VEGAN TAKEAWAY PIZZA: Village Pizza, London - 9/7/2014 and Papa John's, Sheffield - 13/7/2014

When you are trying to eat vegan something that can be annoying is finding decent takeaway pizza. Takeaway pizza has always been a very important aspect of my life at the core of who I am, and I will not allow anything to change this.

Last week I was gross (great) and ate a lot of takeaway pizza. This is a post about that. The first pizza place I'll review will be London's VILLAGE PIZZA (the Old Kent Road branch). Village Pizza is one of London's premier vegan pizza suppliers, even doing pies with vegan cheese (the old classic Mozzarella-style Cheezly from what I can gather) and fake meat. We ordered two pizzas: one 16 inch (ridiculous) Pepe Peppers, consisting of Cheezly, fake pepperoni, jalapeños, sweetcorn and peppers, and one medium Spaniard - Cheezly, fake garlic sausage, black olives, fresh tomatoes and red onion. Here they are in all of their glory:

bby Spaniard

Pepe Peppers, total giant bastard

I wanna first of all give props to Village Pizza for thinking of vegans and making sure they too can get dope, artery blocking pizzas. It is important, in the interests of equal opportunities and so on, that this happens. The slightly bad news was that in both cases, the fake meat (the main draw other than the vegan cheese really) was sort of flavourless and not particularly nicely textured. I was not overly into it. The veg was all really tasty, though, and the pizza sauce was good in a pizza sauce way. However, the dough - special vegan dough also, but tbh I don't understand on any level why anyone is putting milk/eggs in pizza dough - was a little too soft for me, considering how thin it also was. Sad :(. The pizzas were also sort of cold when they arrived. In general, Village Pizza is not my favourite vegan pizza I have ever eaten, but their good intentions are admirable, and next time I'm in LDN I'm gonna be jonesing to try their Hickory BBQ 'za. 

A few days later, this time in Sheffield, we ordered more pizza because the World Cup was on. In a slightly excessive move, we ordered two Extra Extra Large pizzas (the Garden Party, which has the sort of standard list of veggie toppings, and the Hot Pepper Passion which was delicious and really fucking spicy due to chillies and jalapeños) and a small The Greek (more veggies, but slightly hotter due to added peperonata) because there was obviously not enough already. 

A downside to Papa John's is that they don't offer a vegan cheese option, but unlike their main competitor Domino's, Papa John's bases are 100% animal product-free (FYI, in general, their crust is very similar to Domino's - it's chunky and chewy and just really pleasingly bready but not too bready. For these reasons, I think it is really good). So, when the pizzas came, we just grated Cheezly over them, whacked them in the oven and took them out when they looked like this:

close-up of Hot Pepper Passion 'cause it looked dope/I couldn't get
decent photos of the others bc I was too eager to stuff pizza in every hole on my face

Though this might seem like a lot of effort to go to for a takeaway, it was actually pretty minimal and it ended up tasting gr8. Papa John's pizza sauce is on some classic New York pizza shit, and rly complimented both the dough and the veg. I can't praise the dough highly enough, and Cheezly, which featured again on this pizza, is always really good. 

Of the two vegan pizza takeaways, though it required a lil more effort, Papa John's definitely ended up being the better tasting option. Their pizzas made for a more satisfying slice (I would know, I think I ate about 10 and that is not an exaggeration), and there was some left over for dinner the next day. Dope as fuck. 

Village Pizza pizza rating: 6/10

Village Pizza

230 Old Kent Road, SE1 5UB

http://www.villagepizzauk.com

Papa John's pizza rating: 8/10

I'm not going to put an address because their are Papa John's branches everywhere

http://www.papajohns.co.uk