The US chef creating London’s best pizzas
Pamela Yung is the (accidental) new queen of pizza
It’s a chilly Sunday in late October, but the heat coming from the tiny kitchen at Flor, the acclaimed restaurant, wine bar and bakery in London’s Borough Market, is so intense that head chef Pamela Yung is teaming her apron and now-obligatory face mask with a pair of shorts. In the normal run of things there would be all kinds of dishes coming across the pass in front of her: razor clams with Meyer lemon and celeriac; burrata with persimmon, chicory and bee pollen; veal sweetbreads with plum sauce and kalibos cabbage. But this is not the normal run of things, and Flor, for the time being, is no longer Flor: it is Asap Pizza. And tonight the menu is all about one thing.
“It’s kind of funny that I ended up making pizza here,” US-born Yung tells Esquire over the phone on a quieter Tuesday, “because that was never necessarily on the cards.”
Of course, 2020 threw everyone’s cards high into the air (hopefully they’ll come down… soon?) though Yung was more prepared than most. In early March last year, she took a weekend trip to southern Italy — “I’m an ardent Sicily fan,” she says — but by the time she got back, quarantine rules had kicked in. Stuck at home for two weeks, with plenty of time to doomscroll the news and think about what impact the coming pandemic might have on her restaurant, Yung came up with a plan, which she relayed to Flor’s co-owner James Lowe, who also co-founded the Michelin-starred Lyle’s in Shoreditch.
“I was getting really worried, so I was like, ‘Hey James, I think maybe it’s a good idea if we simplify what we do, in case people get sick. Maybe we should turn our flatbreads into pizza, and do it to go?” remembers Yung, 39. Fast forward to June, and their pop-up takeaway pizza joint had quickly gained a rep for its delicious dough and superior flavour combinations, like the “Robi Dazzler”: robiola cheese, cime di rapa, kale, mangalitsa sausage; or the “Spice Grrl”: tomato and nduja sauce, honey, dried oregano and mozzarella (“James was responsible for the naming,” she’s quick to point out).
When it comes to pizza, Yung has considerable form. Before moving to London to run Flor she had been based in New York, where, she says there is “a deep love for it”, and she’d often throw pizza parties for friends; she also did a stint making pizza at Bonci in Rome. This despite the fact that, growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio,
preparing food wasn’t a particular focus for her family.
“We’re Chinese-American but I didn’t eat Chinese food at home. My mum had a microwave cookbook and she tried to make American food,” she says. “It wasn’t until I went to college that I tried some things for the first time — I had never had sushi, I didn’t even really eat strawberries growing up — and it was like, ‘Wow, there’s so much more out there!’ It was a revelation for me.”
Still, it wasn’t until she had completed a degree in graphic design and computer science and was working for a design firm in Detroit that Yung’s interest in baking started to take hold. “There was a very French bakery that I knew of and I asked them if I could come hang out for a bit in the kitchen. I would go a couple of times a week at 3am, work there until 8am, and then go to my normal job. I was curious and had a lot of energy and didn’t need to sleep back then. Well, I didn’t think I needed to sleep…”
Fast-forward through jobs in New York with Will “Prince of Pastry” Goldfarb and at Wylie Dufresne’s wd-50, and stages in Europe including at El Celler de Can Roca in Spain and In De Wulf in Belgium, to 2014 when Yung found herself back in New York and opening her own celebrated (and soon Michelin-starred) restaurant, Semilla, with her partner José Ramírez-Ruiz. But the strains of running it became too much.
“It took a toll on both of us, our relationship didn’t work out, and I ended up walking away from the restaurant. I didn’t really know what to do,” Yung says, “and because we had collaborated so well together, it felt hard to be by myself. So I just bought a one-way ticket to Peru.”
Fast-forward again through two years of travel through 15 or so different countries — observing everything from honey-harvesting in the Amazon to palm sugar production in Bali — and Yung, exhilarated but also exhausted, was ready to put down roots again. Enter James Lowe, and the offer of running Flor, which under Yung’s stewardship has been a bona fide hit. Still, Yung says, she was surprised to find herself “sort of missing making pizza”.
The queue of young, would-be diners waiting to try Asap Pizza’s offerings on this cold October night are no doubt grateful that she came back to it. Funny how things turn out.
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Asap Pizza, 1 Bedale Street, London SE1; asap.pizza