Fired outdoors, one table, and a very long proof.
Phil Yer Pot started as microgreens, grown in Belfast and sold to people who cooked with them. The cooking is the other half: sourdough pizza fired outdoors, at nights and at other people’s houses. Same project, one more leg under it.
Three days in the fridge before this happens
01Who is cookingPhil Yer Pot
Phil, and a dog with no job
Phil runs it. He builds software for a living, which is why the booking system works and the oven is on a timer, and he has been feeding people out of a garden for long enough that the dough is now genuinely good rather than merely homemade. He wrote about how the cooking and the code fit together on his other site.
Benny is a four-year-old cocker spaniel cross whose contribution is greeting people at the gate and getting underfoot at exactly the wrong moment. He is not food safe and he is not in the kitchen, but he is usually at the nights, and it would be dishonest to leave him out.
Nobody needs another restaurant. People do still want to stand in a garden and be handed something hot.
Phil
Benny. No job, full attendance
Phil. Cooks the food, wrote the booking form
02Why it runs this wayMethod
Small on purpose
A night is twelve to sixteen people at one table. That is not a soft launch, it is the size the thing is good at: pizzas coming out one at a time, cut on the table, eaten standing up. Take on more people than you have brought oven for and you get a queue and a lukewarm base, which is what most pizza catering is and precisely what this is not. Bigger numbers are a question of bringing more fire, and worth asking about.
The menu is six or seven toppings, set the week of, decided by what is actually good rather than by a laminated list. There is no plated service and no table service. You eat as it comes off the peel, in whatever order it comes.
03Where this goesPhil Yer Pot
Not on the menu yet. Next summer
The garden comes next
We grow, and it does not feed the menu yet. Next summer is when we want that to change, and we are writing down how it goes.
Right now the toppings come from farms and growers round here, whoever has the best of it that week. By next summer we want a good share of them coming from thirty feet away.
Phil, grower and the one at the oven