Vegans take note: Family pizzeria brings Leederville great pizza, small plates – and a dedicated vegan menu! (2024)

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Here’s a fun food fact. Do you know those conveyor belt pizza ovens that you’d find back in the day at neighbourhood pizzerias and Italian restaurants? They’re called impinger ovens because of how they use blasts of high pressure (“impinged”) hot air to cook food rapidly and evenly.

You’ll find an impinger oven at Leederville’s Vikka, a softly spoken pizzeria quietly doing its thing on Oxford Street. But while the room’s exposed red brick, mismatched furniture and terrazzo concrete flooring all chime with modern-day restaurant design trends, Vikka’s movements and behaviours are what I’d describe as a little more old-fashioned. And when I say old-fashioned, I mean and write that in a very positive way.

Much of this yesteryear attitude, I think, can be traced back to Claire and Tim Barrett, a trained accountant and farmer respectively as well as Vikka’s owners. Although the family has history with this building – in the 1950s, Claire’s grandfather Joe ran a sporting goods shop here – Vikka is the Barretts’ first tilt at hospitality. Which is the part of the story where I introduce Rachael Barrett, Claire and Tim’s daughter who started working in cafes after moving from Bunbury to Perth around a decade ago to support her photography career.

Before opening Vikka with her parents in late 2021, Rachael’s resume included managing Rivervale’s Twelve10 Espresso Bar plus a stint at Lathlain cafe Laika where she befriended Benjamin Ronaldson, the then-head chef at Laika’s small bar offshoot, Cosy Del’s. (Ronaldson, meanwhile, sharpened his cooking chops at other cafes and small bars including Refuge Small Bar, Greenhouse and Mary Street Bakery.) In April, the two pals were reunited when Ronaldson started working at Vikka, although this time around it was Rachael driving the menu.

But the workload seems to be split between everyone, a common story when it comes to smaller, family-owned businesses run with a skeleton crew. Job titles are more suggestions than straightjackets and staff move from back-of-house to front-of-house as the day, night or childcare situation demands. Louise Smith, regularly found on the till, is also responsible for making some of the house soft drinks including her iced lemon tea ($6) which is produced by steeping lemon peels from spent lemonade ($6) lemons in cold black tea and sweetening it with cane sugar. As with any situation involving family, I’m sure this arrangement occasionally leads to drama, but from an eaters’ perspective, this all-hands-on-deck approach works.

It should surprise precisely no one that pizza is the slow-fermented heart of Vikka. (The somewhat Ikea-furniture/death metal band name, incidentally, is a reference to both the space’s past life as Victory Cycles as well as the nickname of a Barrett family member, Victoria.) What might surprise, however, is the quality of the pizza. Or at least for those who automatically assume conveyor belt pizza ovens are only capable of turning out those doughy, filling deep-pan pies synonymous with the big chains.

Rather, the pies here ($18-$26) – despite not seeing the inside of a high-temperature wood-fired oven – adhere to the Naples school of thought that believes a good pizza has a svelte base with some give, plus a puffy, high-walled crust. The crust here is well browned rather than pocked with burn marks and features good lift. It’s also, thankfully, sensibly proportioned. The worrying trend of pizzaiolos baking crater-esque, seemingly-made-for-TikTok pizzas that are more balloon-y crust than topping is one I’d like to see cease immediately: there’s little pleasure in picking up a slice of pizza and getting to the crust after just three bites. The chunky, well-seasoned sugo – is there a little lick of added sweetness in there? – is an excellent canvas for traditional-leaning combinations such as chunky pork and fennel sausage, caramelised onion and pale, well-sized blobs of fior di latte.

One of Vikka’s core beliefs is supporting local makers, so much of the cheese – including the fior di latte – comes from Victoria Park-based cheesemakers par excellence, La Delizia Latticini. The flour is supplied by Millers Food who mill their flour out in Byford. The kitchen buys some of its mushies from urban farmers The Mushroom Guys.

Equally important to team Vikka is catering to dietary needs. There is a separate vegan menu (Rachael was a former vegan) that makes putting together an entirely plant-based meal a cinch. For those following a FODMAP diet, the menu denotes which pizzas are available without garlic or onion, while gluten-free bases ($4) are supplied by The Gluten Free Lab. This gluten-free base isn’t a bad medium for the kitchen to operate via and has reasonable crispness plus only a mild legume flour flavour. What it doesn’t have, though, is a puffy crust and the 2D disc is more of a dense flatbread than classically puffy pizza base. The almond-based cheeses, meanwhile, do a more than passable job of replicating the mouthfeel of the dairy-based OG.

While exchanges aren’t permitted with pizza toppings, you can add additional ingredients to beef up your pie. My tip? Order small saucers of either the fermented chilli oil (mild in heat, long in flavour) or the pungent garlic oil. Each will set you back a whopping 30 cents and they’re likely the best value condiment add-ons to be found anywhere in the entire 6007.

A tight edit of pizza-adjacent small plates is also on-hand to bulk out your meal including marinated Mount Barker olives ($7), cured meats ($7 or $14) and splendid house focaccia ($7) of the dense-and-crunchy rather than squishy-and-soft persuasion. The easiest way to kick off dinner, however, would be to go the snack bowl ($17) which combines all the above along with some pickles, crunchy and garlicky crostini, plus a little puddle of stracciatella, into a convenient mini-antipasti arrangement for two. At a time where some places are changing close to this amount just for bread and butter, this snack bowl is ace value.

I feel that your loved ones would like it if you ordered some sort of vegetable or salad to go with all this bready deliciousness, although I wouldn’t recommend the tomato panzanella ($15), at least in July anyway when cherry tomatoes taste of nothing but cold and regret. The low-flavour, rubbery pellets of bocconcini in the salad, meanwhile, are a rare dropped stitch by La Delizia Latticini. Sweet-and-sharp pickled unripe tomatoes provided some thrust, plus there was enough vinegary bite in the dressing for the focaccia croutons to latch on to, but all things considered, I’d suggest waiting until summer – or at least tomato season – before revisiting this. For now, the beets and burrata ($14; a blob of baby La Delizia baby burrata arranged on a puree of pickled beetroot bursting with earthy sweetness and served with more of that crostini) sounds like a much better way to get your five serves of veg.

Meanwhile, the dessert offering bangs. The trio of options are unapologetically all about comfort and features contributions from all three chefs in the kitchen. Rachael’s tiramisu ($14) is made with lady finger biscuits doused in spice rum and manages, somehow, to feel both fragile yet dense. The sticky date pudding ($12) – thank you Claire – is precisely what you need it to be with the thin butterscotch sauce perfectly weighted for the airy finger of lush steamed pud. The best way to round off the meal, however, is Ronaldson’s fudgy brown sugar panna cotta ($10): a fantasy of jiggly, just-set cream fortified with a precision dose of gelatine. The accompanying cumquat jam is a nifty add-on, but it’s the inspired addition of crushed pistachio and tiny leaves of lemon thyme (lemon thyme!) that serves as the dish’s exclamation point.

At the risk of sound like someone who’s entered his Old-Man-Yells-at-Cloud era a little prematurely – just joking! I’ve been in this phase for years! – change is afoot in Leederville. For years, works and developments have been a constant feature of the streetscape while franchises and neon signs feel more prevalent than they once were. Surely I’m not the only one who thinks Oxford Street is starting to look more and more like Beaufort Street and Albany Highway each year and vice versa?

For anyone else whose memories of Leederville revolve around big nights out (Wednesday at the Leederville Hotel! Weekends at The Manor! Whenever at the Hip-E Club!), catch-ups at Greens & Co and nights out at Luna or any of the theatre’s previous names, the current chapter of the Leedy story may make for uncomfortable reading. Of course, I know this is the way of the world and that, to many, all this change is progress. I get it. But why does progress only have to mean growth and things getting bigger? Why can’t progress also mean opening an accessible family-run restaurant that cares about eaters with dietary needs? Why can’t progress mean waitstaff not being too cool for school and genuinely interested in looking after guests? Why can’t progress mean things getting smaller?

Leederville, of course, isn’t entirely devoid of unique, soulful small hospitality operators bringing good times to the area – I think here of Anisa Hirte’s Queen of Leeds, Jenny Lam’s Bunn Mee or the Kotkis family’s Yalla Bala, among others – but it feels like businesses like these are becoming a little thinner on the ground, and not just in Leederville but across WA. There is a saying in food circles that argues that we are what we eat. I’d like to take that one step further and suggest that we – as a dining public – are also where we eat. It would be terrific if there were more people eating at and supporting the Vikkas of the world and helping keeping neighbourhoods interesting, delicious and connected.

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