“I saw a picture of myself before Elnecot opened the other day,” Dokes and Elnecot owner Michael Clay says as he brings over a bowl of steaming pasta, pizza flour all over his apron. He points to the greys now sprouting from his otherwise dark hair.
But the chef-proprietor, who owns the neighbourhood restaurant in Ancoats and now this smart pizzeria in Prestwich, really shouldn’t be losing any sleep or sprouting any more grey hairs over this latest project.
He has a Dokes Pizzeria already set up in the Society food hall tucked in by the Rochdale Canal ‘Lake’ (a bit of a grand title, given the size of it) off Barbirolli Square by Bridgewater Hall, where they’ve been knocking out pizza for just over a year, and clearly honing the craft.
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Their USP is their use of almost all British ingredients, from the flour via the cheese to the sausage. The flour is milled by Gilchester’s in Northumberland, and the cheese from Manchester’s The Crafty Cheese Man, who also works with the likes of Rudy’s and the 3 Hands Deli, sourcing the best British cheeses out there.
The tomatoes come from the Isle of Wight, they use rapeseed oil from Wharfe Valley near Leeds, and vegetables from Cinderwood’s market garden in Nantwich. Even the pasta - the pasta! - is made in Yorkshire. The food miles are in the hundreds rather than the hundreds of thousands, and it shows what can be achieved with a bit of lateral thinking.
And are the pizza’s any worse for not boasting single crop tomatoes from the foothills of Vesuvius? They are not. Sitting somewhere between a New York and a Neapolitan style, this is decent pizza, whichever way you slice it. Earlier this week, the MEN was invited to check out the opening, and was roundly impressed.
A plate of plump anchovies (a little toppy at £8), marinated in-house with that bright yellow rapeseed oil are superbly pickled. They’ll be doing a ‘croquette of the week’, and this opening week’s was pork and lamb shoulder (£6), the best bit of both animals, cooked low and slow, before being formed into a ball, breadcrumbed and deep fried. Three wasn’t enough. 33 wouldn’t be either.
The ‘Grandads’ pizza arrives (a pizza mid-range price of £11), not so-called for its appeal to octogenarians - it’s not been put in a blender - but because it’s adorned with fennel and leek sausage, specified by Dokes but made by Grandad’s Sausages, quite literally a 10 minute drive away in Whitefield. It’s also covered in stalks of blanched, verdant green broccoli, and shavings of sweet pecorino.
The pasta of the week is that Yorkshire rigatoni, with a ragu of slow-cooked lamb shoulder, anchovies and some dark purple olives stirred through at the end (£14). I don’t get much anchovy - stick another couple of tins in - but it’s pleasingly comforting, with the olives doing the heavy lifting in the depth of saltiness department, work that the little fish should have been doing, to be fair.
This, of course, is all pretty rich, so a salad of golden beetroot, endive, peach, almonds and creamy Chepyn blue cheese (£8) is probably the wrong thing to order. It’s delicious, but cut through the heft of this heartiness it does not. But I’ll reiterate, it’s delicious, so it gets a substantial pass for that.
A brownie for dessert (£6) is warm and served with salted caramel ice cream and some extraneous popcorn, but is excellent nonetheless, and somehow even the affogato has a British slant - the ice cream drowned with an espresso and a generous slug of Midnight Oil, a coffee liqueur made in Hackney by Climpson and Sons.
Keeping it local again, beers from Sureshot (the superb, but undeniably pricey Milson Pale, at £8) and Pomona Island are also celebrating the city's excellence in the booze department.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel proud to be British. Nigh on impossible, mostly. But this approach by Dokes is calm and measured, mentioned as a talking point rather than aggro and flag waving. They’re concerned with keeping things sustainable and close to home. In the case of the sausage, almost excessively so.
So no one’s saying tomatoes from the Isle of Wight are better than Italian San Marzano (those ones from Vesuvius). But they don’t have to be stuck on a plane to get here. And maybe there’s a lot to be said for that.
Dokes Pizzeria, 449A Bury New Rd, Prestwich, Manchester M25 1A. Dokes is now only operating in Prestwich.
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