Wood-Fired Pizza the Latest in First Floor's Rise to the Top (Floor)
To get you in the mood for the ongoing voting in the 2014 Pizza Cup (The Sweet 16 was announced yesterday – vote here to send your favorite on to the next round), we've sent our minions out to patrol the streets for pizza. Here's a selection of what they've found:
Li Lee stands next to the brick stove, watching the glowing embers and sizzling ingredients inside. The massive oven allows him to serve wood-fired pizzas to his clientele at the First Floor bar and restaurant in Sanlitun, something that he has dreamed of doing ever since he was a customer of area bars himself.
“I first tried wood-fired pizza at The Tree, back around the time it first opened. I thought it was amazing – unlike anything I had ever tasted before,” Li says of the highly influential pioneering Sanlitun pizzeria, adding that he was addicted after munching on his very first slice.
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A few years passed and Li began working at the nearby First Floor and Second Floor bars, which were then most famous for their drink menus. But today, the venues have established themselves as popular eateries with savvy deals. And as their standing in Beijing’s food and beverage has scene risen, so too have their spin-off establishments – in recent months Li and his colleagues have been unveiling Third, Fourth and Fifth Floor venues in the same building, along with a terrace dining area where their roaring wood stove can clearly be seen.
Not long ago, customers only expected drinks at bars, Li says. But since that time, Beijing’s bar and restaurant scenes have blended into one. “Now, when people get off work, they want to have dinner, and once they finish, they want some drinks. "If your bar doesn’t have good food, it will be very hard to compete.”
Speaking of competition, it isn’t easy to maintain an edge in Beijing’s expat circles, especially when it comes to pizza. First Floor is attempting to make their mark in the crowded pizza scene using a combination of east and west: the authentic Italian wood-fired method to cook their Dumpling Pizza.
The Dumpling Pizza (actually more like a calzone) features tomato sauce and cheese pizza lovers have come to expect, but all folded into a crust with Chinese-style beef dumplings (jiaozi).
That combination may seem bizarre to some, but Jingjing Wu – the manager for the Second Floor of this towering establishment – points out that other Beijing restaurants have had success with such east-west combos, such as Xinjiang lamb kebab and Kungpao Chicken pizzas.
“A lot of foreigners come here and say ‘wow!' when they see our dumpling pizza,” she says. “And Chinese customers are curious about it too, because jiaozi is something that they grew up with.”
And while dumplings wrapped into a pizza crust may seem like a curious culture clash to traditionalists, Li says that it also reveals a key similarity between East and West: “Pizza is familiar for foreigners, dumplings are familiar for Chinese, so it has something new and something old for whoever tries it.
“Also, wood-fired pizza may be a new thing for Chinese people, but a lot of them have always loved that smoky smell, the smell of roast duck and things like that. We all love that smell.”
Images: First Floor
