HYDERABAD: A crust kneaded to perfection, its base brimming with cheese and the topping settled well enough smiling back at you — mouth watering already? Who doesn’t love pizza? Now before a tiny minority of hands go up, a pizzeria in town would want you to try their food for a change — who knows, 1441 Pizzeria could actually tease your tongue and change your mind? If you’re wondering what makes them throw such a confident challenge, here’s it — they place their faith in their wood fire pizzas.
With numerous branches in the city and online deliveries to umpteen options to choose from — regarding the base, toppings, combinations, dips, sauces and more — 1441 Pizzeria stands as a tough contender against the handful number of authentic Italian pizzerias in the city.
Their Peri Peri Chicken pizza won our hearts. The 11-inch thin-crust pizza left us wanting more. Somehow, the taste gets better with every bite. Their Barbeque chicken wings are just as dry-wet and spicy as you’ll need them to be. Their flavourful cheeseballs are another winner.
Their vegetarian spread is to die for — tempting even meat lovers to choose from their multiple toppings. What’s more, you can even customise your pizzas by instructing the chef online too! Vandini Gupta, founder of 1441 Pizzeria, answers some very important questions, beginning with the choice of name. She explains, “14 and 41 are the latitude and longitude of Maple, Canada, where the food fire pizza originated. While the city does have large pizza chains, it lacked some good, authentic wood fire pizzas at an affordable price and accessible location.
We wanted to satisfy the demand for true Italian pizzas — once we figured out what we wanted to do — we attempted and succeeded in finding a chef in Miami, U.S., who helped us out with curating recipes and menus and even helped us find the right vendors.” Next, localising the concept of pizza in the country was on Vandini’s mind. “We wanted to give ‘everything to everybody’ and we came up with a ‘make your own pizza’ concept just so there is something for everyone here. Specifically, because Hyderabad has been a tricky market for us, given its loyal love for biryani. We did start off rough during the pandemic with just a delivery kitchen in Banjara Hills and have now widened our market,” says she.
Chef Renato, the chef from Italy who curated 1441 Pizzeria’s menu, described it to be a place that serves pizzas with basic Italian ingredients like the classic dough, sauce and classic favourites along with adding an entire variety so the Indian audience gets anything and everything they like in a pizza. “Right from sundried tomatoes, olives, and jalapenos, which are more classic, to the more Indian items like marinated tandoori tikka, paneer, or just paneer tikka, barbeque chicken, our idea has always been to have something for everyone. We pride ourselves in our ‘Make Your Own Pizza’ — our ‘make table’ is made in such a way that you can see the entire table with all the ingredients and watch your dough being stretched and the pizza being sauced in front of you.”
At this place, one can choose from 50+ toppings and the best part — it all comes at one fixed price, so you are not paying for each topping you select. “While customisation makes our people happy, there’s also the added benefit of getting to learn about people’s taste profiles and flavour preferences which help us as we constantly experiment. In the future, we are looking at many unique pizzas,” Renato signs off.