Holly O'Neill 

OFM Awards 2017: Best Cheap Eats – Yard Sale Pizza

Macaulay Culkin’s band played at the launch – and this pizza place more than lives up to the hype
  
  

The Yard Sale Pizza team
The Yard Sale Pizza team: ‘We didn’t want to be London’s best hipster pizza joint.’ Photograph: Alex Lake/The Observer

You should do what love. That was the thought haunting childhood friends Johnnie Tate and Nick Buckland as they bunked off work one hungover Monday in 2013. Neither particularly enjoyed their jobs – Tate was a picture editor, Buckland a graphic designer – so they spent the day driving round east London and dreaming big. They knew they wanted to have their own business, and Buckland in particular had always been interested in food, and they kept coming back to how much they loved pizza, how often they ate it, and their shared nostalgia for the childhood anticipation of pizza delivery. They’d make London’s best delivered pizza. “Massive 18-inch sharing-style pizzas was what we had our hearts set on,” says the 32-year-old Buckland.

They began to develop a business plan and research everything pizza. Tate’s university friend Dan Spinney soon joined as a co-founder. At that time, Tate and Buckland shared a house in Hackney, and Buckland’s father helped them build a pizza oven in their garden. By the summer of 2013, they were refining recipes and testing them at a supper club for friends and family.

In 2014, a few of the friends and family repaid the favour by helping them gut and convert an old chicken shop on Lower Clapton Road. Yard Sale Pizza launched in May 2014 with the UK debut of actor Macaulay Culkin’s band The Pizza Underground. (The group changed Velvet Underground songs to feature lyrics about pizza.) Spinney, 33, in charge of promotions, heard the band would be touring and used contacts from his full-time job in event programming to arrange the gig. It was more luck than a statement of intent, he says. “We didn’t want to be London’s best hipster pizza joint – but the band was coming over … We couldn’t turn down having Macaulay Culkin at the launch.” It was a smart move, winning column inches for a new business and, though a few eyes rolled at the Hackney-ness of it all, Yard Sale Pizza had the goods to sustain the hype.

“We spent a huge amount of time developing our pizza,” says Tate, 32. The dough is double-fermented for flavour and to give a nice bubble structure when cooked. They take the time to slow-cook their sauce and make their own ham. The mozzarella they use for the margherita pizza is imported twice a week from Italy; it’s fresh and milky with a silky texture and perfect on the simple pizzas. For the pizzas with more toppings, it tends to make everything a bit “sloshy” says Buckland – “On deliveries, it would end up everywhere” – so he chose a drier mozzarella to hold the toppings in place.

The tiny Clapton shop quickly gained a loyal following, for eat-in as well as the local deliveries made by bicycle. In 2016, a branch with more seating was opened in Finsbury Park, and earlier this year a still larger one in Walthamstow.

All three founders put their success down to attention to detail and being accessible – offering a good-quality product at a reasonable price. “Everyone knows that pizza has a high profit margin, but we don’t like to rinse it,” Spinney says. “You can look at big chains, and see for size and quality, they don’t offer value for money.” A 12-inch classic margherita at Yard Sale costs £7.50 (rising to £11 for pizzas with more toppings) while an 18-inch starts at £13.50 and will easily satisfy two people – probably three. Simple quality is applied to the rest of the menu: a snappy selection of beer and wine hovers around the £3.50 mark, with ice-cream sandwiches for dessert.

The award for Best Cheap Eats is, Tate says, “slightly overwhelming, but awesome”. Proof of happy customers and a supportive community. “We definitely want to keep going,” he adds. Another east London site looks likely for early 2018, then they may venture south of the river. “At the moment, we’re just thinking about London but you know … Never say never.”

Yard Sale Pizza, Clapton E5, Finsbury Park N4, Walthamstow E17; yardsalepizza.com

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