How we make our pie and mash at Tower Bridge Road

We make our pie, mash and liquor fresh every day in our basement shop kitchen. We wanted to share with our customers how we make our pie and mash whilst sharing a few pictures of the process.

The kitchen at our Tower Bridge Road shop is in the basement. Downstairs you will find a minimum of 4 chefs hard at work making sure we are keeping up with busy demand. You will probably notice if you have been in the shop that all the food comes up through our lift straight to our servers. Our customers often ask how the kitchen knows when to send up more pie, mash or liquor. Next time you’re in the shop listen out to the bell. This hasn’t changed since we started. Simply one buzz for pies. Two for mash. Three for pie and mash. Four for liquor.

The first step is making fresh pastry every day. This is really hard work and takes time to perfect the process. We use a mechanical mixer but a lot of the work is still done by hand too. We then need to cut the pastry down so we have lots of smaller pieces ready to make pies. The process is slightly different depending on whether we are making the top or bottom of the pie.

We then need to roll the pastry to make our tops and bottoms. With hundreds to roll every day this is where some heavy machinery becomes very handy. Our pastry machines have been around since they first made them electric with us having the first electric machines in London and have since been modified to meet health and safety regulations. Before this the pastry had to be rolled by hand! We feed them through a mechanical roller and come out just the right size for getting our pies ready.

Then the team gets ready for the fun bit of making the pies. First, the bottoms go in our special dishes and gets domped to allow room for the meat. We then fill the dishes with delicious fresh beef mince. Our beef comes from Smithfield market and is boned and processed by ourselves daily and turned to mince. Then hats on! (the tops). This is all done in batches of 66.

When the pies are ready for baking they go into our fantastic ovens which are over a hundred years old. Originally powered by coal but converted to gas in the 1970s, these ovens are key to getting the baking just right and ending up with a delicious freshly baked pie ready to eat.

On to the mash. The secret to the best mash is having the best potatoes. Followed by having just the right amount of time on the boil. When the potatoes are ready out they come and freshly mashed using a hand masher. Nice and smooth and extremely tasty.

Our famous Manze’s liquor is a secret family recipe that we have had for over 100 years and is what makes our pie and mash so great.

See some photos below to see our fantastic team hard at work. These photos were taken when a photographer visited our shop back before covid-19 was even heard of.