Peterborough Has A One-Metre Pizza So Obviously We Have Questions

Tucked away on Saracen Way, just off Newark Road, The Deli Chef by Divino has decided the usual circular pizza isn't always ambitious enough.

You can get pizza by the metre.

Which immediately raises several important questions.

Who orders a metre of pizza?

How many people are supposed to eat it?

And how do you carry the thing to the table without taking out somebody's coffee on the way?

First, you have to find it

Part of the fun is the location.

This isn't a pizza restaurant glowing away in Cathedral Square.

The Deli Chef is on Saracen Way in the Newark Road area, surrounded by the sort of businesses you'd normally expect to find on an industrial estate rather than somewhere making giant Italian pizzas.

Even Cambridge Food Hunter, which went looking specifically for the one-metre pizza earlier this year, described struggling to find the café despite using sat-nav.

There's free parking outside, though, which becomes rather more important when your lunch is measured with something normally kept in a toolbox.

Yes, it really is a metre

This isn't somebody getting excited about an unusually generous 14-inch pizza.

The Deli Chef does half-metre and one-metre pizzas.

And the metre version is every bit as ridiculous-looking as you'd hope.

Long, rectangular and designed for sharing, it's the sort of food that reaches the table before the person carrying the other end does.

But size alone wouldn't make this interesting.

Peterborough has plenty of places capable of serving an enormous quantity of food if that's the only requirement.

The more interesting part is what's underneath the spectacle.

This isn't just a giant takeaway pizza

The Deli Chef says it makes its food using local produce wherever possible, while its standard pizzas are freshly made with its own daily-made dough and Italian ingredients.

Its current online menu makes a particular point of saying the pizza isn't frozen.

That's an important distinction.

A metre of mediocre pizza is simply a much longer mistake.

The whole idea only works if, once everybody has photographed it, people actually want to eat the thing.

And there's encouraging evidence on that front.

Customers repeatedly mention the pizza in reviews, including the unusual half-metre and metre sizes, while the independent Cambridge Food Hunter feature was sufficiently impressed to make the giant pizza the entire reason for the trip to Peterborough.

So who actually needs a one-metre pizza?

Nobody.

That's probably the wrong question.

Nobody needs bottomless brunch either.

Nobody needs a burger requiring a wooden skewer to stop it collapsing.

And absolutely nobody needs a dessert accompanied by indoor fireworks.

Sometimes food is allowed to be entertaining.

A metre pizza makes sense when several people are eating together and ordering four separate pizzas suddenly feels rather less interesting than putting one enormous one down the middle of the table.

Birthday?

Family meal?

Group of friends?

Children who insist they could eat an entire metre before discovering, approximately 22 centimetres in, that perhaps they cannot?

Now we're getting somewhere.

There's also a half-metre escape route

Fortunately, you don't have to arrive with a football team.

The half-metre version gives you the same elongated-pizza experience without requiring quite as much table engineering.

And if even that sounds excessive, The Deli Chef is actually a café rather than some sort of competitive-eating venue.

Its normal menu ranges well beyond pizza, with breakfasts, hot meals, sandwiches, cakes and coffee among the everyday offering.

That's possibly what makes the metre pizza more amusing.

You can apparently go there for an ordinary café lunch.

Or you can decide lunch should be 100 centimetres long.

We know which one is getting photographed.

Peterborough needs more food like this

Not necessarily longer food.

That could get silly remarkably quickly.

But food with a story attached to it.

Something you can tell somebody about afterwards.

“There's a café hidden on an industrial estate in Peterborough that does metre-long pizzas.”

That's a much better recommendation than:

“They do pizza.”

And it proves something we've started noticing while building Taste Trail.

Some of Peterborough's most interesting food isn't necessarily sitting in the places you'd expect to find it.

Sometimes you have to look behind the obvious restaurant streets.

Sometimes you have to drive onto an industrial estate.

And occasionally, when you get there, somebody brings out a pizza the length of a small child.

Now we want Peterborough's other ridiculous dishes

The metre pizza has set the standard.

Now we're looking for the other Peterborough dishes that deserve their own article simply because somebody tells you about them and your immediate response is:

“They do WHAT?”

Something enormous.

Something unusual.

Something with a local story.

Or simply something so good that people keep telling their friends to order it.

Tell us the dish and where we can find it in the comments below.

Taste Trail may have to investigate.