My girls have TWO WEEKS OFF for half term, believe it or not, so the struggle to stop them sinking into teenage apathy is epic. Yesterday, as part of the good fight, we went off to Covent Garden to test out pizzeria Fire and Stone’s new children’s menu, designed with fellow parent blogger My Daddy Cooks.
We’d had a lovely day out once before with Fire and Stone, making pizza in their Spitalfields restaurant (before it opened to the public, fear not, you won’t have eaten our wonky offerings) so the girls were pretty enthusiastic. Fire and Stone also make the only pizza I like, as their crust is wafer thin and almost like a dainty salty cracker, and it’s piled high with the topping. I don’t really like bread or anything doughy, so most pizza for me is a purgatory of sawing my way through stodge. And I’ve eaten every salad on the Pizza Express menu 50 times. Fire and Stone, however, is refreshingly, sometimes even astonishingly different. For Christmas, for example, they are offering a pizza with sprouts on top. Seriously.
The girls are a little beyond children’s menus now, as they are nearly 16 and 14 (gulp) but I knew that Child One would quite like the doll-sized portions. In fact, they both loved the crayons and activity sheets thoughtfully put at our table, and soon we were all colouring in tomatoes and chefs’ hats very happily indeed.
I couldn’t quite remember what the best pizza was from our last trip, so I ordered the Cairo, which was generously loaded with peppers, onions, goats’ cheese and pine nuts. Child Two struck gold by ordering the New York, a delicious combination of mini roast potatoes and sour cream which sounds quite bizarre but which is, in fact, super-yummy. Child One went for the children’s menu mushroom pizza, which included a bold sprinkling of herbs which Child Two certainly wouldn’t have touched when she was younger, being seriously phobic about green things, but which added freshness and lots of taste.
The sad result of enjoying our pizza so much was that we had no room to try the puddings, even though I’d been eyeing up My Daddy Cooks’ chocolate-topped tiffin and icecream, which looks gorgeous. Child Two had a diabolo (grenadine and fizzy water) and Child One, who’d eaten least, just about found room for a hot chocolate.
The service was lovely and I think this is a children’s menu which will please kids and their parents – there’s enough healthy stuff to get a few vitamins down them, and enough taste to keep the little dears happy too. A great success. We rounded off the lunch with several hard hours of slog at the Covent Garden shops. Well, all that walking around is brilliant, teen-angst-banishing exercise.
