I’m not sure whether I had dinner in a bar that serves pizza or a pizzeria where you don’t have to eat and can just get a drink. The lines blur. The company that runs the Beagle, and two other sites in Manchester, also produces the pizza - Nell’s Pizza.
There’s good ethics here – an interest in the local and sustainable. So, the flour for the pizza dough is organic. The meat comes from the excellent Heaton Chapel butchers, Littlewoods. Unlike most British pizza, which is based on the Neapolitan style, Nell’s says its pizza is in the New York style. Now, I confess to not knowing what difference that might be and, having eaten there, still don’t know for sure. The difference I noted is the pizza is very thin – so thin that it doesn’t retain the heat and the last third of the pizza was effectively eaten cold. And there’s not a sign of crispness to the dough. Maybe that’s how New Yorkers like It but it’s not an improvement on how other places cook their pizza.
It’s a shortish pizza menu. Three pizzas use meat, the other eleven suitable for vegetarians or vegans. One takes you back to the interest in “local”, with their “cheese and onion pie” flavoured pizza. As they say, a Northern classic – my partner’s mother used to bake a lovely cheese and onion pie. There’s the sweetness of cooked onions and Lancashire cheese is used alongside mozzarella and parmesan. Roast garlic and chives provide a bit of an "edge” to it. More straightforward was the “Original Cheese” – tomato sauce, mozzarella and parmesan.
Flavours were fine. Texture wasn’t. No need to rush back.
