Yardsale is a little place in Clapton, east London, serving up stone baked pizza with alternative toppings. And garlic bread with cheese and Marmite!
Hey man, I am usually all up for going out on the town after work and hitting up a new burger joint/ramen bar/pop-up fried chicken wing establishment! But sometimes you just want to go home on a Friday night and sit on the sofa with a takeaway.
Such is the mood I found myself in last week, especially because I had just come down with a cold that seemed to be doing the early winter rounds in London. So I toddled home with my tissues and Lemsip in hand (other cold releif medications are available) and thought about all of the delicious treats I could pick up on the way home.
It has been said before (by me) that I am a big fan of pizza. You only have to read my ode to Homeslice to realise that. So it was pretty much a given that I was going to choose Yardsale, a little place in Clapton, east London, serving up stone baked pizza with alternative toppings.
Yardsale opened in the summer of 2014, with Macaulay Culkin’s band performing at the pre-launch party, no shit! Other fun facts about them: they offer five pizzas that are a fixed part of the menu, and then two or three specials that change on a regular basis so there’s usually something different to try. All of the pizzas come in either 12 inch or 18 inch, and there are various dips and oils you can add to them to make them more exciting, as well as interesting side salads and garlic bread with cheese and Marmite!
We arrived about 9pm on a Friday night and the place was heaving, standing room only and the phone was ringing off the hook. A sure sign that we were on to a winner.
Full House (£11 – 12 inch/ £19.50 – 18 inch)
Kicking us off is Yardsale’s take on the classic, the Full House. This baby is topped with pepperoni, fennel sausage, spicy beef, peppers, olives and mushrooms, the kind of things that would make a teenage mutant turtle of any martial art persuasion smile. The first thing I noticed was the really good pizza base. All of the pizzas at Yardsale have really nice, soft bases that are really squishy and foldable with little chargrilled patches on them which gives them a bit of crunch and a lot more texture and flavour. Plus it goes to prove that they are all stone baked.
We have some pretty tasty toppings here. But the toppings are quite sporadically wapped on, something that makes the anal retentive in me wince a little… I would personally prefer them a bit more evenly spread. And maybe a bit more pepperoni too? If I am going all out to eat a meat feast on a Friday night then I want to know about it. Good flavours though, I did like it a lot.
This Chicks Pulled (£11 – 12 inch/ £17.50 – 18 inch)
One of the three special pizzas on offer that night was the quirkily named This Chicks Pulled, featuring spicy pulled chicken, barbecue sauce, slaw and mozzarella. Another good squishy base. The pulled chicken, which was covered in some kind of sauce, was soft and tasty. The slaw had a fairly strong taste of fennel which is not normally my favourite flavour but it was not overpowering and traditionally goes quite well with barbecue so it makes a lot of sense. If I had one little complaint it would be that the barbecue sauce was, in my opinion, a little bit too tomatoey and not barbecuey enough. But it’s not a deal breaker by any means. Overall, good. Yeah, I liked it.
Evil Maestro (£10 – 12 inch/£18 – 18 inch)
Lastly we picked another of Yardsale’s pizza specials, the Evil Maestro, with it’s spicy anchovies, whole black olives and caper berries (and a secret underground lair from which to plan it’s world domination, probably). To add a bit more excitement we also opted to have it on a gluten-free base. Brilliantly at Yardsale you can have any 12 inch pizza on a gluten-free base for just £2 extra. For this bit I asked my resident gluten-freeophile (and husband), Christopher, to help me judge it. And he only had good things to say, such as: “It’s great, you can’t even tell the difference. You wouldn’t know it was a gluten-free base until you tear it, and then it’s just a little bit tougher than your regular dough base” and,”Excellent, the best gluten free pizza I’ve ever had.” So I guess he liked it then.
As for the toppings, they were each good and salty in their own way, although they felt a little bit sparse. But then we did order a pizza covered with anchovies, olives AND capers, and much more of any of those would probably be a recipe for instant gout. Nevertheless I couldn’t help but find it a little bit bland and uninspiring. But I suppose next to the two pizzas above, it probably would seem that way.
Dips
Ever since Domino’s came to town they decreed that you’ve gotta have dips to go along with your pizza! Yardsale stock a range of five different dips and so we tried three of them. The Garlic & Herb (£1.50) was a standard creamy, garlicky, herby dip. Quite thick but that just means it clings to your pizza crust better. Yummy. The Hickory Smoked BBQ (£1.50) was probably the same sauce as they use on some of the pizzas, like the This Chicks Pulled above. Again, a touch too tomatoey for my liking, but otherwise serviceable. The Ribman Holy F**k Hot Sauce (£2) is not just a clever name. It IS f**king hot. You can pretty much taste the 1,000 scotch bonnet peppers in there as soon as you put it to your lips. We had it in the car and Christopher was starting to choke just from the emanating chilli fumes. I guess for a chilli fiend it would be your dream because you can never get chilli hot enough. However, for normal mere mortals out there, tread carefully.
Overall, I thought Yardsale was really great. It’s so nice to have a quality pizza place on your doorstep rather than having to trek all the way into town just to get hold of a decent slice. As I said, it was really busy when we went on a Friday night so it’s obviously really popular in the neighbourhood and you can see why. My only wish would be that they had a bigger venue so you could sit down and relax a bit more if the mood took you. And then just maybe you might bump into Macaulay Culkin one day. Or hopefully somebody less worrying.
Sorry Macaulay.
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