Franco Manca – turns out it's a good choice for allergies

lucylox

May 2

We were in London for a day out in the Easter holidays. We often find it really hard to eat out when in London. It's partly because we don't want to waste too much of the day finding a restaurant and then waiting for the food to arrive, but also we don't want to take risks and end up having a reaction, or just a stressful experience. So, more often than not, we end up eating the emergency sandwiches I always pack, and simply stop for a nice drink instead. When Yorica was around we always headed there for the best ice cream ever! Oh, we so miss Yorica!

We were just about to go and find somewhere to eat our emergency rations when we walked past a branch of Franco Manca on Old Brompton Road. Now, we've never eaten at a Franco Manca before but have heard good things about the chain catering well for allergies, and so we took the huge, brave step of walking in for lunch! Yes, it felt slightly nervy but also wonderfully spontaneous which is something we generally miss out on.

The menu is short and we were really surprised at what good value the pizzas were. To our delight the first pizza on the list was a marinara (tomato sauce, garlic, oregano and basil) with no cheese in sight – how wonderful! We ordered this as it's a joy to order something on a menu without alterations and it was almost perfect. The base was deliciously chewy with charred bits and plenty of air bubbles – a really great pizza base. The tomato sauce was fresh, vibrant and light.

The only thing letting it down was the heavy handed addition of the oregano, which surely must have been a mistake because it was as if an entire jar had been tipped on top! We like oregano but this really was way too much! All in all it was a good, safe pizza but next time we'd ask for less oregano (!) and maybe add some toppings for extra interest. The vegan cheese on offer is Violife and there were plenty of meat and veg options to jazz it up. The beauty is you can start with a safe marinara and then add to it, rather than the trickier option of taking cheese off a pizza and then adding toppings instead. Even some of the dips were vegan, but we didn't investigate further to see if they were totally safe.

I'd probably give Franco Manca 4* out of 5 mainly because the staff were efficient but a little brusk, I wasn't 100% sure they'd got the message in our allergy order so watched like a hawk whilst the food was being prepared! Also, as it's a pizza oven you have the potential for some cross contamination in the oven. But, having said that we had no issues and the food was good, safe and tasty, as well as being very good value. We'll certainly eat at a Franco Manca again.

We noticed a vegan raspberry sorbet on the menu but didn't try, we felt like we'd been brave enough for one day!

(The menu also featured a gluten-free base which may be worth investigating if you're gluten-free, although how that works with all the flour about I'm not quite sure? On the menu i didn't see any peanuts but there were walnuts in a salad, almonds and hazelnuts in the puddings, as well as pesto on some pizzas.)