Westwood Pizza fills up quickly. Arrive at 5pm on a Thursday to order a stack of pies and when you return for pick up at 5.30pm, the 10 seats inside will be occupied as a queue snakes out the door.

“It fills up every day,” owner Mitchell Westwood (Bella Brutta, Cicciabella) tells Broadsheet.
Westwood runs the pizzeria with one staff member, Jack Owe-Young, who he worked with at Bella Brutta.

“The wait can get up to an hour,” says Westwood. “People will stand outside for that long and come sit down to have a pizza for 20 minutes, which is quite crazy, I think.”

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But for those who have tasted Westwood’s pizzas, it’s easy to understand why people would wait. There are seven pizzas on the menu, each with just a handful of high quality, well-considered ingredients. The sourdough base, made with a single-heritage flour from Gunnedah in northeast NSW, is chewy and easy to digest.

“It’s a three-day process to make our dough, which is the sweet spot. Any longer and it loses structure. Any shorter, it’s too dense,” he says.

The menu will change as produce moves in and out of season, but will always cover the basics: seafood, meat and vegetarian.

Inspiration for the pies comes from all over. “I was at the Bank Hotel and I had a tomato salad with stracciatella and basil. I thought, this would be amazing on a pizza, but we changed it up by using marjoram, and we buy really expensive, good tomatoes.

“This is probably the most expensive pizza to produce because of those tomatoes.”

Westwood’s version of pepperoni is done with a hot Spanish salami served on a tomato base, finished with a bright green, herb-infused oil. The ’nduja pizza is the second meat option and comes on a white base. For seafood, Westwood is using smoked eels from chef Nicholas Hill (ex-Old Fitz), who sources the eels from the Hawkesbury River.

The fermented-garlic honey pizza is the dark horse. It’s easy to feel sceptical of something sweet on a pizza (pineapple is polarising, to say the least) but balanced with the salty tang of the shaved sheep’s milk Pecorino Romano, the mellow fior di latte and the pungent confit garlic oil, the simple pizza is a masterpiece.

Westwood and Owe-Young have a simple formula for coming up with ideas for toppings. “We trial new ideas every day, whatever we feel like, to see what might be good. It’s a really simple test. We pick up a slice and ask ourselves, is it delicious or not delicious? That’s all that matters.”

For now Westwood is BYO only, but they’re working on getting licensed.

When asked if he has any advice for avoiding the wait times, Westwood says try to get in early.
“One Friday we sold out at 7.30pm and had to turn people away. With the oven and just the two of us, we can make 150 pizzas a night and that’s it. The best is to call and order early. We start picking up the phone at 5pm.”

Westwood Pizza
245 Australia Street, Newtown
0466 181 266

Hours:
Wed to Mon 5pm–late

westwoodpizza.com.au