“Trash Food Is Fucking Hard To Do Well”

Is the Lansdowne Hotel the only place in Sydney you can get a slice of pizza that combines fior di latte with “crap shit” mozzarella?

That clash is typical of the food created at the venues owned by Jake Smyth and Kenny Graham. They did it at what is arguably the city’s best burger joint, Mary’s, and on-par pub The Unicorn – mashing together highbrow and lowbrow to create a genre of elevated “trash food” that’s neither simple nor easy to make. “This kind of food is fucking hard to do well,” says Smyth.

Smyth has ushered in a new menu at the Chippendale pub (in conjunction with executive chef Jimmy Garside), dropping the fish-finger sangas, but keeping the square pizzas, and adding New York-style round pizzas and cheeseburgers.

The Lansdowne is the place where the food looks like it’s been roughed up and thrown about the kitchen, but it’s actually been developed and cooked with love and care.

Take the pepperoni pizza – “The king of the fucking trash pizza,” says Smyth.

The Detroit-style square slice has been completely reworked. The dough is “autolysed”, where just flour and water is combined without yeast or salt, and left to rest for 30 minutes before being fermented for an additional 30 hours. “It gives the dough this incredible bread-like crunchy crust on the bottom. It's resilient, it can sit in the fucking takeaway box in the Deliveroo [satchel] and get to my house [without spoiling].”

It’s a two-day process just to make the tomato sauce, and a lot of thought has been put into the cheese – a harmonious trio of fior di latte, low-moisture mozzarella cheese (to preserve the sturdiness of the pizza’s middle) and “shit mozzarella” with a high fat content that crisps and burns at the edges.

And then there’s the pepperoni. “It's fucking crap pepperoni, but we add heaps of it on,” says Smyth.

The round pizza dough is a labour of love, fermented over three days to maximise the flavour and elasticity and form a super thin base with a slightly burnt crust.

All pizzas are proudly made in the Lansdowne’s commercial deck oven, something that might miff the woodfired pizza purists. “I don’t buy into that malarkey … some of the best pizzas in the world are made in deck ovens,” says Smyth, citing Philadelphia’s Pizzeria Beddia (owned by Joe Beddia, who recently had a one-week pop-up at Bondi’s Public Bar) and Brooklyn’s Di Fara as examples.

“There are amazing New York-style pizzas that we're modelling off that use woodfired ovens like Roberta’s [in Brooklyn], but De Farras is the godfather of all those fuckers,” says Smyth.

Be prepared to swear like a pirate when placing your order. A ham and pineapple slice is christened as the “Tropical Fucker”, and a mixed mushroom topping is the “Mushroom Fucker”. To avoid a lawsuit, a familiar-sounding double-decker burger with two beef patties, pickles, lettuce, cheese, special sauce on a sesame seed bun has been dubbed “The Big Fucker”.

The new menu marks the return of Smyth to the Lansdowne kitchen – he’d taken a 12-month sabbatical from the pans to spend more time with his family. A recent trip to Europe made him nostalgic for the pub kitchen life. “I was looking in these tiny tapas restaurants in Barcelona and I was like, ‘I need to get back, I'm so ready.’”

At home, he and his wife Ali (founder of the PR agency Electric Collective) coordinate a tight schedule of after school pick-ups, baths and dinners, before Smyth heads into the pub to cook the dinner service. “It's part and parcel of running a family … but I'm never happier than when I'm in the kitchen,” says Smyth.

The new Lansdowne Hotel menu is now available.

The Lansdowne Hotel
2–6 City Road, Chippendale

Hours:
Mon–Sat 12pm–3am
Sun 12pm–12am

thelansdownepub.com.au