Surprisingly Good Pizza at Urban Fare Shangri-La

With so many Neapolitan Pizza places popping up in Vancouver, I decided to go back to "normal" pizza and arranged a Meetup with Food Bloggers to try Urban Fare. Although it's "thin crust pizza made fresh in store", Neapolitan pizza purists will probably gag. But if you're not anal about getting your pizza flash-burned in a traditional wood-fired oven, it's surprisingly good!

At the moment, only the Shangri-La location has pizza, probably because they're the only ones equipped with a nice pizza oven in the luxuriously large store that has several counters and cafe seating all around the windowed perimeter. The pricey MARKET restaurant is upstairs, so you may be worried that Urban Fare will serve up similarly sized (read: "small") pizzas -- $16-$19 for an 8" specialty Neapolitan-styled crust pizza. Fortunately, that is not so. Even better, in the generally-considered-pricey grocery store that is Urban Fare, you get a reasonably good quantity of pizza for your peso!

First off, it's not what I would really consider "thin crust". Maybe it was just the particular batch we got, but I felt the crust was pretty standard. The edge was thin (compared to, say, Pizza Factory or Pizza Hut), however, which is important here because they serve up rectangular pizza.

A full size pizza is about 3 feet long and six inches wide (and yes, they do takeout in long rectangular boxes). That approximates to a 16" round pizza (which you'd be hard pressed to find -- although Godfather's Pizza has the 18" Jumbo) or two medium (12") round pizzas.

A whole pizza is about $19. By weight it's $2.19 per 100grams. Depending on the pizza and toppings, in practice this works out to be about 30% more than buying a whole pizza. Like pizza joints everywhere, they can mix pizza toppings on large pizzas. Our group got six slices of Primo Pesto, and a whole pizza divided into Mount Sicilian, Hawaiian Heatwave, and the WestEnder.

Except for the very different Primo Pesto, the pizza we got wasn't particularly out of the ordinary, but maybe because of the slightly jazzed up ingredients, tasted just a notch better than your average pizza joint. Considering the size and price, Urban Fare Shangri-La offers competitive value (two medium gourmet pizzas from Pizza Factory is about $20).

If you do go to Urban Fare for pizza, definitely give the Primo Pesto a go. It's different in many ways, not the least is the absence of tomato sauce as a base. Also, the sweet caramelized onions gives this pizza a different theme from your typical savory/salty pizza, which can start to all blend together flavour-wise.

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 3

A picture from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. I can't remember why I had this couple in the picture, but I do vaguely remember this to be in London, on the first official day of the tour group getting together. Their insistence on my helping them take a picture caused the three of us to be late getting back to the bus. The local tour guide had a "rule" about lateness, that we had to buy chocolate to share with everyone. As it turned out, later in the trip, on at least two occasions, we were stuck on the highway on either a long commute or a traffic jam, and I had chocolate and chocolate-covered marzipan to share. About the chocolate-covered marzipan -- Apparently we were in Austria just as they were celebrating Mozart's birthday with special marzipans wrapped in foil with the famous composer's picture. I'm pretty sure it was Mirabell Mozartkugeln . Anyway, there were enough to go around the en

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 10

The last of my pictures (at least the ones that survived the cheesy disposable cameras) from my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. Below is the obligatory group photo. Not sure everyone's in it, actually. I'm pretty sure this one was taken by the tour director, Mike Scrimshire as I'm in the back row, on the right side.

Trafalgar's European Explorer 2006 memoirs part 9

More assorted couples on my 2006 trip, a Trafalgar 's bus tour, on an itinerary called the European Explorer. An American couple who joked about being from "the land of the giants" -- and with good reason, because both of them were really tall! A cute Jewish mother-daughter pair who ducked out part-way to divert to Israel. I vaguely remember the issue of the daughter being an orthodox Jew was highlighted in France when, to make things easy, she just declared herself vegetarian for the wait staff. I also remember there was some logistics error in France because our party size was way underestimated or simply relayed incorrectly, and there was a shortage of food at dinner. Dessert came as an unopened can of yogurt. It did not seem like they tried to make it up to us later, either. Plus there was smoking every which way in France, and I had a helluva time with that. We were also in a hotel that seemed tucked away in the burbs, and not walking distance from anythin

Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

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