Best Eats This Week: Pork Belly & Aioli, Burrata & Tomato Bruschetta (Pizza East, London)

Being right next to the gym, I had passed by Pizza East perhaps once a month and I had always thought of it as an upscale Pizza Express.  Looking in, the decor of it is your cliched warehouse look: walls laden with red bricks and purposefully cracked white tiles; exposed pipes and bare floors; rustic wooden tables and stools.  Cute, but too much of it nowadays.  Then late one evening I went in with friends and was pleasantly surprised -- nothing like Pizza Express.  The menu proved to be exciting, and despite being a pizza restaurant, it had lots of tempting side dish options.   Pizzas were in fact not ordered, and the series of small plates we had ranged from decent to impeccable -- these two dishes fell in the latter.

Pork belly, crackling and aioli 
A pork belly dish is rarely disappointing unless you go to an absolutely terrible restaurant.  It's a fantastic ingredient and as a fatty meat you just have to cook it low and slow, and most mediocre restaurants succeed at creating a nice crispy crackling.  Pork belly dishes are usually a safe bet, it's one of those things that don't need much to taste good, and if you dress it up a bit it can become something mind-blowing.

A generous starter plate at £8, this also comes as a main.  It's a big flavor dish -- the aioli is pungent with cumin and garlic; the meat is silky soft and fatty and rich with spices; the crackling crisp and crumbles in your mouth.  It's a strong, robust and simply sublime plate of food.
 
Tomato and burrata bruschetta
Maybe not as good as the pork belly but it's a worthy mention.  Beautiful cherry tomatoes, roasted to maximize their sweetness, are warm and generously piled on top of a crusty piece of bread.  This sat next to a delicious piece of burrata - a good quality piece of mozzarella that was creamy and luxurious and fresh.  And obviously these elements together was just an incredibly rewarding experience.

Can't say much about their other dishes - there was an underseasoned broccoli and a rather insipid plate of brussels sprouts.  Not bad, but nothing to get excited about.  The pork and the burrata though, top notch.