judging by the waitress’ question, they also know most of us are no longer so sure. I emailed The Counter to find out if the waitress was acting on her own and got this response from Mike Miklos, the Director of Education and Team Development: 

The server probably could have phrased her question better, but what she was trying to say was that “you’re really going to get a rare burger”…Many times our customers order a “medium” thinking it will have no pink, when it arrives they think it’s raw. Since everyone has their own perception of what “medium” or “rare” is we try not to even use those terms and [instead] describe the amount of redness.

I was back at Langer’s two weeks ago and its hot pastrami is still far and away the best, though maybe not for all the reasons Ephron cited. Hand-slicing may be a big part of Langer’s lore, as seen in the paintings of the late Al Langer on the back wall, but I no longer see it as a secret to its sandwich’s greatness. Mine was assembled with the machine-cut slices you see above and it was outstanding. There were no meat crumbs or scraps to be seen – only thick, moist, extra fatty, deep-pink slices of perfect pastrami steamed to the point of near collapse. The rye bread is no longer from the fabled Fred’s (now it is from Bea’s Bakery), yet it too is as good as ever. The interior is wonderfully chewy and its crust is actually a crust: You don’t tug on it with your teeth, as you must with most other ryes. You crush it with your teeth. The Langer’s pastrami is in fact a double-crusted sandwich with a wonderful play of contrasting textures. Beneath the noisy rye, the impossibly tender meat is itself encrusted in its cracked pepper and spice rub.

So apart from the great rye bread and the superbly fatty cut of brisket (probably the point cut or “deckel”) I can’t explain what makes Langer’s the best. I can’t even defend my insistence on applying mustard. If pastrami has a more complex set of flavors than nearly any other food and Langer’s has better flavors than every other pastrami, why camouflage it with a condiment?

Karen Dawn

Caffe Luxxe pulls some of LA’s best espresso shots and, situated amid the casual-chic shops of Santa Monica’s moneyed Montana Ave, it also pulls in a sizable share of holistic mommies and bohemian millionaires.  There were in fact no empty tables for my brother Roy, myself and our weekday afternoon coffees, so we were delighted when Karen Dawn, author of Thanking the Monkey: Rethinking the Way We Treat Animals (site here) invited us to sit down at hers. When I asked Karen for permission to take and post her photo she said yes, with one condition: I needed to make it clear that the cappuccino in her hand was made with soy milk.  The animal rights activist could imagine no worse a humiliation than to be mistaken for someone sneaking off to the local coffee bar for a cup two-thirds filled with steamed cow’s milk.