Deep fried lasagne; three words seemingly enough to prize teenagers from a slack-jawed mid-Christmas holidays Playstation marathon or a thumb-cramp inducing session on TikTok.
It shouldn’t work, of course. Other meddlings with lasagne have rarely gone well. Cast your mind back to 2010, when Tesco decided to unveil its lasagne sandwich. Or lasandwich, if you will.
“There is no such thing as bad publicity,” or so they say, a phrase attributed to the horrific P.T. Barnum, and perhaps one of the most nonsensical ever coined. Ask Tesco all about that, with reference to the lasandwich debacle.
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The media pounced on it, and gave it the mauling it so richly deserved. A fridge-cold supermarket sandwich layered with cold pasta and cold meat sauce slapped between two cold slices of slimy white bread that embodied a wilful disregard of what’s nice about both lasagne and sandwiches.
It was a product meeting that got out of hand. A brainstorm gone horribly wrong. “But it got them loads of publicity,” Mr Barnum might argue, while casually poking at a sad lion with a stick. But the coverage was all negative, wasn’t it Phineas, and then they stopped making the sandwich and it was a waste of time and money, and Tesco came out looking pretty daft for letting a very bad idea get as far as it did.
But if you ask me, the problem was not necessarily in the concept but in the execution.
Some decried the whole ‘double carbs’ situation, but here’s why that is nonsense, and it’s two words - chip barm. Stockport sandwich spot The Rack recently ran a lasandwich as a special, and by all accounts it was excellent, proving that it can be done.
So with that, the aforementioned teenagers and I were off to American Pies, just off the St Peter's Square end of Mosley Street. Once through the door, the deep fried lasagne was ordered almost before we sat down. It arrived at the table, and was - quite rightly - pounced upon. Basically plump croquettes, served on some extra meat ragu, these breaded bombshells were halved, and what do you know, cute layers of pasta, just like you would expect.
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These morsels of joy were devoured in short order. But they are not, to give American Pies its due, the main event. Pizza in all its forms is celebrated across this fine city. There are the thinner, messier, Neapolitan styles, favoured by the likes of Rudy’s and Franco Manca. There are the slightly more robust but still relatively slim bases seen at Nell’s, taking on the New York style. Then there is the pillow-like Detroit style, seen at Ramona, Four Side and Corner Slice. Deep pan, crisp and even, as the festive dad joke goes.
American Pies, which is run by the folk behind Brewskis, is the only place in town championing the Chicago style (and the previously discussed deep fried lasagne), and it is unlike anything else. It’s half pizza, half… quiche?
The sides of the dough crust climb up the side of the pan like pastry, while inside is a molten cheese and marinara sauce lake that makes the roof of your mouth tingle before you’ve even burnt it, which you will. Add to that whatever topping insanity you care to throw in there (hunks of crisped fennel sausage and dried chilli in this case - £13.50), which range from buffalo fried chicken to fried aubergine parmigiana.
Where the Chicago style also differs hugely is cooking time. A proper Neapolitan takes 60 seconds in a furnace-like oven, while these take their time, 20-odd minutes for the seven-inch, and as much as 40 minutes for the 10-inch. It’s best advised to order the moment you sit down.
And then there are those sizes. When Nell’s is throwing out 22-inch pies that are bigger than a domestic dustbin lid, the thought of a seven-inch sounds ludicrously paltry. I can confirm that finishing a seven-inch Chicago style pizza on your own should get you a photo on the hall of fame behind the bar. We shared one between three, and with starters it was more than plenty.
Alongside the deep fried lasagne (£7.50) came a dish of fried chicken parm (£7), like the type you’d get with chicken milanese, and some - wait for it - ‘boursin bites’ (£6), at the specific request of the girl child, large balls of dough with an obscene amount of garlicky cream cheese pumped inside. All arrived in terrifyingly hot skillets, still bubbling from the oven, cheese melted and brown and swimming in that excellent marinara sauce (they must use gallons and gallons of it).
This is not refined cooking. You will get cheese sweats. You’ll marvel at the things you didn’t order, like the ‘doughritos’, a potentially sacrilegious combination a burrito and a calzone, or the fully demented ‘beef wellington garlic bread burrito’, which encases a piece of beef fillet in garlic buttered parmesan pizza dough, with wild mushroom duxelle and a peppercorn sauce.
But it’s pretty hard to fault what American Pies is doing. Yes, it’s faintly ridiculous - more than faintly in places. Yes, it's what cardiologists wake up in the night in a cold sweat worrying about. But was it delicious and was it just what was required on a grey, depressingly drizzly day in January? It absolutely, categorically, most certainly was.
American Pies, Unit 1, 58 W Mosley St, Manchester M2 3HZ
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