I thought it was a rather sad day in Canton/Victoria Park when Dusty packed up their pizza peels and moved out of their  Papermill Road site. A combination of Covid and an outdoor location can’t have made trading easy by any stretch of the imagination (still utterly grim out there for hospitality).

It was, therefore, rather gratifying to see their re-emergence, phoenix like from the well raked pizza oven ashes, at a spanking new indoor site in the North Cardiff burb of Llanishen.

J, A and I were all nursing various degrees of hangovers and a shed load of carbs seemed the obvious solution.

You can’t get much more carbie than pizza, so the newly opened Dusty’s Pizzeria in Llanishen was the chosen venue for a little Friday lunchtime outing.

Inside I think it is still a bit of a work in progress,

with seemingly expansion plans in play in terms of the adjacent unit.

The menu is mainly traditional, but with a few bit more out there numbers.

It caters for most tastes, including those with chronically bad taste. I mean why else would anyone (other than under extreme torture) choose the Hawaiian?!

I threatened J with exorcism

after she intimated that she may order it.

Sense prevailed, with A supporting my religious objections to the demonic Hawaiian, and we thus ordered a trio of fairly traditional pizzas.

First up was a double pepperoni (£14 – trad. NYC rather than Napoli).

Good puffed up airy crust and a nice thin but flexible base, the star of the show here was the hot honey, which worked really well as against the slightly spicy pepperoni. There is a saying that “Sweet goes with heat” and this proved to be very true here.

A guinciale number (£12) had salty, crispy, fatty, pork, creamy bechamel and mozzarella and sweet, slow cooked, onions all topped off nicely with nutty parmesan.

All three of us thought the last njuda pizza (£13.50) was the best of the bunch.

The sweetness of the san marzano tomatoes, the acidity of the pink pickled onions and the sharpness of the goats cheese all worked really well with the spicy njuda. Generous application of a very good pesto injected a pleasing fresh herbaceousness to the proceeding.

I liked, in all cases, that they don’t feel the need to load up too much sauce, etc. With pizza, to my mind, when it comes to topping less is usually more.

Because more carb loading was required, J and A insisted on ordering the lasagna fries.

Usually I am fundamentally opposed to pizza and chips (as with half and half, carb on carb just seems odd to me), but have to say as a standalone dish these were the business.

The meat ragu had a really good flavour  with the rich savouriness and spike of Italian herbs that I associate with a lasagna. The fries remained crisp, thus avoiding my main issue with loaded fries (limp dick chips) and the salad added a welcome bit of freshness to proceedings. Nutty, salty, parmesan topped things off nicely.

It really did taste of a good pub lasagna.

With the ladies still craving carbs, dessert was ordered.

The choice is limited

and with the doughnuts unavailable we defaulted to the only other “ice-cream sandwich (£6)” option.

Really nice caramel ice-cream,

but I would question the use of the stroopwafels. Unless you have the bite force of a megladon, any attempt at eating this as a sandwich would undoubtedly cause the ice cream to shoot out of the side at maximum velocity. I would actually quite like to see this, especially if I was attempting it and sitting opposite J.

Our attempts to divvy up the stroopwafels entailed applying maximum force with the point of a knife and, for the most part, we (well me) failed miserable in this task (these things seemingly have a the tensile strength that makes tungsten look brittle). Possibly needs a slight rethink this dish. Maybe warm the stroopwaffles in the microwave, just a touch first, so they become a tad more malleable (but then will they melt the ice cream)?

On the drinks front there is a decent selection of beers,

including some low and no alcohol numbers.

Wines are limited, being an all Italian affair. The Nero d’Avola (decent pizza wine, especially with meat based toppings) retails at about £14, so £29 is a pretty fair mark up for the UK.

As we were all (to various degrees) in recovery mode (from the night before) it was soft drinks all round.

Whilst the R. Whites Lemonade ordered by J and A had me reminiscing as to the classic 70s advert (they, of course, had no idea what I was talking about, which is not an uncommon occurance if truth be told), I went for the ginger and yuzu kombucha (£3.50) and in doing so had my name changed (automatically by deed poll) to Tarquin.

J (now standing for Jacintha by association with kombucha drinking T) mocked my choice, but it was very refreshing and just the ticket to rehydrate and wash the carbs down.

The verdict

Cardiff has a pretty strong pizza game and it is very nice to see one of the originals (that started the rise in pizza quality in the city) back in the game.

Very welcome addition to North Cardiff, I would say and well worth the trip up North

Worth noting they do a great £6 Margherita deal on Mondays.

Some bargain that – £3 each if you share one!!.

The details

Address:  9 Llangranog Road, Llanishen  CF14 5BL

Website: https://www.facebook.com/dustyspizzeria

Opening hours: Mon – Thursday : 15.00 – 22.00ish; Friday – Sun: 12.00 – 22.00 ish.