French Eddy demands a “pizza” the action at BTW

The team at Behind the Wall, in Melville Street, have to keep their finger on the pulse and be ready to change things up to keep things fresh and new – and the freshest, newest thing at BTW is the upstairs Pizza Pad, which currently operates Thursday through to Sunday.

Owner Brian Flynn said: “It’s been quite an encouraging start. We did have someone say they had been all round Italy, but the pizza they had at Behind the Wall was the best they had tasted.”

General manager Bobby Galloway said: “You spend time getting the right recipe and the right product and you can tell people these pizzas taste fantastic, but it’s not until people eat them and they tell other people how great they taste, things start to spread by word of mouth.”

Bobby’s pizza dough tossing prowess, which has featured on a number of social media videos, was honed while he was running a Pizza Express on a break from his 16 year-stretch with BTW.

Apart from the pizzas, of course, the Pizza Pad is getting attention for its mascot, Eddy the French Bulldog who is the “face” of the endeavour and even has his own pepperoni pizza, the “Hot Eddy”.

Brian admitted the upstairs area had been losing its attraction in recent times and something was required to draw people back in.

“Getting people to come out just for drinks is becoming more difficult these days – even at weekends. We had the live bands, but that was getting less and less popular.”

BTW will still have live music and entertainment, but now that is supplemented by the Pizza Pad.

Brian said: “We had to come up with something that was different from the food we offer downstairs and we had talked about doing pizzas for some time. We had Bobby’s background with Pizza Express and we had the space up here for a pizza oven and kitchen area.

“We wanted to make artisan pizzas that are still reasonably priced and with summer coming we have been serving them in our beer garden. It’s been very positive for us for the first couple of weeks.”