Welcome to my home kitchen: Piping hot home-based pizzerias

SINGAPORE – Mr Dax Chew is no stranger to pressure.

As a matchmove supervisor in a London-based visual effects firm, the 46-year-old helped to bring Hollywood blockbusters like Avengers Endgame (2019), Black Panther (2018) and Man Of Steel (2013) to life by conjuring up otherworldly landscapes, spaceships and laser beams. 

These days, pressure takes on a markedly different form – that of hundreds of hungry guests descending on his parents’ landed home in Marine Parade to pick up their pizza orders. 

Mr Chew moved back to Singapore after his company retrenched him during the Covid-19 pandemic. His brother Arnold Tay, 56, taught him how to make pizza in early 2023, and the two started Long Weekend Pizza shortly after. 

Together, they churn out close to 200 pizzas a day from a handmade oven Mr Tay, a carpenter, erected in the backyard. Mr Tay assembles the pizzas, while Mr Chew pops them into the oven. Each pizza sells for $17 to $23.

Home-based businesses like theirs have joined the throng of pizzerias opening up in 2024, all clamouring to feed an insatiable appetite for Italian cuisine here.

For those with a passion in pizza-making but no aptitude for business, operating from home is a nifty way to trim the fat. “Here, we have no employee issues, no rent. Everything’s easier,” says Mr Tay, who used to toss pizzas at Little Island Brewing Co at Changi Village. 

He and Mr Chew offer only takeaway because they do not have sufficient seating in their garden.

Other home-based pizzerias, on the other hand, invite customers to dine-in because they want them to taste the pizza at its freshest. 

Married couple David Shen and Sheralyn Tay, both 43, host private dinner parties at their Housing Board (HDB) flat in Yishun on Fridays and Saturdays. Dinner consists of eight pizzas for six guests, or 12 for a group of 10, though they keep a couple extra on standby in case of big appetites. They charge $100 a person.

“Ideally, the pizza should be eaten two minutes after it pops out of the oven, so you get that nice crunch when biting into the crust,” says Mr Shen, who works as a digital marketing consultant by day. His wife is an editorial consultant and founder of local fashion brand Tria The Label. 

Mr Antonio Miscellaneo, the chef behind Italian restaurants Casa Vostra, newly opened at Raffles City, and La Bottega Enoteca in Joo Chiat, likewise insists that pizza has to be eaten within five minutes of being removed from the oven to “still be appealing”. 

It is why neither restaurant offers takeaway. His now-defunct 2023 home delivery venture, also called Casa Vostra, was launched on one condition: “The only way I’d want my pizza in people’s homes is if they complete the last step by heating it at home.”

The 52-year-old got his culinary start in 2019 with Casa Nostra, an Italian private-dining experience at his East Coast condominium. According to him, it is the easiest way to enter the food and beverage scene because of the minimal investment required.

Still, it comes with its fair share of drawbacks: the lack of privacy, especially for families with children – he has two, a girl and a boy who are aged nine and 12 respectively – and limited scalability. Having now opened two restaurants here, he has no intention of returning to private dining. 

In the meantime, several other home-based pizzerias have popped up, filling the gap in the private dining market left by Casa Nostra’s closure. The Straits Times checks out three of them to find out what is cooking. 

Long Weekend Pizza

Where: 61 St Patrick’s Road
Open: 5 to 9pm, Fridays to Sundays
Info:

@longweekendpizza

Step into the bungalow that houses Long Weekend Pizza and you will soon realise that the self-assembled pizza oven is only one of several eccentricities in the compound. There is a pond of exotic fish, a treehouse and a trampoline. 

Mr Dax Chew, 46, says customers occasionally take their kids along, letting them have a go on the trampoline while they wait for their order. He describes the business as having a “nice kampung vibe”, adding that the neighbourhood has been very supportive. 

The brothers’ passion project started out as an experiment within their family. Later, it expanded to the East Coast Road neighbourhood. Once word got around, the rest of Singapore wanted a slice too. 

“It was a bit of a scramble when our orders started exploding. We had to streamline our processes a bit more, such as by developing templates for auto replies. We get hundreds of orders, so we can’t spend all day texting,” says Mr Chew, who takes orders via WhatsApp.

They sell pizzas from 5 to 9pm only on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. But the preparation work starts much earlier.

The oven itself takes three hours to warm up and Mr Chew, who now flips pizzas full time, spends the rest of the week preparing the dough and ingredients, which he gets from Bedok South Market. 

He says he now works 12-hour days, longer than his nine-to-five shift as a visual effects supervisor. But although he misses working on movies, peddling pizza brings a rush “office life simply does not have”. 

“It’s a different kind of excitement and satisfaction. Here, I get to see the happiness on people’s faces when they receive their pizza. I never got to see how people reacted to my work when I worked in visual effects.” 

Plus, he adds, working with his brother, Mr Arnold Tay, 56, a part-time bicycle repair handyman and former bakery owner, has brought them closer. “I understand him better now. We’ve learnt to respect each other’s boundaries.” 

Prices start at $17 for a Margherita pizza and are capped at $23 for the meat mania pizza – a combination of ground beef, sausages and pepperoni with bacon.

Most of their popular pizzas – pepperoni, Hawaiian, mushroom and truffle oil – cost about $20. 

These are Neapolitan-style pizzas, complete with a bubbling, leopard-spotted crust. Pre-orders on WhatsApp are encouraged, though the brothers occasionally try to accommodate walk-ins when possible. 

Pxza  

Where: Yishun (the address will be sent to confirmed guests) 
Open: 7 to 10.30pm, Fridays and Saturdays 
Info:

@pxzasg

on Instagram

Like many people cooped up at home during the pandemic, Mr Shen and Ms Tay were hit by Covid-19 cravings. In their case, they yearned for Neapolitan-style pizza like the ones they had eaten in Italy, which unfortunately for them, “did not travel very well”.

So they decided to make their own. They borrowed a pizza oven from a friend, procured two 25kg bags of Italian flour and got to baking. 

Mr Shen was looking for the pizza trifecta: dough that was crunchy, soft and chewy, an elusive combination of textures that are often mutually exclusive. 

After countless rounds of experimentation – one time, they ploughed through 18 plain pizzas to test various flours, hydration levels and baking times – they finally had a winning recipe.

Friends started asking if they could take along their friends and family for a fee. So in July 2024, the couple decided to open their HDB flat for bookings on Instagram.

“It started as a joke, but felt really natural. We’ve been cooking for a long time together and thought that if people were keen to eat, we should just give it a shot,” he says. 

Mr Shen uses higher hydration dough, which he says would be impractical in a restaurant because of the temperature management and skill required to handle it. It allows the dough to rise faster, and results in a light, puffy crust. He also removes excess water from the mozzarella cheese, so the centre of the pizza does not sag after baking. 

Toppings are inspired by the couples’ travels and friends’ gifts. For instance, they turned basil from a friend into a pistachio pesto flavour, while a chance meeting with a street-side hawker in Kuala Lumpur gave them the idea for their otak pizza. 

“We do some fusion flavours, but I wouldn’t say we’re very experimental. We stay true to our favourite foods, and the flavours are those that we personally really like,” says Ms Tay. 

They have no plans currently to move their operations to a restaurant. “I like it too much as a hobby to run a restaurant. That’s a completely different ball game. We’ll have to start thinking about how to maximise profits,” says Mr Shen. 

Ms Tay adds that with full-time jobs, they want to keep things manageable and meaningful. “I just love feeding people, and connecting with them over food is very satisfying. Doing it on our own turf also allows us to do it on our own terms, which is nice.” 

Wala Pizza

Where: Boon Keng (the exact location will be sent to confirmed guests) 
When: 6 to 10pm, dates dependent on month 
Info:

@walapizza.sg

Pizza lovers might be familiar with Wala Pizza, a home-based omakase experience that is infamously difficult to book. Introduced in 2021, it is the brainchild of Ms Jenna Ding, a pizza chef in her 30s with a background in science and nutrition. 

Her Canotto-style pizzas, with their elaborate toppings and ballooning, blistering crusts, have gained something of a cult following. Her 9,000 Instagram followers camp out on her account on the 20th of every month, hoping to snag a seat at one of her famed dinners. 

They cost $186 a person, though the pricing differs for special menus during Christmas or Chinese New Year. She accepts a maximum of six people a group. 

The menu often changes and is customisable – Ms Ding even keeps a spreadsheet with the preferences of all her previous guests – but typically consists of two antipasti, five pizzas and a dessert. Flavours range from pumpkin four cheese to squid ink with Hokkaido scallops to even assam popiah. 

“My creativity can be quite insane and wild. My diners can expect the unexpected,” she says, adding that though she adheres to classic ingredients and fermentation methods when it comes to making the dough, the sky is the limit for toppings.  

At the end of 2023, the former account manager at Symrise, a German chemicals company that produces flavours and fragrances, moved from a flat in Chua Chu Kang to one in Boon Keng, hoping to make her pizzas more accessible to more people.

But do not expect her to open a restaurant any time soon. 

“I still enjoy the freedom of being able to travel easily, plan my own schedule, meet friends and have that balanced lifestyle,” says the home-based chef who is married. She adds that this job has given her the chance to meet people from all walks of life. 

“And I really enjoy having that intimate relationship with my guests, talking to them every night. By opening a restaurant, I might lose this personal touch, which is why I’m quite hesitant at the moment.”

But she adds: “Never say never.”