Vegan pizza at UK chain
Alex is a reader who wants you to know about his experience at Zizzi. In case you haven’t heard, Zizzi is a restaurant chain with 140 locations around the UK and they are now offering vegan cheese as a topping option in every restaurant.
They also now serve vegan pasta, vegan wine and vegan desserts.
This is HUGE news and Alex is going to tell you all about it:
After hearing on Facebook about the new vegan cheese available at Italian restaurant chain Zizzi, we headed to the Exeter branch for date night.
The standard menu had vegan options clearly marked with a Ve symbol and our server brought us the “Allergen” menu which has a “Vegan Menu” page. Not a huge selection of vegan options but the revolution is the vegan cheese. No more dry, half empty pizzas.
As we had not booked and promised to give back the table within an hour, we just ordered olives for starters with some Prosecco. A nice touch is the little “Did you know?” box on the menu that tells you all of their wines are vegan except for a few listed. The Prosseco was lovely.
Of course for the main course we had the pizza. You have to pretty much build your own, starting with a Margarita and adding your selection of toppings. I went for artichokes and caramelised balsamic onions, my partner had mushrooms.
When the pizza arrived they looked exactly like the other pizzas, so we both simultaneously asked the server if they were vegan. Another nice touch here, Zizzi put little green stickers on the plates for vegan orders so you can be reassured you’re getting the correct thing. The pizza was brilliant. This is the Italian style thin crust pizza not overloaded with topping so you could easily have a starter and a full pizza and not be too full to order a dessert.
My caramelised balsamic onion topping was great with lots of sweet flavour. The “Mozzarisella” cheese is very creamy in taste and texture but does not take away much from the flavour of the pizza. In texture it does lack the stringy texture some people might associate with pizza, but for me that is more something for deep pan style pizza, loaded with toppings, which this is not.
No dessert for us this time, but a few vegan options based on sorbet are on the menu. Next time we are in town we will probably stop for an afternoon coffee and try the vegan nectarini which is a nectarine with scoops of coconut & mango swirl gelato.
You can view the full vegan menu from Zizzi online, search for your nearest outlet here and thank the chain for their vegan-friendliness on Twitter.
Fuck me, that’s amazing!!! 😀
Went to zizzis last night for the sole purpose of checking this out, it was great!!!! No hassle, all of the ingrediants in stock. Their vegan cheese is really nice
hey,
Was so excited to hear about Zizzi offering vegan pizza. However when I placed an order for a margarita pizza with vegan cheese at their St Katherine’s Docks location in London, I got a pizza with NO cheese! It was for takeaway, so I brought the box back to the wait staff and manager, who said it DID have cheese on it! The pizza just had tomato sauce, no white melty cheese on it as shown in the photos on your post. (I’ve cooked with mozzarisella many times myself, so know what it looks and tastes like.) I was too hungry to argue, so took the cheeseless pizza and left.
When I had first arrived, the waiter who took my order didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked for the vegan cheese, so had gone to confer with kitchen staff, When he returned he said no problem, they could accommodate vegan. But clearly, this branch of Zizzi has not gotten the memo from their HQ, nor does it seem to have stocked mozzarisella in their kitchen.
Very disappointing when chains make claims to try and attract a particular client base, and then do nothing to educate their staff and fulfil their marketing claims.
Phone their head office and tell them about this!