Sela Bar at Home


With restaurants in Leeds closed to eat-in diners owing to COVID restrictions, many have continued to offer takeaway meals. Some have also started offering DIY restaurant kits, providing a fun date night idea or a great way to celebrate at home.

I have enjoyed a few takeaways over the last few months, but I hadn’t yet tried a DIY kit, despite seeing lots of brilliant options. So, to celebrate Christmas Eve, my sister and I ordered a DIY kit to prepare and enjoy together.

Sela Bar is best known as a music, food and drinks venue located on New Briggate in Leeds City Centre. The bar was initially opened to provide beers from around the world, fun cocktails, and a stage for Yorkshire’s talented musicians to play. The Bar soon started offering pizza and then quickly became known as the go-to place for some of the best pizzas in Leeds. But in 2020, like so many other venues across the City, the Bar was unable to operate as normal because of COVID.

Thankfully, like many of our best restaurants and bars, Sela Bar have thought outside the box and recently started offering a pizza DIY kit. My sister and I ordered the Sela Bar DIY pizza kit and it was promptly delivered on Christmas Eve.

Sela Bar Pizza Kit

The kit included two readymade sourdough pizza bases, Sela Bar house pizza sauce and mozzarella – all neatly packed in individual boxes, with a
recipe card and instructions – ready to cook and serve. The kit also came with two cocktails – we chose ‘Elderflower Collins’ (Beefeater gin, elderflower cordial, lemon juice, soda water) and ‘Spice Up Your Life’ (Old Jim Spiced rum, lime juice, pineapple soda), and two beers – we chose a lager and a pale ale.

After a busy day of volunteering, walking and running, my sister and I were ravenous. Thankfully, the DIY pizza kit had been delivered in the morning, and so was ready and waiting for us when dinner time came around. The kit came with easy to follow instructions, which we followed to the t – well, as best we could!

Ready to Dough


To start, we rolled out the pizza bases and briefly cooked them, one at a time, in a hot pan (in lieu of a pizza stone). After the bases had crisped up, we flipped them over and added the house pizza sauce and the mozzarella. We love a well topped pizza, so we also added extra toppings: on one, we added Parma ham, goat’s cheese, and onion chutney, and on the other, we added baked ham, pineapple and sweetcorn. Briefly, before eating, we
put both pizzas under a hot grill to melt the cheese. Right at the end, we added a handful of rocket salad to complete the presentation

The pizzas were a great size – large enough to fill us up – and they were delicious. The tomato sauce was rich and well-seasoned. Although the pizzas didn’t have crisp crusts (probably because we cooked them in a pan rather than on a pizza stone), we loved that the bases were light and fluffy, and had a lovely crunch underneath. Our extra toppings were also delicious – but I’m sure opting for a classic margarita pizza would have been tasty, too.

Voila!

I’m sure this kit would have been a great way to get kids involved in cooking, as the whole process was so easy.

The cocktails were also great and super easy to mix as they were pre-made in the kit. All we needed to do was to add the soda and enjoy. The beers we selected were also fab and went perfectly with our freshly made food.

The whole meal was a joy. I enjoyed rolling out the dough and adding my own toppings, and I really appreciated how quick the meal was to create. From start to finish, the meal took less than 10 minutes to prepare.

Drinks included in the delivery were also brilliant complements to the meal, which was a real treat.

It’s easy to order via the Sela Bar website, delivery was done by hand and in a COVID safe way, and the whole kit was very affordable, costing just £25. I would recommend the kit to others wanting a quick
and easy treat to create at home.

All photographs by Gemma Bridge. Feature photograph shows the Sela Bar drinks kit.

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