Restaurant

Gaby Soutar visits @Pizza, Edinburgh

Where? 4 Charlotte Lane, Edinburgh (www.atpizza.com)

This place got my hyperbole hackles up before I even visited – “Counter cultural, revolutionary, fuelling the community”, are just some of the terms they use on their social media and website. There’s also a video on their Facebook page featuring roller derby, parkour, a ballet dancer in the Scottish National Gallery, graffiti artist, and other down-with-the-kids stuff. It’s heavy duty marketing, innit.

Most of me was cynical, but there was also a blindly optimistic kernel that was intrigued. What could really be that different?

Well, their pizzas are oval, like pinsa, rather than the standard moon shape. There are two choices of base – ancient grains or sourdough. They pay their staff the Scottish Living Wage, for which they get a thumbs-up. Oh, and thanks to an oven that looked a bit like a hotel toast machine, they can cook it in 90 seconds, which makes for a speedy lunch option if you’re on the clock.

You queue, then move down the line as the plastic-gloved pizzaiolos roll out the dough and put the toppings on. You can design your own pizza, with a flat rate of £9.50 and a decent if slightly prosaic selection of toppings. Fine if you’re just ordering for yourself, complicated if you’re being Mother and have to shout across the monochrome space. “Do you want SOURDOUGH or ANCIENT GRAINS? I said AN-CIENT GRAINSSS.”

At the end is a soft drink dispenser, with bamboozling controls. It pumps out fizzy “craft soda” (£2.25 a cup), with unusual flavours including grapefruit and juniper, or apple and bramble. Wine (£5.50 for chardonnay) is served in a disposable glass with a lid, presumably so you can drink any dregs on the bus later.

When it came to the eats, we shared four pre-designed concoctions from the Indecisive list, £9.50 each. These all feature calorie counts, should you wish to depress yourself.

Our Eat Meat Repeat (1,095 calories), with the Friends-style strapline of “the one with the feast of meat” was probably the all-round favourite, with a decent contingent of spicy Italian sausage clods, pepperoni discs, a few plasters of Wiltshire ham, no discernible spicy beef meatballs or oregano, and Gran Moravia cheese gratings. Salty and burly, with a decent crispy sourdough base.

Although it was supposed to be sweet, we all found Boombastic (965 calories) a bit too cake-y, with a sugary barbecue sauce, a web of red onions, sweetcorn, strangely flourdusted and matte pineapple chunks and lumps of chicken. Someone else’s bag, but not ours.

The breakfast themed pizza, At Tiffany’s (1,080 calories), was better, with a slightly stringy runny-yolked egg on the top, a few pieces of fatty bacon, threads of spinach, and slices of sausage.

However, we were a little underwhelmed by the White Dog (755 calories, wooo, you’re on a diet), which was more like a bit of garlic bread with a thin blanket of mozzarella and ricotta on top. Also, the side of house slaw (£1.50, 190 calories), in a plastic tub, was way too heavy on the onion.

There isn’t any coffee or dessert, apart from if you can handle their one pudding pizza – Vanilla Sky, with chocolate sauce, mixed berries, icing sugar and sweet ricotta, which we certainly couldn’t. This place is good if you want your food fast so you can get on with your parkour, but counter cultural it ain’t.

Thus, we repaired to the lovely Cairngorm Coffee (1 Melville Street), drank flat whites (£2.70 each) – not ready in 90 seconds, but who cares – and ate cake. There was a tall Oreo brownie (£2.80) with smushedup biccies on the top, a slice of an almond orange loaf (£2.80) and some “tartberry tart” (£2.40), which was a bit like shortbread with raspberry jam and seeds on the top.

Lovely, and no calorie count, thank goodness, because, at this point, you could probably tap us like maple trees, and pure syrup would flow out.

Now that’s what I call fuelling the community.

The list features calorie counts, should you wish to depress yourself