Muppets don’t staff the kitchen at Swedish Pizza, Templestowe

Swedish Pizza
131 James Street
Templestowe (Templestowe Village shops)
www.swedishpizza.com.au

In a radical departure for this blog, I now present to you yet another pizza review – but this time it’s one with a difference.

Scandi influences are everywhere in retail at the moment – just look at Country Road’s new look, or Kikki K (the whole store), and let’s not forget the IKEA behemoth that keeps on chugging along. But up until now, apart from meatballs with lingonberry jam at the aforementioned big box homewares retailer, I hadn’t eaten Swedish food, and certainly not Swedish pizza!

I knew how Swedish people cooked from watching this video – that’s Sidepork Pandemonium by the way, well worth a watch. But when my friend Sarah put me on to Swedish Pizza since she works in the area – “it’s Swedish pizza and the flavours are all weird but good”, the concept intrigued me.

I hadn’t been to Templestowe Village for ages and was amazed at how many restaurants and cafes were going on there, well supported by the locals too! Swedish Pizza was quiet on the Friday night we visited but doing good trade in takeaways.

It’s a takeaway joint but you can eat in like we did.

We ordered regular sized pizzas, as the family ones would feed the entire Scandinavian royal family and all its branches (I’m assuming they’re heavy eaters for the purpose of this analogy too). My choice was the Kebab SP pizza: kebab meat, paprika, champignon mushrooms, green pepper (spicy!) and bearnaise sauce (not a joke).

This is a regular sized pizza. You don’t want to know how big the family size ones were!

The kebab meat was fantastic and the garlicky bearnaise background was delicious. Green peppers turned out to be mild green chillies which woke you up every now and then. I’m surprised this flavour hasn’t caught on in takeaway pizza shops around Australia.

Each pizza order also comes with a complimentary cabbage salad which is very refreshing when you’re working your way through a fairly large order of kebab meat, gorgonzola and bearnaise sauce, I can tell you.

Here are some other things for scale – complimentary cabbage salad, takeaway menu, knife and fork… and giant Kebab pizza

Pleasingly, Mr B ordered my second choice without me even putting it out there for consideration (I love when that happens): the Gorgonzola pizza, which was marinated beef fillet, gorgonzola, paprika and bearnaise sauce.

The flavour of the gorgonzola was quite strong – and you can see in the action shot below (Mr B not deigning to pause for the purpose of photo taking as he was fungry) this was a cheesy cheesy pizza. I liked it, but since it was so strong in flavour I’d suggest not committing to this as your ONLY pizza flavour – try and get a few others on the table. Try and get the kebab pizza on the table!

I forgot to mention the bases – thin, and crispy at the edges but the amount of sauce on the pizzas meant that the slices were quite floppy – easy to roll them up and eat like a kebab though if that’s your bag…

Gorgonzola and steak on a pizza? Yes please.

To sum it up: now I know why people drive to Templestowe for this. Sometimes you just want something different from the usual. Plus, we only ordered the tip of the iceberg: there are 41 Swedish pizzas on the menu, and Swedish style kebabs, and salads. Our regular (huge!) pizzas were just $15 each and the place is licensed so we washed them down with a not very Swedish Corona each.

Go and check it out!

I did.

 

Two other blogs have reviewed Swedish pizza: The Food Booth which ordered pretty much the same pizza flavours as we did (I don’t read these reviews before I go, I swear!) and came to the same conclusions; and Two Bears and a Fork who ordered Mexicana and Margherita and thoroughly enjoyed both.

Smaklig måltid!