Restaurant Review: Sepp's Pizza

SEPP'S PIZZA 11053 86th Avenue ~ seppspizza.com Instagram: @seppspizza Co-Diners: The E.A.T Crew

I first caught wind of Sepp's Pizza last summer when I noticed someone walking around with one of their white and red boxes. Since that moment I've been hearing about them a lot and my curiosity has grown! Have you ever wanted a back alley New York style pizza experience? Are you even aware that this has been missing from your life? Because now you can, right in the heart of Garneau. EDify Magazine named Sepp's the Best Pizza 2022 and I have been extremely interested to give them a try myself! The first thing to know about Sepp's is that the entire operation is pickup or delivery only. There is no dine-in option whatsoever. You place your order online and then pick up your pizza at the time that you've selected. To do this, you go into their back alley and go up to the pickup window. They will slide the pizza to you all back-alley-dealings style and it's pretty fun. (Or you could do delivery, which is clearly less of an interesting experience.) I did this on a Sunday evening and took the pizzas home immediately so that I could try them as fresh as possible. Thankfully the drive from Sepp's to my house is only 5 minutes. Presumably with a pickup/delivery business model their pizzas are made with travel time in mind. The pizzas are made in a classic New York style with a Northern twist and they're always fresh. The website is easy to navigate and it's pretty effortless to scroll through the options of 14" and 18" pizzas. Plus there are a whole lot of beverages to choose from, including alcohol. I thought that it was really cool that they have a Sepp's Pegasus Pilsner - a signature beer made in collaboration with Edmonton's Sea Change Brewing Co. but unfortunately this beer was out of stock. As for the pizza, there are TWENTY different types, all available in two different sizes. It's a challenge to decide which ones to order! There are so many options! Also, if for some reason none of the pizzas work for you, you can also build your own. I assumed that I could surely narrow down two pizzas to order but it was tough. I was very intrigued by the Funghi Pizza because it sounds so creative with the use of mushrooms, potatoes, and gorgonzola cheese. I am always most drawn to flavour combinations and ideas that I've never tried before. I also love the idea that Sepp's house cures their own pepperoni, so naturally a pizza featuring said pepperoni would make a whole lot of sense. However, my first choice had to be the Apulo Pizza ($24.75 for 14") which I'd heard good things about.

San marzano tomato, mozzarella cheese, spicy soppressata, jalapeno, and organic honey.

I loves me a soppressata SO MUCH, so right away this pizza was speaking my language. It's a pretty greasy pizza but that can be expected with so much cheese and spicy meat. I was pretty happy about it. This pizza captures the wonderful combination of sweet and spicy and executes it very well. You get the heat from the soppressata and the jalapeno and the sweet from the beautiful honey drizzled over top. All set on top of a delicious red tomato sauce base. This flavour combination was very exciting to me and I enjoyed it very much. The pizza itself is quite thin (although not as thin as Neapolitan style) and the toppings are plentiful. The 14" gave us eight large slices and you can imagine that you're supposed to fold them in half like a real New Yorker. (I bet that this works even better with an 18" pizza.) For the second pizza I was curious about the Emilia Pizza which involves ragu bolognese, ricotta, bechamel, and nutmeg (among other ingredients). But I went with the Gina Pizza ($25.35 for 14") because I thought that it would be great to try one red based pizza and one white based pizza.

Cream sauce, 36 months parmigiano reggiano, shaved brussel sprouts, pancetta, sage, lemon, black pepper, and parsley.

This pizza caught my attention with its use of brussels sprouts and pancetta. Plus the inclusion of sage and lemon sounded very bright and fresh. The flavour combination was quite wonderful and I loved the play of salty and acidic together. It was also fairly verdant. However, I really found the crust to be quite hard. There's toothsome and then there's this crust, which was even a bit difficult to chew. This seemed to be less of a problem on the Apulo Pizza (maybe because it's a wetter pizza?) but I found the crust somewhat off-putting with the Gina Pizza. Sepp's is cramming a lot of toppings onto their pizzas so maybe a more solid crust is a necessary base? Lastly, there is one dessert on the menu and I ordered it. It's a Traditional Tiramisu known as Sepp’s Su ($16.75).

Gina's Pan Di Spagna, creamy marscapone cheese - zabaglione with 4 whistle farm eggs - marsala - calebaut chocolate- ACE Coffee Roasters Espresso No.3.

This dessert is meant to serve four people. I thought that doing a tiramisu and therefore a collab with ACE Coffee Roasters (with whom they share their building) was a genius move that makes a whole bunch of sense. I liked it a lot! We scooped heaps of dessert mess onto our plates and I really enjoyed the robust coffee flavour. The cake parts were ultra moist and the whole thing was endlessly creamy. I'm not the world's biggest fan of tiramisu but this one was delightfully light and a wonderful end to the pizza party. I liked Sepp's because I am loving seeing new and interesting things happening in the pizza game. As you might be aware, Edmonton is a pretty iconic pizza city in Canada, being the birthplace of some of the country's biggest pizza chains. So it's cool to see different styles of pizza happening. I definitely want to try more of the pizzas at Sepp's and hopefully the crust issue was a one-off. They've got lots of exciting flavour ideas and I am totally here for the back alley pizza window experience.