Phil Yer PotPhil Yer FaceBelfast
Phil Yer PotPhil Yer FaceBelfast
One moment
Phil Yer Pot is a Belfast food project. Phil Yer Face is the cooked half of it: sourdough pizza fired outdoors, at ticketed nights and at other people’s houses.
01Who is cookingPhil Yer Face
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.
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
02Why it runs this wayMethod
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
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 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