Campus Pizza - Sepp’s - High Dough - Rosso
7610 - 112 Street NW, Edmonton AB
Respected food critics visit a restaurant multiple times before publishing a review, allowing them to taste the full menu and evaluate the consistency of the food and service. By this criterion, I can think of no other set of restaurants I am more qualified to write about than my local pizza shops. While there is only one in McKernan proper, I live a short walk or bike ride from some of the best and most distinct pizzerias in the city.
My first taste of Campus Pizza was shortly after I moved out of Lister Hall and into a basement suite in McKernan. Twenty years on, it has fed me more meals than any other restaurant. Campus makes classic North American pan pizzas with consistently, uniformly crispy bottoms, concentrated, herbaceous tomato sauce, and generous toppings. A few years ago they introduced signature pies, novel concoctions like perogy pizza, donair pizza, taco pizza. These are all fine in their own way, but there is little that can dissuade me from their classic pepperoni with its subtle flavours of chili and fennel.
The current owners have extended Campus Pizza’s hours late into the night (3am on Saturdays!), a major boon to McKernan’s university students and other night owls.
A short walk north, in Garneau, you can get the best New York style pizza in the city, bar none. Sepp’s is unique in Edmonton in many ways. Orders must be placed online: you can’t even call them in on the phone. It is strictly take-out. There isn’t even an indoor space for customers to enter: you just walk up to a window on the south side of Ace Coffee to pick up your order.
With the exception of a puffy, chewy crust, New York pies are wide and flat as a bedsheet. Sepp’s crust is ultra-thin but persistently crispy: it’s almost miraculous how such a thin layer of bread can remain so crisp while in contact with sauce and cheese. Toppings are nuovo-Italian, so expect “prosciutto cotto” instead of “ham”. My favourite Sepp’s pie is the Apulo, with spicy soppressata and jalapeño balanced by a sweet honey drizzle. Sepp’s might be the most expensive pizza in Edmonton on a dollars per gram measure, but there is nothing else quite like it within a day’s drive.
High Dough Detroit Style Pizza occupies an awkward segment of Calgary Trail that I have not thought about much since the Billingsgate Seafood Market closed. It moved here after rapidly outgrowing its first location in Garneau, where the owners had previously operated Three Boars. The conversion of Boars to High Dough was perhaps the smartest and most successful COVID-era pivot in the Edmonton restaurant scene.
Detroit style pizzas are thick, rectangular slabs, with cheese sprinkled right to the very edge of the pie. Along the edges where the cheese meets the pan there is a crispy lip of lacy, caramelized cheese that brings deeply savoury flavours and a small universe of texture. These are hefty pizzas: one pie will comfortably feed two, especially if you tack a Tahini Caesar Salad onto your order.
The High Dough menu contains some quirky flavours: there’s a Korean pie with kimchi, for instance, and a perogy-esque pie with potato, bacon, garlic, and dill. For the traditionalists, there is an excellent pepperoni pizza. High Dough’s pepperoni is a narrow, dry style. When baked the sliced rounds form delicious, crunchy cups with a dash of spicy oil pooled in the bottom. High Dough also has what is probably the city’s best take on donair pizza. The spiced donair meat is crumbled instead of sliced, and the infamous ‘white sauce’ is syrupy-sweet, but balanced by fresh tomato and sharp, piquant pickled jalapeños.
Back in Garneau, Rosso Pizzeria serves old-school, Neapolitan style pizza. This is hand-stretched dough with lovely, large, irregular bubbles that blister and burn in the intense heat of a wood oven. The sauce is essentially just crushed San Marzano tomatoes, and the cheese and toppings are sparse, letting the crispy, chewy dough shine.
Rosso does take-out, but as the only full-service dine-in pizza joint in the area, what I appreciate most is that here you can turn a pizza into an entire evening. Start with a negroni and olives or roasted cauliflower, then order an ice-cold Peroni, or a frothy Lambrusco, and savour your pizza. Finish with a small caffe affogato: it’s just the jolt of sugar and caffeine you need to fuel your walk back to McKernan.
This piece originally appeared in the September 2023 issue of The McKernan Messenger.
