Trip report from Manchester

We have just spent a couple of days in Manchester where we visited a couple of show rooms and our friends at Rudy's Neapolitan Pizza.

On the way there to make the first leg of the journey more bearable we stopped in Sheffield. We had a quick look on Google and http://napolicentro.co.uk/ seemed the obvious choice. Apart from the 300+ 5 star reviews on Google, sometimes you can just tell from the name if a pizzeria is promising. Well, you can mainly tell if it's "not promising", for instance you know that a pizzeria called "Pizza King" won't be typical Italian!

To cut a long story short, it was a cracker. Nice pizzas and combinations. Here below is a vegan pizza with pumpkin base, sun dried tomatoes, walnuts and rocket.

After an early night we then headed to Oldham to visit https://www.linda-lewis.co.uk/, who are the official Cuppone ovens distributors in the UK. Kyle showed us around and we were able to see the Giotto oven in action. Giotto was the first electric oven to have a rotating plate and the latest version is truly impressive. One can even fold it for transport and can fit through a door 90cm wide, this alone is truly amazing.

From there we quickly drove to Manchester were we had a meeting with Rudy's management to find out about their expansion plans and how we can help them find pizza chefs. Thankfully the meeting involved having lunch, and once again we made a "sacrifice" and had some delicious pizza. Of course we are a it biased but the pizzas were truly exceptional. Once again we tried a vegan one with Artichoke base, potatoes, mushrooms and red onions.

Finally on Tuesday morning we went to see Giovanni at Bianco - Pizza & Coffee. Giovanni has worked in technology when he was younger and now has made it his business to bring technology into pizzerias, making it easier to produce good quality pizza without having highly skilled labour. In a mere 9 square meter he has efficiently organised a kitchen that can produce 60-90 pizza an hour. King of the stage is an electric Morello oven with a rotating plate. But also the Pizzarella stretcher and the dough baller machine make a big contribution. We were fairly impressed with the Pizzarella stretcher, as anyone can use it and the results are pretty good. We can see it working in a café or busy (but unpretentious) pizzeria. The main problem with it is the £12k price tag!

All in all this was a fantastic trip, making important connections and talking about what we love the most. We think one could say we truly live our mission of "connecting the world, one pizza at the time!"