‘Dear Darla’ is light and healthy pizza Jaymee T. Gamil Philippine Daily Inquirer
April 29, 2009
MANILA, Philippines – Craving for pizza but hesitant to ruin your hard-earned summer figure?
There’s no need to choose between your stomach and your waistline. Yellow Cab has introduced the Dear Darla pizza, an innovative thin-crust pie rolled into a mini-wrap, topped with fresh garden vegetables instead of the usual chunks of meat.
The pizza, named after the puppy love between characters Darla and Alfalfa in the iconic “Little Rascals” movie, offers alfalfa sprouts and arugula leaves as main ingredients. They are served in a box along with a pie cut into rectangular slices, sparsely topped with the default tomato sauce, cheese, olives, onions and pepperoni.
With retro-industrial decor, Manhattan photo murals and open kitchens giving a distinct character to all its restaurants, Yellow Cab offers an innovative fast-food dining experience. That point is driven home further as one tucks into the semi-DIY Dear Darla pizza.
Layer the vegetable ingredients yourself by spreading the arugula leaves on each slice, topping them with alfalfa sprouts and sprinkling them with chili oil. The slice is then rolled, and eaten, like a pita wrap.
The raw greens give the pizza a leafy tang, light and cool on the palate, clean and crunchy in texture. It’s a delicate delight you wouldn’t expect from pizzas, notorious as they are for being heavy and strenuous on the tongue and belly.
Always fresh
But Dear Darla isn’t the only item on Yellow Cab’s menu that guarantees freshness. After all, it’s company policy.
“Once delivered and prepared, [our] ingredients must be used within four hours,” explained Philippine marketing manager Alexandra Bustalino, during an Open Kitchen held with the press last March.
Yellow Cab’s more perishable items, like vegetables, are also sourced locally. But to ensure top quality, some basic ingredients, like cheese, are imported from New Zealand and Australia.
The sauce is of a special, secret mix, delivered and stored in unlabeled cans.
“But the taste, the quality [of the pizzas] are determined more by the preparation rather than the ingredients,” Bustalino pointed out.
Which would mean it’s partly up to you to bring out the best in Dear Darla. The specialty pizza is now available at the 70 Yellow Cab branches in the Philippines, 50 of which are in Metro Manila.
A branch in Imus, Cavite, has recently opened, while another branch is slated to open soon in Naga City, Bicol.
Yellow Cab has branches in five countries worldwide, but the refreshing Dear Darla pizza, perfect for the hot, tropical summer, is available only in the Philippines.
