‘A taste and texture sensation’: You won’t find Garfield’s left-field pizzas anywhere else

I grew up shopping at the original King & Godfree grocer on Lygon Street, its labyrinthine antique stacks and shelves holding magical things: cheeses and meats and chocolates and tins of oily fishies and jars of good mustard; things I craved from a very early age. My recollections of the shop are both intense and somewhat fuzzy, since it closed for renovation a few years before I moved back to Australia (and Carlton). But its magic imprinted on me, nurturing my lust for luxury pantry items and my passion for very good picnic food.

The revamped version, opened in 2018, felt far less magical, its cafe and restaurant and high-end deli a little discordant. And yet I appreciated I could still get cheese and bread and wine to carry down the street to Carlton Gardens. When that version shuttered in the middle of 2024, it left Carlton without decent picnic supplies, much to my sorrow. The fact that I often had to travel to Queen Victoria Market to get my stinky cheese and crusty bread felt wrong, antithetical to the spirit and history of the neighbourhood.

And now, another revamp is afoot, and we’re told there will be no deli involved and instead a series of restaurants and a bar. The first venue to open offers the one thing with which Lygon Street is already overflowing: pizza.

Ah, there may be pizza you say, but is there raw tuna pizza? Japanese-style pizza? Pizza with potato chips as a topping? Well, there is now. Because Garfield Pizzeria (named for a cat that roamed the building during construction) is looking to differentiate itself.

The space is barely more than three counters: one to order from, one big slab that serves as a communal table, and one around the perimeter, the venue’s facade open to the hubbub beyond. Footpath seating makes up most of the dining real estate, as is the tradition of Lygon Street, but this place feels very different to the shopfronts and cavernous tourist traps of yesteryear.

The granite counters are bathed in a yellow light, punctuated by neon signage, that stimulates nostalgia for some era that never existed: part Italian, part Japanese, timeframe undetermined. Instagram is gonna love it.

The place is not slinging old-school Australian-Italian pies, nor is it aiming for the slavishly authentic Neapolitan pizza the snobs among us prefer. A collaboration between culinary director Karen Martini, executive chef Mark Glenn, and head pizzaiolo Sangsub Ha, this offering embodies post-fusion shenanigans at their most fun.

The pizza is made with a method known as “Tokyo stretch”, using a long-fermented dough that is then pinched and stretched in such a way that it becomes light and airy yet almost spiky, the crunchy bits intensified in the rotating wood-fired oven (imported from Italy, of course).

There are a few non-pizza options – olives stuffed with a beef and pork mixture and then fried a little too hard; a cos salad with a buttermilk dressing a touch too sweet. But apart from a very simple fried globe artichoke, I didn’t find much beyond the pizza that was worth diminishing my hunger.

Because, yes, the pizza crust is very good. Stretchy, tangy, light but blistered, shattery in all the right ways and right places while both pliant and solid in others. The pies are small-ish, enough to cut into four decent-sized pieces, which you do with a pair of provided scissors.

The toppings are more inconsistent, and in many cases I felt they didn’t do justice to the excellent dough. It’s as though a couple of pizzas meant to be signatures were obsessed over, and then the rest were not as well considered. Salt was often overwhelming, even with the simple margherita.

But consider me a convert for the cacio e pepe, a pizza bianca with three kinds of cheese (mozzarella, stringy white Oaxaca and then pecorino to finish), making for a gooey fun-fest, which is then festooned with copious amounts of pepper and potato crisps. It’s a taste and texture sensation.

And respect must be paid to the Tokyo bianco, a pizza topped with bechamel and a thin layer of tuna prepared crudo-style, plus a flurry of shiso and nori. It’s weird! It’s cool! I dig it!

Alas, there are things about Garfield that seem careless. Cocktails are served in plastic cups over ice, and evoke high-school parties in both look and taste – these suckers are sweet and silly above all else. Fine, but why serve a drink with popping boba pearls (strawberry, in a concoction of bittersweet chinotto with amaretto) without a straw big enough to slurp them?

My Australiani pizza was advertised with egg, but unless it’s blended into the tomato base somehow, mine had not an egg in sight, and as such was just a ham, olive and green chilli pizza – nothing particularly Australiani about it.

I do not mean to be a grump. This place is extremely amusing. There are even some stellar wines on offer, including a Radikon pinot grigio from northern Italy that is basically a white wine cosplaying as a red in the best way possible, skins on tannins on skins.

It’s hard not to lament what this building used to mean to this neighbourhood, to our lives, to the ways we learned to eat. But taken on its own terms, Garfield Pizzeria has the potential to be a very good time, with chips on top.

Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.