Wood-fired pizza on Lower Main Road, and a dough room that sells what the kitchen uses.
See the dough roomThe dough is four things, and one of them is time. Type 00 milled in the Cape, water off the tap, sea salt, and about a gram of fresh yeast to twenty kilograms of flour — mixed at four in the afternoon, balled at seven, and then left cold in the room beside the oven for two full days before anybody touches it. Forty-eight hours is not a slogan. It is simply how long a dough with that little yeast in it takes to build any flavour at all, and it is also why a base off this floor sits lightly in a way a same-day dough never does. We mix more than the kitchen needs on purpose. What the pizzas do not use goes out over the counter in the dough room next door, together with the flour it was made from, the cheese that goes on top of it, and the two or three things you cannot buy in Cape Town without driving out to a wholesaler in Epping.
The oven is a Neapolitan barrel, 1.4 metres across the floor, built in firebrick over a sand form and clad in clay and river sand. Hennie Sauls laid it over eleven days in the winter of 2021, in the yard, in the rain, mostly on his own, and then came back for a year afterwards to look at the cracks he had told us to expect. It holds 480 °C on the floor and somewhere near 900 up in the dome, which cooks a base in about ninety seconds. We burn kameeldoring and rooikrans out of a yard past Malmesbury and nothing else — no pine, no pallets, no briquettes. The fire is lit at two and pushed to the back by four, and by then the floor has stopped taking heat and started giving it back. That is the whole trick, and it is not really a trick. — Marco Cupido, Peel
Wednesday to Sunday, 11h00 to 21h00. 34 Lower Main Road, Observatory. The oven is lit at two and the dough room opens at three — tell us your number, what you want held and when you are fetching it.
