Pizza Punks to open seventh outlet.

The unlimited-topping, San Franciscan sourdough pizza brand, Pizza Punks, has confi rmed it will open its seventh UK restaurant in Liverpool this September.

Opening in the heart of the city on Bold Street, Pizza Punks Liverpool will join the brand’s other restaurant locations across the UK, including Glasgow, Belfast, Leicester and the latest opening in Durham.

The new 170-cover restaurant will be the largest Pizza Punks site in the UK, with a new grab and go kiosk at the rear of the building and an additional 30-covers of outdoor seating on Bold Street. The restaurant will also feature regular DJs and live music, neon lights, cool artwork, monochrome brick tiles and a stripped back aesthetic, making it the ultimate cool pizza experience, claim the brand.

Advocates of freedom and expression, Pizza Punks off ers a distinctive pizza experience – create your own - with 35 unlimited toppings to choose from, all made from scratch in the Pizza Punks kitchens, to create your own personalised punked up pizza. All for one fl at fee, there are no extra costs, just awesome, handmade in-house pizza. Pizza Punks Liverpool also off ers Halal, vegan, gluten-free and vegetarian options.

At the helm of the restaurant is the brand’s handcrafted San Franciscan pizza dough - a unique dough that’s proofed for 48-hours to generate maximum fl avour and fi nished with San Marzano Tomato, Basil & Garlic Sauce and mozzarella before the house-toppings are added. It’s then cooked in wood-fi red ovens for the ultimate thin and crisp base with a deliciously chewy thick crust. Pizza Punks have taken all of the best bits from Neapolitan Pizza dough by using the fi nest Italian ingredients and methods before ripping up the rule book and introducing them to the aged sourdough starter sourced from San Francisco.

New to the Pizza Punks off ering and available at the new Liverpool site, customers can try fresh pasta, hand-made in the restaurant each day. As with the brand’s bespoke approach to pizza, guests will be given the option to punk up their pasta with a choice of sauces and the fi nest Italian ingredients. Guests can choose from toppings such as Nduja, Tuscan Sausage and Salt & Chilli Chicken.

Pizza Punks founder, Brad Stevens said: “Pizza Punks Liverpool will be our seventh site in the UK, and we can’t wait to share the Pizza Punks experience with the city. We do things diff erently, our customers have the freedom to make the experience their own – they can punk up their pizza or pasta with unlimited, quality toppings for no extra charge.

“We want families and friends to visit and have the best time. For us, it is about providing excellent quality ingredients, unrivalled levels of customer service and most importantly, having fun; we want our guests to enjoy some great food, drinks and music with us.”

Pizza Punks was awarded the UK’s ‘Best Italian’ takeaway eatery last year, in the Deliveroo restaurant awards, voted for by the Deliveroo customers, and its city centre restaurants have all ranked number one on Trip Advisor, in Glasgow, Belfast and Newcastle.

Employees working longer to keep hospitality afl oat

Hospitality employees are working around six hours a week longer than before the pandemic, new fi gures from workforce management specialist, Bizimply, reveal. As the hospitality sector works to tackle the unprecedented recruitment crisis, analysis of real-time data from Bizimply’s customers shows the practical steps operators are taking in order to deliver on customer expectation of service levels. Taking March 2020 as the baseline, the data shows that employees are now working an average of around 25 hours a week, compared to a prepandemic average of 19 hours a week. In food-led businesses, employees are working an average 28 hour week, compared to around 23 hours in wetled businesses. Fine dining restaurants, which are among the worst aff ected by recruitment issues, are typically asking their staff to work 40-plus hours a week, Bizimply found. The fi gures are based on user data from hundreds of Bizimply customers in the UK and Ireland, equating to thousands of outlets and tens of thousands of employees, across all sectors of the hospitality industry including pubs, bars, restaurants, hotels, cafés and fast food outlets.