Andheri eatery serves American-style deep pan pizza with oozy cheesy crust

Imran Ladak and Sahil Peeradina. Pics/Ashish Raje

We order an oozy cheesy margherita (Rs 220) from Rodeo Pizza to satiate a midnight craving. It comes within 25 minutes, and the box of 7-inch deep-pan pizza has an oversized blanket of cheese, carelessly covering a raging sea of red sauce. The edges spill out another round of cheese. Only a pizza lover could have made this one, we wonder, and make a trip to the outlet on a crowded Sunday evening.

Turns out graphic artist Imran Ladak, known as the 'Pizza Guy' among his friends, opened the restaurant with his cousin Saahil Peeradina "to fill the void of a good American-style deep pan pizza." As a kid, Ladak would wait for his parents to sleep and slip out to meet his quota of three pizzas a week. "Now, I hide from my wife and eat," he quips, adding, "not anymore as I begin my day with a pizza here."

To minimise human error and ensure speedy baking, the duo has invested in a state-of-the-art conveyor belt electrical oven that dishes out nine small pizzas, six medium and four large every five minutes. The dough is their secret recipe, too. "On the first day of trial, our chef didn't turn up, so we spent the next three days making pizza by trial and error. Eventually, the perseverance paid off!" says Peeradina.

Margherita pizza with oozy cheesy crust in the making

When we land up on a Sunday, the place is swarming with patrons. While we wait for our pizzas, we bite into the in-house invention of cheesy garlic toasties (Rs 99), that is a crunchy crisp naan-like serving cut into strips,and singed with roasted garlic. The La Fiama (Rs 355), a deep-pan comes with butter, garlic and onions and is on the sweeter side; the caramelised onions plead guilty. We love the pepper mushroom (Rs 425) which is slightly spicier (though we take the fire a notch higher with a sprinkle of chili flakes). The mushrooms are crunchy, well-marinated and tossed in a spicy garlic mix.

We switch to thin crust with the basil and herb chicken (Rs 425), which comes with juicy meat chunks and a bold basil flavour garnished with capsicum and onions. The winner is the kheema makhani (Rs 515) that has well-minced chicken in a tomato-onion gravy-sauce. A fellow eater takes a bite and announces, "You cannot deny the satisfaction of eating a good Indianised pizza."

We close our order with choco lava (Rs 99), which comes slightly burnt on the edges and a little dry in the centre. It could be more molten, but we are already dreaming of our next order of an oozy cheesy indulgence.

AT: Dharti Apartments, Versova, JP Road, Andheri West.
TIMING: 12 pm to 12 am (1.15 am on Sundays)
CALL: 26356000

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