Tanya Gold

A taste of 1997: Pizza Express reviewed

iStock 
issue 08 July 2023

As the government withers this column falls to ennui and visits Pizza Express. As David Cameron, who left the world stage humming, said of Tony Blair: ‘He was the future once.’ So was David Cameron, and so was Pizza Express: I bet they meet often. It was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot, who shipped a pizza oven from Naples and a chef from Sicily and opened in Wardour Street. That branch closed in 2020.

Boizot grew up in Peterborough but lived in continental Europe for a decade, and he learnt three things: an Italian restaurant must be bright; good pizza must be slightly charred (burning food is underrated); children need restaurants too. These changes were sensational, and Pizza Express was launched on the stock exchange in 1993. It outclassed Wimpy, made Pizza Hut look stupid – who eats pizza from Kansas? – and even now is better than Domino’s, which produces food I am afraid to touch. (Domino’s is my River Styx, plus Subway.) It was ambitious: I think the early design owed something to Corbin and King’s monochrome Le Caprice, but I may have imagined it.

This Pizza Express is on two storeys, and decorated as a 1990s brasserie 

In 2014 it was bought by Hony Capital, a China-based private equity firm. I’m not sure I want pizza brought by private equity: the pizzas (we know as of last week that Pompeii-ans made frescoes featuring pizzas, but without tomatoes, which are not native to Italy) got smaller. Even people eating pizza, which is a powerful anaesthetic and downer – which is why people give it to children – notice these things. Other restaurants imported pizza ovens and did what Pizza Express did, but better: Temper in Covent Garden, for instance. (You will have your own favourite. I pray it is not Domino’s.

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