When 133 pizzas from 60 Southwark pizzerias hits your gut, that’s amore.
Even by my standards, this particular Best and Worst group test was a monumentally daft undertaking. Eating pizzas from any restaurant, takeaway or street food stall that offers delivery or collection in the northern half of Southwark is a coronary-baiting endeavour.
But I’m nothing if not stubborn in the face of a challenge, especially during the omicron waves which made dining out indoors to be an even riskier activity. Aside from needing some kind of geographical limit to make this Best and West group test practically feasible, the northern chunk of Southwark – roughly encompassing Lambeth, Kennington, Waterloo, Elephant and Castle, London Bridge and clumps of both Walworth and Bermondsey – was chosen quite deliberately.
With a mixture of independent and chain pizzerias serving multiple styles of pizza to people from almost every income group, this Thames-crowned chunk of Southwark strikes me as a reasonable proxy indicator for the state of pizza in London as a whole. But there’s another reason why I chose this particular part of London: the now closed ASAP Pizza.
ASAP Pizza wasn’t just the first lockdown pivot form of the now-shuttered restaurant Flor. It also pushed the art of London pizza forwards a bit with innovative combinations of toppings and choices of grains in its bases – all without ever becoming too clever for its own good. Innovation, in both dough and toppings, should be a mainstay of London pizza.
That doesn’t mean there’s no value in the vaunted Neapolitan-style margherita pizza – far from it. The puffy, gently elastic and effortlessly soft base is a carbohydrate marvel. The topping triumvirate of acidic, sweet, umami tomatoes, creamy mozzarella and fragrant basil is rightly timeless.
What I wanted from this round-up, aside from a snapshot of the capital’s pizzas in all its multihued cacophony, was a pizzeria or two that serves both forward-looking and time-honoured pizzas. A pie with ASAP-esque imaginative flair alongside a Neapolitan-style margherita worthy of the name.
That’s a tall order. A very tall order indeed.
An administrative note: although I find the exploitative ‘gig economy’ business models of delivery apps such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats to be highly distasteful, I also couldn’t have completed this group test without them – ordering direct and collecting wasn’t always possible. The way I attempted to square it with my conscience was by tipping the drivers generously – their precarious livelihoods depend on it.
Table of contents
The restaurants
400 Rabbits
Azzurro
Bon Vino Enoteca Maltby Street
Caprini
Caravan (Bankside branch)
Collective Kennington Park Cafe
Crust Bros
The Fire Station (Waterloo)
Francesco’s
Franco Manca (Southwark)
Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza (Southwark)
Gourmet Pizza Co
O’ver (Borough)
Pizza Express (London Bridge)
Pizzeria Pappagone Sud
Pizza Pilgrims (Waterloo)
The Pizza Room
Theo’s (Elephant and Castle)
Vapiano (Bankside)
Zizzi (London Bridge)
The delivery brands and dark kitchens
Basilico, Twisted Slice, Pizza Verde, Protein Pizza, Green Goat
Greenwood
Spizza Napoletana
Veggie Crust
Village Pizza Vegan
The pubs
Flatboys
The Libertine
The Three Stags
Big Ben
De Milano
Forno
HFC
Honest Pizza
La Parma
Pizza2Go
Pizza GoGo
Pizzeria L’Opera
Red Planet
Tops
Verona, La Milano, La Venice
Yummie Pizza
Bad Boy Pizza Society
Fresco at Mercato Metropolitano
Good Slice at Flat Iron Square
The big chains
50 Kalò di Ciro Salvo
Bella Italia (The Strand)
Frankie and Benny’s (The Strand)
L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele
The restaurants
400 Rabbits
For a restaurant named 400 Rabbits, it’s somewhat disappointing that it doesn’t offer any pizzas topped with bunny meat. It does serve a pizza topped with rhubarb – the sweet and modestly tart slivers acting as a neat counterpart to the earthy goat’s cheese which was easily powerful enough to overwhelm the mozzarella. The fragrant basil held its own on what was more of a goat’s cheese pizza than a rhubarb one, but it wasn’t worse off for it.
400 Rabbits’ margherita unexpectedly came without basil. Given the milquetoast mozzarella, it was left to the sweet and umami tomato to carry the toppings of this pizza. The vegan version was almost identical, but for the substitute vegan cheese which was weirdly weightless and vaguely vegetal in taste. It was more like eating soft boiled egg whites than cheese, which made for an especially unsatisfying pizza.
400 Rabbits clearly has some issues with its mozzarella supply, as a modestly elastic and creamier instance of the cheese appeared alongside sweet and milky feta on the simply named The Feta. I’m not entirely convinced that the two cheeses really complimented each other, but at least the pine nuts and salsa verde lent a distinctively punchy presence to this odd two-cheese pizza.
Although the mozzarella was once again missing-in-action taste-wise on The Beef, that was really my only beef with this pizza. Essentially a better version of the ‘supreme’ pizzas available from the chains, the tang of the ground beef was offset by the crisp, crunchy green bell peppers and onions. The tomato paste was, once again, sweet and umami.
‘Milk’ gelato had that oddly sweet milkiness you only ever find in ‘milk’-flavoured desserts and ice cream. Airy and relatively smooth with only a few errant ice crystals, it wasn’t bad but was still lacking compared to some of the other gelato available in London.
As well as the oddly inconsistent mozzarella, 400 Rabbit’s pizza dough was prone to ups and downs. Ranging from soft, tuggably pliable, reasonably puffy and charred on a good day to somewhat denser, thicker and chewier on a bad day, the crusts and bases were ultimately the biggest hurdle to a reliably good pizza from 400 Rabbits.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £8.75
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Azzurro
Nestled in a railway arch near Waterloo, Azzurro might look like an independent restaurant at first glance. It’s actually an outpost of the Town Centre Restaurants Group which runs, among other things, the Cafe Giardino outlets in shopping centres such as Lakeside. If I’d known this before ordering, it might have prepared me for the boxed mediocrity to come.
Azzurro’s margherita was neither here nor there. The soft, floppy base and thin, crispy crust were comparable to the better-quality supermarket efforts. The basil was only occasionally aromatic, while the tomato had intermittent bursts of acidity. The meek mozzarella brought little to the party other than its pale eggshell white colouring.
The Daniele used the margherita as a foundation, mainly as a conveyor for the overwhelming sweetness of the caramelised onions and fleshy peppers. It was so sweet that not even the limp rocket could get a word in. The goat’s cheese didn’t taste of much, but it did at least add a mouthpleasingly creamy consistency to an otherwise one-note pizza.
Despite almost looking like a log, Azzurro’s tiramisu was mostly cream. Occasional tingles of booze, coffee and bittersweet dark chocolate hinted at what this wisp of a dessert could’ve been.
Azzurro’s pizzas aren’t as offensively bad as some of the others in this group test. But I just can’t bring myself to award Three Stars to a restaurant dishing up pizzas so tired and compromised.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £12.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Bon Vino Enoteca Maltby Street
A wine bar that also happens to serve pizza doesn’t sound like a promising prospect, but Bon Vino Maltby turned out to be unexpectedly enjoyable. The crusts and bases were airy, elastic and puffy with a gentle char, easily going toe-to-toe with the best of the competition in this round-up.
Bon Vino’s margherita was blighted by surprisingly muted mozzarella and only intermittently flavourful basil. The mildly sweet and umami tomato, along with that superlative dough, made up for these flaws to an extent.
Although salsicca and friarielli is hardly an unconventional choice of toppings, I plumped for this white pizza anyway and wasn’t disappointed. The pleasing bitterness of the greens was enhanced further by the grassy bitterness of pesto, all of which was neatly balanced by the reasonably creamy cheese. Coarse, salty and meaty clumps of sausage were the crowning glory of this pizza.
Although Bon Vino misses out on a clean sweep due to the uneven toppings of the margherita, their efforts are otherwise worthy of a raised glass.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £11
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
Caprini
At the time of writing and as far as I know, Caprini is the only one of Southwark’s trad trattorias still trading in takeaway pizzas with the others dine-in only. Caprini’s thin and soulless crusts would be more at home in a supermarket chiller cabinet rather than in the kitchen of any self-respecting Italian restaurant. On the margherita, these drab bases were matched by an equally bland blend of tomato, cheese and – inexplicably – dried oregano. Poor.
Sticking poached pears on a pizza might sound like heresy, but Caprini almost managed to pull it off. The sweetness of the squidgy pears was neatly complimented by the distinctively punchy tang of blue cheese, even though the latter was outnumbered by humdrum-quality mozzarella and needless rocket. There’s the core of a good idea here; it just needs better execution.
Caprini must have done something right to have lasted this long, having apparently been trading since the 1960s. But, from their pizzas, I can’t tell what that could possibly be.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £8.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Caravan
Caravan is a mini-chain of vaguely antipodean restaurants, although that impression may be due to their initial focus (many years ago) on coffee. While I enjoyed their breakfasts at their King’s Cross branch in the Before Times, the pizzas from their Bankside location were more uneven.
The crust and base on the tomato-less speck and egg pizza proved to be dense, doughy and thick enough that a knife was occasionally required, rather than merely tearing it apart with one’s hands. Both the cheese and the speck were disappointingly meek. The moderately rich egg and occasional wafts of rosemary had to pick up the considerable slack, for which they were ill-prepared.
Although finely ground, sausage with the stridently bitter taste of fennel made for a fine pizza topping. It almost made up for the milquetoast taleggio, chilli and tomato as well as the same slab of a base that blighted the speck pizza.
Caravan’s margherita benefited from a base and crust that were somewhat less hench, although it was still not as puffy and airy as some of the other better pizzas in this group test. The mozzarella still had little to say for itself, while the basil and tomato occasionally piped up with a bit of fragrance and a smidge of sweetness and acidity, respectively.
Maple pecan pie tasted mostly of brown sugar-derived sweetness, with only a whisper of maple syrup and the occasional crunch of extant pecans. Thin, almost non-existent pastry and wilting if somewhat fleshy kumquats rounded out a dreary little dessert.
Pistachio and lemon tart not only suffered from the same anorexic pastry as the maple pecan pie, it only had occasional hits of both pistachio and lemon. The whipped cream did have a mild floral sweetness to it, apparently courtesy of honey, but in the end this dessert was a waste of calories, money and effort.
A decent topping here and there are not enough to make it worth bothering with Caravan’s otherwise humdrum pizzas.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £11.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Collective Kennington Park Cafe
Nestled inside Kennington Park, this cafe has somewhat limited evening hours. Nevertheless, it can knock out a decent pizza crust. While the dense crusts weren’t quite as airy as the best Neapolitans, they were still delicately soft and pliably chewy.
Collective’s margherita thrummed with umami, lightly acidic tomato. The basil only had a modest waft to it though, while the mozzarella was surprisingly tame despite its slippery tautness.
The tomato-less white Portabello benefited from the earthy peatiness of its namesake mushroom. The addition of double cream and Cornish brie did surprisingly little to bolster the mozzarella though. The former was muted, while the brie only brought an occasional funky hit to the mix. There’s a nascent nugget of an idea for a good pizza here, it just needs a little more refinement.
While the results of the Collective effort here aren’t triumphant chart-toppers, the pizzas are nonetheless respectable and make for a fine fallback option for Kenningtonites.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £9.50
Crusts- bin, sin, or win? Win.
Crust Bros
Neither I nor my dining companion Road Runner were expecting much from the Waterloo outlet of this two-branch mini-chain. But it turns out that Crust Bros can whip up pizza crusts and bases that put many of its competitors to shame – puffy and elastic with a pillowy softness.
The problem with Crust Bros is that their toppings aren’t always up to the quality of their dough. The meh mozzarella and wilting basil meant that the margherita leaned heavily on the sweet acidity of its tomatoes. The vegan margherita suffered from the same problems, compounded further by the unpleasantly gummy plant-based cheese substitute that also had an odd, hard-to-place artificial taste to it.
Part of Crust Bros’ schtick is the somewhat overwrought names for their pizzas. Their four cheese pizza, for example, is called the Cheesus Crust. Although the parmesan, mozzarella and goats’ cheese were somewhat lost in the mix, the smokiness and creamy wallop of the scamorza and the tangy astringency of the gorgonzola more than made up for it.
The nutella pizza used the same high quality dough as its savoury efforts, with the hazelnut-chocolate spared slathered on top for a dark, sweet, mildly nutty and chewy treat. Crust Bros’ tiramisu was dominated by its booze-soaked biscuits, with not nearly enough of everything else.
Crust Bros has clear potential – it’s just a shame that it’s not fully baked. Yet?
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £8.45
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
The Fire Station
As its name suggests, Fire Station is yet another municipal building transformed into a retail investment opportunity – more specifically in this case, a holding pen for perma-sozzled Home Counties types unsteadily waiting for their trains at nearby Waterloo.
While Fire Station’s pizzas weren’t flawless, they were still much better than I expected – especially for pizzas from a restaurant that also dishes up burgers and fried chicken. The You Butter Nut, for example, was surprisingly enjoyable – even if the toppings did come across as a pumpkin curry going through a midlife crisis. The sweet, soft butternut squash melded well with crunchy sweetcorn, slippery spring onions and the distinctly flavoured coconut yoghurt which contrasted with the very mild, occasional surges of heat from the chillies.
The Carbonara was less like the pasta dish and more akin (somewhat) to a sausage and egg McMuffin with the solid yolk of its cooked-through fried egg. Salty, fatty, crispy pancetta was the dominant topping on this pizza, while faint hints of garlic and occasional whispers of earthy, umami cheese lingered in the background. Like most guilty pleasures, it wasn’t at all bad as long as you take a patronising attitude towards its charmingly child-like flaws.
Unfortunately, even that overly accommodating attitude couldn’t make the margherita enjoyable. The cheese and basil were soulless imposters, while the the overpowering sweetness of tomato was unnecessarily reinforced by the addition of cherry and sundried tomatoes.
The uneven quality of Fire Station’s toppings was matched by the highly uneven nature of their crusts and bases. While always thin, they varied from crispy to hard and then reasonably puffy and soft. Fair play to Fire Station for attempting to try something new with the toppings, but there’s a mismatch here between what the menu writers want and what the kitchen can accomplish.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £11.75
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Francesco’s
I wonder if there’s a real Francesco behind Francesco’s, or whether it’s some sort of fevered marketing exercise like the fictional eponymous ‘duo’ of Frankie and Benny’s.
The odd thing about Francesco’s is that its pizzas marry surprisingly high quality ingredients with weirdly half-formed carbs. Although there was no basil on the margherita, the tomato was sweet and umami, while the mozzarella was slippery with a light lactic lilt. The base and crust looked vaguely Neapolitan, but the base was unwholesomely stiff. The crust avoided being stodgy, despite its chewy thickness, making it something of a guilty pleasure.
None of Francesco’s other topping combinations took my fancy, but its pizza ‘wraps’ caught my eye. The margherita wrap was literally a whole margherita rolled up like a rug ready to be bundled into a moving van, almost looking like a dürüm as a result. This quasi-calzone (or semi-stromboli, if you prefer) tasted a lot like the margherita. But not only was the tomato much less noticeable, this oddity was around half the price of the standard margherita.
Francesco’s takeaway tiramisus are served in wee plastic cups. The standard version largely consisted of coffee-flavoured cream teabagging a few flaccid sponge biscuits. The pistachio variant added an oddly artificial pistachio flavour that had all the aromatic appeal of plasticine.
From its crusts to its pizza ‘wraps’, Francesco’s reaches high, but doesn’t quite make the landing. Still it’s a perfectly decent hyperlocal fallback option for Camberwellites.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £8.
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Franco Manca
Franco Manca is a London pizza institution with good reason. The bases and crusts are usually exemplary – puffy, charred and gently chewy. Even when they’re off-base, they still manage to be respectably airy and soft.
A ragu of beef and pork was feathery in its tenderness, while still retaining a rich umami and mouth coating meatiness. It melded surprisingly well with the fragrant basil, umami tomato and creamy, elastic mozzarella.
400 Rabbits wasn’t the only restaurant here to have issues with its mozzarella. The mozzarella on Franco Manca’s margherita was surprisingly tame, leaving the heavy lifting to the sweet, acidic tomato and aromatic basil.
The tiramisu was largely a heap of bland cream. Disappointing.
Despite the issues with its mozzarella, Franco Manca remains a fine choice for high-quality pizza.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £7.85
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza
The blonde sweary one has a couple of pizza restaurants dotted across London. The Southwark branch is itself located beneath a branch of Bread Street Kitchen, like some sort of chain restaurant Escher drawing or the hospitality equivalent of an inbred bastard stepchild imprisoned underneath the stairs.
Anyway, it appears that the blonde sweary one tries to do some ASAP Pizza-style envelope-pushing with its pizza dough. I could be mistaken, but their crusts and bases appear to have been enriched with corn/maize for a noticeably chewier, hearity and marginally nuttier effect. While different, the vaguely focaccia-like texture didn’t strike me as necessarily better. The inconsistent quality of the baking was off-putting, with some crust segments singed into blackened astringency.
The toppings of the margherita were just as higgledy-piggledy. From the peaks of the umami tomato the troughs of the ineffectual basil and the large medallions of oddly unmelted mozzarella, this was a muddle of a pizza.
The kitchen had the good sense not to attempt a vegan pizza based around a plant-based cheese substitute, opting instead for a marinara-derived tomato-only foundation. Presumably cheeseless pesto added another layer of mild moreishness to the tomato. The scattering of pine nuts brought their distinctive creamy nuttiness to the mix, but only intermittently so given their limited numbers. Sadly, the wee cubes of aubergine were deeply lacking in both texture and taste. A mixed bag.
I really don’t understand the point of Gordon Ramsay Street Pizza. For a restaurant owned by a formerly boundary-pushing chef, their apparent attempt at shaking up the carby foundations of pizzadom turned out to be neither here nor there. Meanwhile, its overall quality just isn’t up to snuff. Even if you dined at the restaurant to take advantage of their sit-down all-you-can-eat shtick, you’d quickly end up wondering why you didn’t patronise one of Southwark’s numerous better-quality pizzerias instead.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £13
Crusts- bin, sin, or win? Sin.
Gourmet Pizza Co
I’ve always suspected that this restaurant was a tourist trap: the Zone 1 riverside location and having ‘gourmet’ in its name are all highly suss. Having sampled their takeaway pizzas, I’m more convinced of this than ever. Their bases and crusts somehow managed to be stodgy and almost inedibly hard, despite being wafer thin.
The furnace-blasted basil gracing the margherita had been rendered lifeless, while the fudged mess of tomato and cheese was remarkable in its blandness.
While designed for vegans, omnivores and vegans alike should avoid the mushroom and pine nut pizza like a contagious airborne virus. The overwhelming taste of rosemary couldn’t disguise the lifeless mushrooms or the texture of the vegan cheese substitute which resembled both wallpaper paste and coconut oil. Its glommy, slimy mouthfeel was deeply unappetising and would be more at home in a test tube than on a pizza. The astringent pine nuts, which tasted more like burnt popcorn kernels, were the crowning achievement on this violation of the Geneva Convention.
Despite ample amounts of cream, the biscuit layer of the tiramisu was suspiciously arid. Unconvincing chocolate wasn’t helped by a whiff of what was probably supposed to be coffee and booze, but was about as aromatic as a diesel pump.
Absolutely not. Don’t even think about it.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.25
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
O’ver
O’ver’s unique selling point, if you’ll pardon the onanist marketing terminology, is that it uses sea water in its dough. This allegedly makes food ‘lighter and easy to digest’, a dubious claim which just about stays out of the odious wellness bollocks that I’ve come to despise so much.
Thankfully for O’ver, their crusts were just as puffy as their copywriting. Although occasionally hard and tough in places, they were generally elastic and pliable with a restrained amount of char. All this made the state of the margherita all the more woeful – a meagre amount of tomato plus mozzarella and basil hardly worthy of the appellations.
The dire state of O’ver’s margherita made the winsome appeal of the ‘Golosa’ all the more surprising. Richly creamy mozzarella was joined by milky ricotta and sweet, salty mortadella. Although it was odd to taste pistachio on a pizza, its initially bold nuttiness quickly faded after the first bite, so it ultimately added little. But at least it didn’t detract from this appealing pizza.
The kitchen sensibly managed to avoid overloading their aubergine parmigiana starter with tomato, allowing the the fleshiness of the eggplant and the creamy heft of the cheese to be felt. Although it never reached the same giddy highs of Theo’s aubergine parmigiana, it was more consistent than that version.
Although the tiramisu had the benefit of a reasonably booze-soaked biscuit layer, this dessert mostly consisted of wan, wilting dairy.
The deconstructed cannoli was even worse. Reasonably sweet and milky ricotta came studded with shards of pastry, but these ranged from excessively hard in places to overly soft and stale in others. The crushed pistachio was unpleasantly and unexpectedly peppery in places – as if it had been plucked from a countercultural trail mix – and even tasted stale in places. The misshapen pistachio was so bizarrely rank that I had to get a second opinion, just in case a stealthy stroke had suddenly blitzkrieged my taste buds. Reader, my taste buds were not mistaken.
Manky desserts aside, O’ver’s kitchen can knock out a good pizza when they put their minds to it. Just ignore their suspect claims about salty sea water.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £12.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
Pizza Express
There are no good jokes left to be made about Pizza Express, but one could squeeze a few cheap laughs out of their pizzas. The margherita, for instance, was – to my surprise – a Margherita In Name Only. With no basil and meek mozzarella, this MINO was overly dependent on its teeth-rottingly sweet tomato for taste. The base and crust, while clearly imperfect and not anywhere as pleasing as a good Neapolitan, did have some charms of its own. While thin and light, it had a pudgy plumpness that verged on being loaf-like.
That same not-quite-there base and crust made for an uneven foundation to a remarkably malformed Porchetta pizza. Pulled rather than sliced, the overly tenderised pork had occasional hints of rosemary and thyme that were – at best – vaguely reminiscent of porchetta in the same way that lard is reminiscent of olive oil. Slivers of pancetta attempted to provide some fattiness, but to limited effect. Faintly musky cheese attempted in vain to make up for the dead-on-arrival tomato. What a waste of swine flesh.
The ‘Romana’ base is thinner than the standard, default option, but the crust was woefully inconsistent – soft and floppy in places, chewy in others, crisp and almost crunchy in more places still. Almost like a piadina grappling with a mid-life crisis, it was almost enjoyable as a guilty pleasure. That’s more than can be said for the ‘BBQ Burnt Ends’ scattered on top. More like stewed chuck steak plucked from a mutated casserole, it was tender enough but far too sweet. It overwhelmed whatever charms the barbecue sauce, mozzarella and wilting onions may once have had, with only the oddly sour tomatoes acting as a counterpoint. It takes special skill to make a mockery of both Italian and American food in a single dish, but Pizza Express have pulled it off with aplomb.
Although the tiramisu had even amounts of dairy and biscuit, neither tasted of anything much other than bland cheapness.
A roulade of lemon curd, white chocolate and meringue actually consisted mostly of cream with vanishingly little curd. There was some modestly crisp meringue, but this couldn’t disguise either the lack of curd or the Milky Bar-level white chocolate. Even so, this dessert wasn’t too bad in small doses – attempting to eat the whole thing, though, was an exercise in suppressing one’s gag reflex.
Pizza Express – what a joke.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Pizzeria Pappagone Sud
As its name alludes to, Pizzeria Pappagone Sud is the southern outpost of the original restaurant (on Stroud Green Road not far from Finsbury Park) – although not that you’d know it from their oddly slipshod websites.
The 13in margherita was even more haphazard than the website. The underwhelmingly average base and crust verged on tough in places, while the basil-free conglomeration of what was allegedly tomato and cheese tasted of cost-cutting and that-will-do.
The same soulless margherita formed the basis of the San Daniele – quite obviously so with this pizza as a takeaway, with the rocket, taleggio and San Daniele prosciutto served on the side for you to layer on top of the pizza yourself. Both the prosciutto and alleged taleggio brought a woody umami to the proceedings, but they just weren’t enough to make up for the dreary margherita foundation underneath.
The tiramisu was mostly cheap dairy with a few smudges of sodden biscuit fingers here and there. With only vague hints of booze and coffee to its name, it was about as convincing a tiramisu as a bag of crisps.
Banoffee pie suffered from fruit that wasn’t sweet or squidgy enough, a complete lack of caramel, a bit too much cream and a biscuit base that was far too thin to leave much of an impression. Poor.
I’m not sure who supplies Pizzeria Pappagone Sud with their gelato, but they should get their money back and switch. Pistachio was face-shrinkingly salty and astringent, while the cherry yoghurt was vaguely sour for some reason. The Oreo variant was inexplicably bland, while the lemon sorbet was more like Jif – but at least it was smooth, unlike the others which suffered from errant ice crystals and a mouthfeel lacking in denseness and smoothness.
If you want pizzas full of sadness and regret, then Pizzeria Pappagone Sud is the restaurant for you.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £7.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Pizza Pilgrims
Pizza Pilgrims has come a long way since its days trading from a street food van, with 16 restaurants across London and another in Oxford.
While Pizza Pilgrims’ crusts and bases weren’t quite as consistently superlative as they have been in the past, they still had highly respectable levels of softness and elasticity with occasional instances excelling with gravity-defying levels of puffiness. The margherita had its acidic, umami tomatoes neatly counterbalanced by taut, slippery mozzarella, with only the so-so basil letting the side down.
The headliners of double pepperoni and spicy honey on another pizza were underwhelming. The pepperoni, double helping or not, had vanishingly little stage presence. The honey was mildly sweet, rather than spicy, which was still enough to drown out the tomato and mozzarella.
Given the corpulent multitude of toppings on the 8-Cheese pizza, the base was somewhat thicker and doughier than the others here from Pizza Pilgrims – and yet it remained remarkably elastic and unstodgy compared to the worst of the competition.
Some of the eight claimed cheeses (ricotta, fior di latte mozzarella, Grana Padano, gorgonzola, provola, parmesan and buffalo mozzarella) inevitably got lost in the mix. The notable standouts were the milky sweet ricotta, the restrained tang of gorgonzola, umami parmesan and the airy, milky yet rich buffalo mozzarella. While all that was inevitably a bit heavy, it also made for a sumptuous indulgence. The sweet chilli ‘jam’ was reasonably effective at cutting through all that lactic lavishness, and yet I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something out there more potent.
The ‘Nutellamisu’ was effectively a tiramisu with a Nutella layer, but inexplicably served as an inverted pyramid. As a result, the arid bottom-up biscuit base gave an overly dry first impression, followed by a mild nutty sweetness and a touch of custardy creaminess. As this underwhelming exemplar shows, sometimes the classics don’t need reinventing.
While many of the other eateries serve up Nutella-topped dessert pizzas, Pizza Pilgrims has long taken a different route with its calzoney Nutella ring. The pizza dough was soft and reasonably tearable in most places, occasionally regressing with tougher, doughier segments. Even so, it proved to be a reasonably mess-free way of heaving the nutty bittersweet darkness of the hazelnut-ish filling into my gob.
While not an outright winner, Pizza Pilgrims’ creditable efforts show why it’s still so highly regarded by so many right-minded Londoners.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £8.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
The Pizza Room
The Pizza Room has five restaurants, four of which are dotted across south London, with at least one delivery-only dark kitchen in Vauxhall.
The biggest flaw in their margherita was the quality of the crust. Although reasonably airy, it was unexpectedly crunchy which deepened its resemblance to cheap grissini-style breadsticks. Not that the toppings were any better. The acidic tang of the tomatoes and creamy heft of the mozzarella were intermittent at best. The flecks of what might have been dried basil added nothing.
La Primavera was a noticeable improvement. The floppily thin base was matched by a crust that, while not as superlative as the very best crusts in this group test, still had a soft and airy fluffiness that made for easy eating. The dominant taste here was the saltiness of the smooth mortadella, followed but not necessarily complimented by the mild sweetness of honey which also added a mild floral scent. There might have been a garlicky base underneath the tired buffalo mozzarella and wilted pistachios, I’m not sure. What’s certain is that the uneven toppings here were a poor match for the improved dough.
The Pizza Room’s thin base was indeed noticeably thinner than its other efforts with a puffy crispness almost like a toasted piadina. Once again though, toppings let the side down. Moderately sweet pears and reasonably punchy walnuts were a good start; weeny amounts of tame gorgonzola made for a poor finish.
The Pizza Room’s tiramisu struck just the right ratio between moist biscuits and whipped dairy. Although this tiramisu only had a mild booziness and bittersweetness to its name, it was still far more edible than some of the other tiramisi eaten in the course of this group test.
The ricotta mousse was more like a moist, generic sponge cake encased in what looked like cream cheese and what was supposed to have been a pistachio glaze. But, overall, it tasted more like a generic coconut-flavoured pudding. It wasn’t unpleasant, it just didn’t live up to its ricotta and pistachio billing.
The cocoa elements of the layered white and dark chocolate mousse weren’t especially distinctive, but the scattering of biscuit crumbs and rice krispies did at least lend this dessert a reasonably toothsome crunch.
Nutella spooned and splayed over a crisp and moderately thick pizza-style base wasn’t as texturally pleasing as Pizza Pilgrim’s Nutella ring, but – like any reasonably competent Nutella-based dessert – was still a sweet, mouth-coating crowd pleaser.
Wobbling and swaying from mediocre to unbalanced, there’s clearly room for improvement at The Pizza Room.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £9.90
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin/Win.
Theo’s
The original Theo’s is a Camberwell institution, but then such an accolade doesn’t necessarily mean much. While broadly Neapolitan in style, the pizzas delivered from the Elephant and Castle branch are larger than most with a single 12/13in-ish size. The quality of the baked dough varied. It managed to be reasonably pliable, puffy and charred in some instances. But it was more inconsistent in others with thicker, chewier, doughier patches giving way to overly thin and floppy patches. Even so, the crusts and bases were generally respectable across multiple meals despite this unpredictable inconsistency.
Although Theo’s margherita suffered from surprisingly dull mozzarella and a vague, intermittently acidic tomato, it did at least have some punchy basil to its name. The aubergine and gorgonzola was better, despite using the margherita as a foundation. The bold astringency of the blue cheese paired reasonably well with the woody, intermittently fleshy aubergine.
Milky ricotta was paired with surprisingly spicy nduja (spicy by London pizza standards at any rate). Its piquant aftertaste counterbalanced the ricotta well, with both livening up the margherita foundations.
The sausage and onion pizza was a surprise in more ways than one. The sausage was remarkably bland, but at least the onions were sweet. The margherita trio underneath had upped their game with mozzarella that finally had some creamy heft, while the tomato was sweeter with some acidity too.
When the stars aligned, Theo’s aubergine parmigiana starter was a thing of beauty. The stacking of fleshy aubergine, umami tomato and creamy cheese sometimes came together so well that the tasteful triumvirate felt preordained and inevitable. Most of the time though, only two of three came together which made for a dish that was satisfying only in fits and bursts.
The crisp golden crust of the pizza fritta starter gave way to reveal a chewy doughy layer and then milky ricotta and chunks of salami with a surprisingly gammony presence. Whether you think of this as a deep-fried cousin of the calzone or a Mediterranean pasty, it’s well worth having.
Although Theo’s tiramisu was mostly creamy dairy, this was ultimately a good thing as it proved to be exceedingly rich, eggy coating that coddled one’s taste buds.
Although this is a takeaway group test, I couldn’t help but sneak into the deserted dining room midweek to sample the dine-in only ice cream panuzzo. A literal ice cream sandwich, you can have the crusty, moreish and tight-crumbed pizza-dough bread filled with a variety of gelato flavours. While the pistachio gelato was smooth and elastic with a flavour reasonably true to the nut, this was all obscured by the crustiness of the bread. Even so, the combination of moreish, hearty carbs and refreshingly cool gelato is still one I can ‘ship.
Theo’s is in an odd position where it’s markedly better than most of the competition here – whether it’s from other restaurants or not – despite noticeable quality wobbles in the consistency of its pizzas. A flawed second-best choice then, but one that still has its charms.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £11.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win/Sin.
Vapiano
To date, I’ve never eaten inside a branch of Vapiano. While Vapiano’s pizzas didn’t send me fleeing in disgust, neither did they leave me hankering for an immediate repeat visit to their Bankside branch.
Much to my surprise, Vapiano’s bases and crusts were – while not the best here – still eminently scoffable. Crusty, thin and airy with rigid bases, they held up reasonably well under the arguably overabundant helping of toppings.
Not that those toppings are necessarily as commendable. If it hadn’t been for the sweet tomatoes, tinged with occasional hints of umami and acidity, the margherita wouldn’t have tasted of anything at all.
The ‘Spinach pesto’ was better, despite the almost complete absence of pesto. The sweet spinach and overwhelming milkiness made for an enjoyable pizza, albeit in a quasi-infantile teat-sucking kinda way given the overwhelmingly dominant milkiness.
Vapiano’s pizzas were uneven while also ranging from somewhat inoffensive to mostly enjoyable as a guilty pleasure. That might sound like I’m damning them with faint praise, but even that middling level of achievement is laudable in the world of London Bridge pizza.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £10.45
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin/Win.
Zizzi
The Zizzi chain is now perhaps best known for that infamous incident involving its Salisbury branch. Even so, this graspingly middle class chain has long served up an expansive menu of cod and inchoate Italian dishes, including pizzas.
Despite being wafer thin (and inexplicably dusted with semolina or maize flour), the bases and crusts of Zizzi’s pizzas were unevenly crisp – hard in places, crunchy in others. The basil-free and bland melange of cheese and tomato on Zizzi’s margherita had more in common with the old school takeaways than any of the other restaurant pizzas.
A white pizza topped with prawn and salami felt cobbled together from discarded microwave ready meals. Leathery salami, congealed cheese and droopingly sad prawns all made the cardboard pizza box look positively appetising in comparison.
A white pizza topped with beef shin proved to be a more satisfying off-piste effort. Although the stewed beef was too sweet for my liking, the smoked burrata and scarmoza melded with the mushrooms to produce a surprisingly rich, almost egg-like effect.
Delivery spillage aside, Zizzi’s tiramisu was a somewhat uneven and disjointed effort, resembling more of an overly sodden cake with too much booze and sponge and not enough of everything else.
A cheesecake of salted honey, raspberry and pistachio sounds intriguing, but the reality was predictably dreary. The cheese layer was more like low-grade icing sugar – claggy, cloying and overly sweet, overwhelming not only the scanty amounts of honey and fruit, but also soddening the thin biscuit base.
In a way, I’m glad that places like Zizzi still exist as they’re a reminder of everything that restaurants should rise above.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £12.75
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
The delivery brands and dark kitchens
Basilico, Twisted Slice, Pizza Verde, Protein Pizza, Green Goat
Basilico is a long-standing London pizza chain, but that doesn’t hasn’t stopped it from experimenting – at least from its Tower Bridge Road branch. As well as trading under the Basilico brand, this branch also dishes out pizzas under the delivery app-only Twisted Slice and Pizza Verde banners as well as the more distinct brands Protein Pizza for aspiring henchs and Green Goat for vegans.
Basilico’s bases and crusts were somewhat unusual, at least by London standards. Thin and double hulled with an airy interior, its mouthfeel varied from pliable to crisply brittle to tough and cardboard-like in others.
Even with those flaws, the margherita was a heavy, leaden disc. The yellow-hued fatberg posing as cheese largely obscured the sweetness and acidity of the tomato, although occasional hits of concentrated basil did manage to seep through every once in a while.
The mushroom and spinach was largely an improvement, even though the fungus was missing in action. The creamy sweet greens got an extra lactic lift from the clods of heavy cream, while the occasional shard of sweet, crisp onion provided a bit of contrast.
As its name suggests, Twisted Slice is all about unusual, non-standard toppings. But not only was its margherita just as flawed as its parent brand’s in all the same ways, the only twist its own ‘twisted’ pies was how they were flawed in so many of the same ways as the competition.
The ground meat of the ‘double’ cheeseburger pizzas was utterly forgettable, doubly so for the bacon, tomato and cheese. The dominant elements here were the onions and burger sauce with their overwhelming sweetness.
Twisted Slice’s garlic bread was unchewably tough on one occasion, with precious little garlic. It was much more pliable and puffy on another occasion, although the garlic was still missing in action. This variant had the addition of marmite and cheese, although the surprisingly cautious application of the divisive brown spread meant its salty, yeasty presence was unexpectedly minimal. The dominant presence was instead the spraying of bland, congealed cheese which clung to the bread like plaque on tooth enamel.
The kimchi and jackfruit, whether it was ordered from Twisted Slice or Green Goat, was identical. But this pair was more akin to the twins from The Shining than Jedward. The bases and crusts had a level of hardness that could be used to shimmy a lock. The jackfruit, cheese and tomato were like reality TV stars – garishly coloured with zero taste underneath. The crunchy sheaves of kimchi did have some sourness and light spice, but this clashed with the sweet tang of the needless and rather cheap identikit BBQ sauce. Kimchi on a pizza is a good idea; kimchi on these pizzas was a piss-take.
Green Goat’s chilli cheese broccoli sounds like an unlikely trio of pizza toppings, although no more so than anything else in this group test. The base and crust here were notably different from the rest of the Basilico family – thin yet soft and pliable with garlicky hints. If only all of the carbs from the Basilico family were as pleasing as this. Although the cheese was still somewhat lacklustre, it did have at least some milkiness to its name which contrasted reasonably well with the relatively fiery levels of pep and heat from the chilli, as well as the crunch of the supple broccoli. Although the various elements didn’t quite come together, this was still an enjoyable pizza.
Pizza Verde’s margherita was, unsurprisingly, nearly identical to Basilico’s and Twisted Slice’s. The Vegan Sicilian didn’t fare much better. The overloaded toppings slid off more quickly than a government minister doing a U-turn (and with even less grace), so slices had to be folded up – almost like a calzone – for any morsel to have any chance of reaching my gob.
Unfortunately, the experience was a bit like being waterboarded with salad cream. The vegan ‘feta’ and ‘mozzarella’ were unpleasantly gummy, while the peppers, tomatoes and pesto were saccharin in their sweetness. The only respite was the occasional bit of fleshiness from the wee cubes of artichoke.
Added protein or not, Protein Pizza’s basil-free margherita was not only a Margherita In Name Only, but was also blander than small talk at a funeral. The crust and base was almost as dry and hard as the cardboard box it came in.
Although Protein Pizza’s fiorentina was blighted by milquetoast spinach and mozzarella, the richness of the eggs and the milkiness of the surprisingly dense ricotta – possibly due to the addition of high-protein cheese – more than made up for it. It’s a shame the crust and base were still stiffer than a mannequin though.
Despite coming from the same kitchen, there wasn’t a huge amount of consistency in the Nutella pizzas from Basilico, Twisted Slice and Pizza Verde. The mouthfeel of Basilico’s effort was remarkably variable in mouthfeel – almost inedibly hard in places, as crisp as a poppadom in others and excessively chewy in others. Despite the limpness of the extant hazelnuts, the Nutella and strawberries worked well enough together.
The efforts from Twisted Slice, Pizza Verde and Green Goat, on the other hand, was consistently crisp and thin, shattering almost like a poppadom. Otherwise, this lot see-sawed in the intensity of the various toppings – tame Nutella here, sweet strawberries there, no strawberries at all in instance. The lack of consistency here really is baffling.
Basilico and its various sub-brands deserve some credit for trying to do pizzas differently. However, that credit doesn’t last long when the results are this haphazardly uneven. To borrow a line from The King – a little less brand conversation, a bit better execution, please.
Basilico
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £11
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Twisted Slice
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £8.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Pizza Verde
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £11.85
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Protein Pizza
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £14
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Green Goat
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £11
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin/Win.
Greenwood
It’s unclear if Greenwood is connected to the King’s College Greenwood Theatre near Guy’s Hospital, but I suspect not given that the London Bridge location has sister kitchens near Wood Lane and Liverpool Street.
Either way, Greenwood’s margherita did have a half-baked student cafeteria feel to it. As if the bland basil wasn’t bad enough, the tomatoes had a transient sweetness while the mozzarella’s lactic tang was intermittent at best. The thin yet spongy crust had more in common with sliced bread than with pizza dough.
A four cheese pizza isn’t an especially outre option, but it’s always interesting to see what any given pizzeria will toss into the mix. There was an occasional earthy funk courtesy of goat’s cheese, as well as an intermittent tilt of creamy mozzarella. A mild blue cheese tang was present, as was a little umami courtesy of parmesan. While not the most banging or well-balanced four cheese pizza, it did at least taste of something – unlike Greenwood’s margherita.
Greenwood seems to tout their brought-in freezer cheesecakes, which you can eat straight from the tub like cheap ice cream, more than they do their pizzas. ‘Butterscotch and caramel’ was more like caramel salted so strongly that it could sterilise wounds, but it did at least have some goo and tang to its name. The mouthcoating cream cheese had an odd tang to it, while the chocolate crumbs were no substitute for a proper biscuit base. Weird.
Lemon and raspberry was less dense than the butterscotch and caramel. The raspberry flavour was unconvincing, while the lemon manifested itself as a wan, ghostly zestiness in the cream cheese. A thin layer of biscuit crumbs merely reminded me of how much I wanted an actual biscuit base. Freezer cheesecakes are an interesting idea, but these examples should be put back into the deep freeze.
As with so many pizzerias, Greenwood is let down primarily by its bases and crusts. When they’re as iffy as those blighting a supermarket pizza, you might as well eat one of those manhole covers instead. At least they’re cheaper.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £10
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Spizza Napoletana
‘Spizza’ is apparently Corsican for pizza, although I have no idea if that has any bearing on this takeaway’s attempt at Neapolitan-ish pizzas. I say ‘ish’ deliberately as one can see what they’re aiming for with their carbs, even though they eventually fall flat (if you’ll forgive the deliberate pun). While the base was relatively thin and flexible, the crusts were – for the most part – too chewy and hard. It was somewhat softer and puffier in places, hinting at what this kitchen could accomplish but currently can’t with any real consistency.
The toppings similarly struggled. The margherita was spoiled by the oddly sour tomato and vaguely aromatic basil, but at least the mozzarella had some creamy heft to it. Well, every now and again, anyway.
Salsicca and friarielli isn’t especially cutting-edge, but I’m a sucker for this topping combo. While the veg was suitably bittersweet and the cheese reasonably creamy, the sausage was only relatively coarse and definitively dull. A so-so effort, overall.
The dough troubles afflicting the pizzas also blighted the nutella pizzas. The base turned out thin and crispy in places, almost like a piadina, but overly crunchy and chewy in others, then soft, pliable and airy in others. While the chocolate-hazelnut spread was fine, I’d rather have spooned it directly out of the jar and into my maw given the dough troubles.
Bless Spizza for trying, but they need to try even harder. Until then, they’re a decidedly second-best option for takeaway pizza.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £9.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Veggie Crust
It takes a special kind of gall to call your pizzeria ‘Veggie Crust’ when there are almost as many meat-topped pizzas on your menu as there are vegetarian ones. This incongruity is tied to Veggie Crust’s hidden life as an app-only brand for old school takeaway Pizza Mania which otherwise only seems to offer takeaways for collection (although I could be wrong on that).
This old school takeaway-heritage is fully evident in the margherita. Not only was it a Magherita In Name Only with no basil evident, it had bafflingly little tomato. The charmless cheese somehow managed to ooze grease into the threateningly thick dough slab of a base and crust.
The melanzane barely lived up to its name as the headlining aubergine only managed to muster a mild fleshiness before slinking down my gullet. A few sliced rings of intermittently salty black olives were more likely to induce trypophobia than anything else. The promised goat’s cheese was missing in action, unlike the sadness i felt while eating this pizza.
A laughably lilliputian slice of banoffee pie did at least have a smudge of squishy, somewhat sweet banana and toffee. But then the loose crumbed biscuit base and thin cream, flecked with chocolate chips, reminded you that this speck of a dessert was more of a hazy daydream than an actual dish.
I’d rather eat some smeggie crust than another slice from Veggie Crust.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £7.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Village Pizza Vegan
Village Pizza Vegan appears to be a plucky mini-chain with five locations dotted around London and the Home Counties. In the case of its Tabard Street location though, it’s actually an online-only brand of old school takeaway Pizza2Go. Its vegan-friendly pizzas are very different from those at Pizza2Go though.
For a start, the thin bases and crusts are a world away from the classically caulk-like affairs from Pizza2Go. They were drier and more hard-going than a novel about evaporating paint written in the style of Ulysses. This was especially evident in the Vegan Margherita which was almost as beige and parched as a temperance seminar. It was not only devoid of basil, but of any taste whatsoever.
If ‘Vegan Hot Pot’ conjures up visions of a pizza topped with Sichuan peppered tofu or perhaps a casserole-inspired mix of potatoes, onions, carrots and seitan, then I’m afraid I have to burst your bubble. The only source of heat here were the intermittently hot and sour jalapenos. These were also the only source of joy on a pizza that sank to new levels of dismal wretchedness.
Soy-based meatballs were not only bone-dry, but were so tasteless that they might as well have been polystyrene packing peanuts. The mysterious medallions of ‘pepperoni’ resembled scabby husks of skin, except I’m pretty sure my own dermal flakes actually taste of something. Even the olive slices managed to be overwhelmingly bland, with only hints of saltiness peeping through occasionally. It’s rare to encounter a dish so bleached of taste that I reached for a bottle of vinegar to test my tastebuds and nose for ageusia and anosmia.
Despite ordering a blackcurrant crumble, what actually arrived appeared to be some kind of toffee cheesecake. It was the least offensive item in the entire order, even though the cheese layer almost resembled marshmallow.
If it were possible to send takeaway orders back to the kitchen, as you can with dishes in a restaurant, I would’ve done so with the dreary discs of despair and despondency from Village Pizza Vegan.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £12.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
The pubs
Flatboys
Although strictly speaking not a pub, Flatboys seems to have residencies almost exclusively within pubs such as Kennington’s The Ship. I wasn’t expecting much, which only heightened my enjoyment of their crusts and bases. Thin, soft, pliably elastic and reasonably puffy, they were surprisingly superb. Although the basil on the margherita wasn’t up to much, the mozzarella had a slippery silkiness, while the tomatoes were sweet and umami.
Pistachio on a pizza sounds odd, but the nuts were surprisingly tame. They weren’t missed though as the smooth, salty and slippery mortadella melded seamlessly with the taut mozzarella and milky ricotta for a punchy yet light helping of scran.
Flatboys may be one of the lesser-known pizza operations in the London Bridge area, but it deserves far more credit than its getting. With pizza as well-crafted as this, they’re far from falling flat.
★★★★★
Margherita price: £9.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
The Libertine
The Libertine is a proper pub with sticky floors and oddball characters propping up the bar. Its pizzas were the weakest of the pub pizzas here, mainly due to the bready and stiff but still thin and moist bases.
The Libertine’s margherita suffered from wilting tomatoes, but the basil was punchy while the mozzarella had some reasonably creaminess and heft to it.
Smooth, salty and fatty Parma ham was paired with tangy gorgonzola to mouth pleasing effect. Rocket, for once, justified its presence – its pepperiness helped cut through the richness of that meat-dairy duo.
Don’t bother with the brownie. While reasonably squidgy and fudge-like, it was ultimately too dry and wan.
While The Libertine’s pies are the weakest of the pub pizzas here, they’re still infinitely preferable to many of the other pizzas in this group test – including those from many actual restaurants.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £8
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
The Three Stags
I still find the idea of pubs serving pizzas to be quite odd, so a pub dishing up vegan pizzas alongside the usual topping suspects immediately tickled my cheese-addled mind.
Although the crusts were a tad too dense and thick, they were far from tough or inedible thanks to their bouncy, puffy softness blackened just so with a bit of char. The lactic heft of the margherita’s mozzarella melded beautifully with the sweetness and acidity of the tomatoes and the herby fragrance of the basil.
The Three Stags’ vegan pizza suffered from unpleasantly gummy cheese-substitute, but at least there wasn’t too much of it. Aubergine and mushrooms were in scant supply, so the sweet, squidgy courgettes and sweet bell peppers took centre stage alongside the tomato. This was a heavily one-note pizza, although it was still considerably less grotesque than some of the other vegan pizzas in this round-up.
The Three Stags’ efforts aren’t without their flaws, but these were nonetheless respectable pizzas – and not just by the standards of a pub.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £9.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Win.
The old school takeaways
Some will scoff at the very idea of reviewing old school pizza takeaways, especially as they almost all use kits from the same small number of ‘food service’ catering supply companies. But not only are most people unaware of this interchangeable identikit pizza cabal, I did pledge to review all of the pizza eateries in my roughly-circumscribed patch of Southwark.
However, that does mean a slight change of approach for this section of the group test. To avoid otherwise deeply repetitive text, I’ll be covering some of the ‘margherita’ pizzas from these takeaways in the next paragraph or two. All of the more unusual pizzas for each eatery will then be covered separately. Hopefully this will all still be easy enough to follow.
One crucial thing to bear in mind with many of the ‘margheritas’ from these old school takeaways is that they’re Margheritas In Name Only (MINO, if you will) due to the obvious lack of basil and the almost guaranteed absence of olive oil. The crusts and bases are thick and somewhat stodgy, albeit soft and squidgy affairs that have more in common with a supermarket budget bread loaf than the better quality pizza doughs here.
The bland melanage of cheese and tomato not only tends to be inoffensively bland, but seemingly deliberately so. It’s almost as if they’re designed to look appealingly and televisually gooey at all costs, including at the cost of taste, with perhaps a hint of sweetness and acidity from the tomato occasionally, defiantly peeking through. The congealed cheese-and-tomato mix tends to sit on top of the base as a discreet layer, rather than seeping and melding in as with the better quality pizzas here, almost resembling plaque on dental enamel rather than something you’d actually want to eat.
All this applies to the MINO cheese and tomato pizzas from Big Ben, Honest Pizza, Red Planet and Tops.
The partial exceptions were De Milano, HFC and Pizza2Go. Meanwhile Forno, La Parma, Pizza GoGo, Verona (aka La Milano and La Venice) and Yummie Pizza managed to be more different.
De Milano’s effort was almost identical to the miscreants above, but for the addition of actual but droopy basil. Honest Pizza’s MINO was also highly similar to the above, but had only a vestigial crust with the toppings going straight to the edge.
HFC’s effort was – like your first adolescent whirlwind love affair – sweaty, spotty, overly eager to please and with an overwhelming saccharine-like sweetness. Pizza2Go added some dried basil to its otherwise cookie-cutter cheese and tomato effort, kinda sorta making it an actual margherita rather than just another Margherita In Name Only. The green flecks added a transient herbiness to an otherwise forgettable pizza.
Big Ben
Suitably enough for a pizza takeaway named after one of London’s landmarks, Big Ben has a pizza named ‘The Tourist’ which comes topped with meatballs, tandoori chicken, onions, jalapeno peppers and garlic sauce alongside the cheese. The bland chicken tinged with food colouring was the culinary equivalent of brownface, while the ‘meatballs’ were in reality just scabs of congealed mince.
Despite these glaring flaws, there was still joy to be had from this pizza. The moderately spicy jalapenos melded with the creamy heft of the cheese, both on top of the pizza and inside a stuffed crust version of the borderline stodgy, squidgy and bread-like crust, to make a surprisingly enjoyable guilty pleasure.
Big Ben’s tiramisu almost looked like a Philadelphia cream cheese sandwich and tasted like coffee cake skirting dangerously close to its use-by date.
If you’re going to insist on ordering pizza from an old school takeaway, then Big Ben – with very judicious ordering – is one of the least worst options.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £8.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
De Milano
De Milano isn’t related to La Milano, one of Verona’s alt trading names, as far as I know. The only amusing thing about the Sausage Passion was the name. The promised salami and olive oil was absent, while the ‘hot dog’ slices tasted like bland, grainy turkey-based pepperoni. ‘American sausage’ was vaguely garlicky. The tomato had very occasional hints of acidity, while the cheese had even less to say for itself. This motley selection of butcher’s and grocer’s rejects was made even intolerable by the foam mattress of a crust.
De Milano’s Hanky Panky pie wasn’t, surprisingly, a carbon copy of the one from Red Planet. Vaguely like an enbiggened Oreo, a wince-inducingly sweet layer of frosting came sandwiched between a crunchy, tightly crumbed dark biscuit layer on the bottom and a vaguely chocolatey layer up top. It’s less hanky panky and more like a fumbled snog round the back of the bike shed.
It was while trying to stomach the misery of De Milano’s pizzas that I started to question the wisdom of this entire undertaking.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £11.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Forno
‘Forno’ is apparently Italian for ‘oven’, although the oven used by this takeaway probably doesn’t meet all the stringent criteria required by the gatekeepers of Neapolitan pizzas. The crusts here were thin and light, but spongy in their breadiness.
The cheese and tomato of Forno’s Margherita In Name Only melded into a generic umami that faded quickly.
Forno’s California was far better. The bittersweet combo of spinach and sun-dried tomato, dotted with the occasional crunch of red onion and the saltiness of feta, helped partially wash away the memory of the dreary margherita. Tomato, cheese and dill added a mild moreishness. Despite the still spongy crust, all these toppings made for an enjoyably guilty pleasure.
Forno’s tiramisu was almost identical to the one from Verona – a spongy, frigidly cold and bland mockery of an actual tiramisu.
Forno can make a half-decent pizza when the kitchen puts its mind to it. They just need to do that a bit more often.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £8.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin/Bin.
HFC
As its Colonel-inspired name alludes to, this takeaway doesn’t just dish up pizza but a whole smorgasbord of other Friday night classics from fried chicken to kebabs.
Its ‘thin and crispy’ base was only marginally more waifish than its bog standard, bread-like ‘deep pan’ effort and not crispier at all. The prawns, cheese and tomato added remarkably little to the ‘Ocean delight.’ Even the tuna only managed to add an occasional fishy brine-like presence, which may as well have come straight out of a tin. The big fish in this pond were the wee anchovies which added a salty, briney hit.
HFC’s pizza aren’t complete POS, but TBH IMHO AFAICT they’re treading water.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £6.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Honest Pizza
Honest Pizza isn’t related to Honest Burger. It’s just as well as it’d be shocking if one of London’s best burger restaurants had suddenly tried their hand at pizzas and come up with something so stunningly average.
To be fair to Honest Pizza, while the crust on their margherita (mentioned above) was distinctly undistinctive, they managed a better job with the crust on their doner kebab pizza. While still doughy and thick, it did somehow have a crisply puffy mantle – at least when warm – which proved to be a guilty pleasure.
This was more than can be said for the meat. The dry coils of what was allegedly doner meat were made edible only by liberally applying the pots of garlicky spicy sauce, served on the side. The onions and extant tomatoes were just as beige as the melted cheese and tomato.
The headliner of the chocolate fudge cake was far too solid to pass as fudge, but it was at least sweet – which is probably the best one can hope for in a dessert from an old school takeaway. The mystery white layer was excessively sweet, while the biscuit base was tightly crumbed.
If only Honest Pizza had been able to replicate their crisply puff crust – it would’ve been a lot easier to forgive their dreary toppings. As it is, Two Stars and no cigar.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin/Win.
La Parma
La Parma isn’t quite like most of the other old school takeaways here. Rather than thick and stodgy, its dough formed thin and light, yet floppily insubstantial crusts and bases. Think of a bog-standard supermarket pizza base and you’ll be along the right lines.
La Parma’s margherita not only had actual basil, but fragrant basil to boot. It was far more enjoyable than the swirly mass of generic tomato and cheese which had settled into a thin layer that could be peeled off the base like dead, chapped skin.
The grab bag of fruits de mer on La Parma’s seafood pizza had the feel of a supermarket selection, but this played into this pizza’s messy, dribbly, salty strengths. Mixing shrimp and squid rings into the cheese and clamato-like concoction of brine and tomato made for an unexpectedly cockle-tingling guilty pleasure.
It’s almost impressive how malformed La Parma’s tiramisu is at every conceivable level. The biscuit layer was a dry husk with a vague hint of booze, while the alleged cheese was wince-inducingly frigid.
La Parma’s pizzas are the rough equivalent of a broadly inoffensive supermarket pizza, but with the cooking done for you. That may well be the best anyone can hope for from an old school takeaway.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £9.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Pizza2Go
A bolognese pizza is the kind of culinary creation that could launch a thousand memes if it was outrageously daft enough. Sadly, Pizza2Go didn’t have the stones and ended up creating what would’ve been a semi-serious attempt at a proper pizza if it hadn’t been so ham-fisted.
Shrug-inducing minced beef had faint hints of booze, while onions and mushrooms had an occasional moreish tang. It hardly made for a convincing bolognese ragu, even less so when taken with the same squidgy, stodgy base and tomato sauce dotted with dried basil as Big Ben’s margherita. If you order the stuffed crust variant, don’t try to be clever by slicing the crust open length-ways to slurp out the cheese and pepperoni inside. The sickly sweet cheese and the cheap, credulity-stretching so-called pepperoni made for slimy, unwholesome eating. This is probably the closest I’ll ever come to dissecting a bovine fallopian tube.
The loose-crumbed base of the Tennessee toffee pie almost resembled Hobnob crumbs. But this goodwill was wasted by the insipid saccharine sweetness of the toffee and icing sugar/cream cheese layers.
Pizza2Go? PIease, hell no.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £14.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Pizza GoGo
Branches of Pizza GoGo not only seem to be everywhere in London, but seem to have been around forever – even though you probably don’t know anyone who’s ever actually ordered a pizza from them.
You’re not missing out on much, at least you’re not if you order from the Tower Bridge branch. The optional thin crust was crunchy with a floppy base, somewhat resembling a stale, warmed-over breadstick. The honestly-advertised Cheese and Tomato relied on the vaguely milky and somewhat caramelised cheese for flavour as the tame tomato might as well have been completely absent.
Pizza GoGo’s standard crust was in the vein of those from other old school takeaways: thick, bready and stodgy. Even so, that crust was almost a welcome relief from some of the flaws of the burger pizza. The weeny cubes of textureless beef were more like a plant-based protein alternative, while there was next to none of the promised burger sauce. There was a mild sweetness and crunch from the onions, extant tomatoes and gherkins, but it’s a very sad burger pizza indeed that has to lean on those toppings for joy.
I’m not sure why Pizza GoGo serves churros, but I do know that you shouldn’t order them. These churros were pale, flabby, sweaty and droopy – much like someone who’s been eating too much pizza. The unwholesome, unappetising appearance and mouthfeel almost made me think these churros had been steamed rather than fried. In any case, the mediocre melted chocolate inside counted for little.
Pizza GoGo? Pizza no, no.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin/Bin.
Pizzeria L’Opera
Pizzeria L’Opera is another takeaway on Old Kent Road, a few doors down from Verona, but there’s not much to sing about here.
The thin and soft crust was forgettably breadstick-like. Just as yawn-inducing was the generic umami from the melding of cheese and tomato in the margherita. A few burblings of fruity acidity seeped out along with vague whispers of dried basil, but that’s as much noise as this margherita managed to make.
The ‘Buffalo’ margherita was barely any better. Indeed, if anything, it was worse. Not because the extra toppings were necessarily meagre in number, but because they were meagre in quality. Laid on top of the standard margherita were drearily dull discs of buffalo mozzarella and equally ineffective cherry tomato pieces. Basil oil had allegedly taken the place of the dried basil, but if anything it had even less stage presence.
Dry slabs of chocolate cake – on more than one occasion – barely had any sweetness, despite the sponge’s sarcophagus of icing.
The strawberry cheesecake was a little bit better, the so-so strawberry compote sitting atop tart cream cheese and a loose-crumbed biscuit base. Even so, a Muller Corner with some Hob Nobs would’ve been more convincing.
Much like the GoCompare tenor, the pizzas from Pizzeria L’Opera are irritatingly bad but ultimately more or less harmless.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Red Planet
If you’re expecting pizzas that are out of this world from Red Planet, despite the already attested cookie cutter mediocrity of their ‘margherita’, then I’m here to bring you back down to Earth.
The idea of doner kebab meat on a pizza fuelled my imagination, but the reality was only slightly more edible than four-star leaded petrol. The ‘deep pan’ crust was even thicker and stodgier than Red Planet’s usual, while sweetness was the dominant taste in the toppings from the bell peppers to the oddly chosen burger sauce. The dry, oversalted coils of doner meat were not only lost amidst all the sweetness and the cheap, heavy cheese, it was also a grave insult to the spitroasting traditions of the eastern Mediterranean. This doner pizza might have had a chance at working with better tomatoes and perhaps some chillies and some form of garlic. But I guess we’ll never know.
Red Planet’s suggestively named Hanky Panky Cake was about as titillating as a blow-up doll. The loose-crumbed, somewhat moreish biscuit base was reasonably enjoyable. The forgettable chocolate and the vaguely sweet and tart cheese layer were not.
Red Planet’s pizzas not only failed to reach orbit, they couldn’t even achieve lift-off.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.75
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Tops
Tops’ cheeseburger pizza was surprisingly evocative of an actual burger, much more so than the competition. Although finely ground, the minced beef was reasonably tangy. Its moderate heft and the sweetness of the cheese and burger sauce was offset reasonably well by crisp onions and sharp pickles. The thick doughiness of the kit-dervied base was oddly fitting here, helping to complete this guilty pleasure.
The biscuit base of the banoffee pie was surprisingly passable, but everything else was not. The caramel layer was lip-shrivingly tangy, while the dairy layer was more like permafrost in its cold crunchiness.
There’s not a huge amount to Tops that separates it from its classic takeaway brethren, a choice topping here and there, but it’s just about enough to help it stand apart. Just.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £10.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Verona (aka La Milano, La Venice)
This Old Kent Road pizzeria cheekily trades under multiple names on the delivery apps, all with identical menus as far as I can tell.
While the margherita had reasonably umami tomatoes, the dried and extant basil failed to follow through. Mozzarella was slippery and taut, but tasted of surprisingly little. The biggest flaw, however, was the bland supermarket-style crust. While thin and light, it was still far too bready.
The same crust also afflicted the California. Despite this, as well as the wilting feta and merely performative spinach, this vaguely West Coast pizza wasn’t too bad. The sundried tomatoes and roasted onions were dominant with their sweetness, while undertones of dill and possibly garlic added a wee bit of extra character.
The tiramisu was less like the classic dessert and more of a vaguely tiramisu-themed sponge cake. Reasonably moist layers of sponge alternated with seams of bracingly cold and vaguely coffee-flavoured cream.
It’s underwhelming pap like this that helps give the eateries on Old Kent Road a bad name. No matter which name this takeaway trades under, consider it a choice of the very last resort.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £9.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Yummie Pizza
The annoyingly spelt Yummie Pizza oddly straddles the line between old school takeaway and delivery dark kitchen. Despite setting up shop in a railway arch, it insists on serving up a menu of what appears to be catering kit pizzas.
It does one thing slightly differently though – its crusts. Although Yummie’s thin crust option looks like those from other old school takeaways, it was far crisper and puffier – at least while warm. If you dawdle and let it cool, it can quickly harden and become far chewier. Still, while warm, it was a surprisingly decent foundation for the basil-free ‘margherita’. Indeed, it was arguably far more enjoyable than sweet, occasionally tart melange of bog-standard cheese and tomato.
Yummie has a couple of ‘spicy’ options on its menu, but only the ‘Indiano’ is advertised as having ‘chilli’ on it. That ‘chilli’ turned out to be hot sauce, but this wasn’t too bad as it did have some periodic spicy heat alongside its sweetness. Far more offensive was the textureless, flavourless cubes of what was supposed to be tandoori chicken. Almost as peculiar was the standard crust which, despite being unexpectedly thinner than the thin crust, was a far doughier, stodiger affair. It’s as if this pizza had been cobbled together from leftovers foraged from the back of a student’s fridge.
I have no idea why Yummie Pizza serves up churros, but I do know that you shouldn’t order them. Soft rather than crispy on the outside, chewy and flabby rather than airy on the inside, these churros were a perverse inversion of what churros should be like. The lip-pursing sweetness of the dulce de leche, found both inside the churros and as a dipping sauce on the side, added injury to insult.
Yummie Pizza came perilously close to rising above its old school takeaway and dark kitchen brethren with its thin crust, but came thudding back down to earth with its worn-out toppings. Not yummie, more like glummy.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £12.95
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin/Win.
Street food
Bad Boy Pizza Society
The slightly overnamed Bad Boy Pizza Society is the current incumbent pizza stand at Vinegar Yard, the property development site pretending to be a street food market.
Bad Boy are in reality good boys, knocking out pizzas with soft, gently charred crusts and thin, floppy bases. Although the crusts were slightly too chewy and not quite as puffy and airy as I would’ve liked, these were still well-crafted carby foundations.
Although the margherita suffered from wilted basil, it was far from being a dud. Supple, taut and hefty mozzarella came with umami tomato, both of which oozed seductively into the base.
Despite their name, none of Bad Boy’s alt toppings were especially daring. The headlining honey on the Notorious PIG was conspicuous by its absence, so the porcine duo of pepperoni and nduja had to pick up the slack. Pepperoni slices were suitably thick and meaty. While the nduja had some piquant pep in its step as well as a mild coarseness, both were still a little too restrained to truly stand out against the backdrop of quality mozzarella and tomato.
In the end the gang at Bad Boy were more like mama’s boys, sticking closely to the Neapolitan template with their attempts at innovation feeling a little timid. Still, their pizzas generally made for fine eating.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £8
Crusts- bin, sin, dip or win? Win.
Fresco at Mercato Metropolitano
I’ve reviewed the resident pizza stand at this large street food hall before, during the Before Times. For once, it’s a pleasure to say that an eatery has managed to get better with time – even if just a bit – rather than worse.
More pliable than an Olympic-level gymnast, the crust and base was soft, elastic and puffy with a gentle char. Although the basil on the margherita wasn’t up to much, the respectably creamy and taut mozzarella melded well with sweet, acidic tomato.
The quixotically-named Happy Grumpy took the same basil, dough and mozzarella from the margherita, while adding smol yet starchy and tender cubes of potato as well as a scattering of sausage meat. While reasonably bittersweet, the sausage wasn’t quite coarse and meaty enough. Even so, this was still a highly enjoyable pizza.
This stall is not only one of the few traders at Mercato Metropolitano that I can heartily recommend, it’s also one of the stars of this entire group test.
★★★★☆
Margherita price: £7
Crusts- bin, sin, dip or win? Win.
Good Slice at Flat Iron Square
Good Slice is the new pizza stand at the relocated Flat Iron Square, just a few doors from its previous location, replacing previous pizzaiolos Baz and Fred.
Smooth, slippery and hefty mozzarella was let down by a lone basil leaf that was only reasonably fragrant and tomatoes that had only a transient acidity. The biggest letdown of all was the base. Although thin and reasonably puffy, it was a bit too bready and not especially soft or elastic.
The ‘Big Smoke’ is not only an allusion to London, but refers to its smoked mozzarella. Its smokiness and creamy bulk tasted tailor-made for the aromatic rosemary, so it was a shame that there wasn’t nearly enough of the cheese. There weren’t enough of the sweet onions, either. Sheaves of potato were surprisingly light. The almost crust-less base was crunchy and airy, but unevenly so with the dough becoming noticeably thicker and jaw-stretchingly chewy towards the edges. Much like the city itself, the Big Smoke is a good idea in need of a lot more finesse.
The carby components of the Veggie were similar to those of the Big Smoke, but more evenly airy and crunchy crisp. Although noticeably improved, it was still arguably a little too hard in places. This relatively modest flaw didn’t dull my enjoyment of hefty, gooey mozzarella or the gently sweet and milky courgette. The tomato and wee dollops of pesto were only occasionally umami though, which made this otherwise enjoyable pizza somewhat out-of-kilter.
The Good Slice wants a slice of the action, but it keeps coming up short in one too many places. For now, anyway.
★★★☆☆
Margherita price: £9.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin/Sin.
The big chains
Domino’s
Having not eaten a Domino’s pizza in years, I braced myself for the worst.
Aside from the lack of basil, the honestly-advertised Cheese and Tomato was largely inoffensive. The predominantly sweet tomato, with the occasionally hint of mild acidity, was the primary force here as the cheese was a non-presence. While loaf-like, the crust and base managed to avoid becoming indigestible doorstops by maintaining a reasonable thinness.
Domino’s attempt at a cheeseburger pizza was ineffectual, largely due to the overly fine grind of its minced beef. The wilting onions didn’t help, nor did the overbearing combined sweetness of the tomatoes, burger sauce and pickles. The ‘Italian’ base was somewhat thinner and crisper than the standard base as seen above in the ‘Margherita’, but it was at best inoffensive rather than actively delectable.
Surprisingly, Domino’s pizzas weren’t the unbearably heavy stodgefests that I remembered. Having said that, the only reasons for actively seeking out a Domino’s pizza are a lack of edible alternatives and/or inhibition-altering intoxication. Damning with faint praise? More like celebrating with caustic weariness, perhaps.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £6.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Papa John’s
I had never really understood the cult of devotion surrounding Papa John’s. Having finally eaten some of their pizzas, I understand it even less.
Papa John’s ‘original crust’ was barely worth eating with its head-battering thickness. The headlining duo of the Cheese and Tomato cancelled each other out, resulting in an odd red-and-yellow melange of nothingness.
If Papa John’s cheese and tomato was a pale impersonation of a proper pizza, then their jackfruit-based pepperoni pizza for vegans was an oddly misshapen impersonation of a proper pizza. The plant-based vegan-friendly cheese had a slight slickness and gumminess to it, as well as a ruddy silkiness that almost made it more cheese-like than the actual dairy cheese in the Cheese and Tomato.
The jackfruit posing as pepperoni was not only a wholly unconvincing impersonation, it wasn’t even a pleasurable thing in of itself. I’d almost be tempted to compare its grainy bittiness to badly made examples of seitan, except that would be a disservice to badly made examples of seitan. To be fair, the tomatoes here did have an occasional hint of acidity and sweetness and the slender ‘thin’ crust was noticeably less stodgy than the original crust. Still neither of those attributes made this pizza worth relishing.
In hindsight, the lumpen and doughy cinnamon scrolls weren’t ideal as a dessert following a hulking pair of pizzas. Chunkiness aside, these scrolls were unimpressive with only the faintest whiff of cinnamon and only a mild sweetness despite the sodden downpour of icing sugar. Weak.
I’d rather have the clap than eat Papa John’s pizzas again.
★☆☆☆☆
Margherita price: £15.49
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Pizza Hut
This iconic chain and slice of manufactured Americana should need no introduction. Until this group test, it had been decades since my last slice of a Pizza Hut pie. Somewhat surprisingly, the crusts were thinner and relatively unstodgy compared to the otherwise comparable and typical form of an old school takeaway. It was still a bulky loaf of a meal, just somewhat less so than its late night high street competition.
One way in which Pizza Hut was indistinguishable from that competition was in the toppings of its Margherita In Name Only. The vaguely moreish melange of cheese and tomato was, unsurprisingly, devoid of basil.
The cheaper ‘flatbread’ pizza used a thin, floppy and forgettable base that has more in common with the tired pitta bread at a cut-price wedding buffet than a self-respecting pizzeria. The combination of pesto and tomatoes had a vague zingy sprightliness to it. The pairing of a vegan ‘Italian sausage’ with an equally plant-based cheese substitute was remarkable for tasting of nothing with an almost negligible mouthfeel. It was like eating calorific air. A pointless pizza if there ever was one.
Chocolate chip cookie dough arrived warm, but was barely palatable with a slight greasy consistency and minute chips that barely tasted of chocolate. The accompanying lilliputian pot of vanilla ice cream was similarly bland, but at least it was airy and light.
Pizza Hut has vast buying power and expertise – and yet the best they can do is no better than an old school takeaway relying on food service catering company pizza kits. That’s both an indictment of Pizza Hut’s supposed prowess and a backhanded compliment for those catering companies.
★★☆☆☆
Margherita price: £14.49
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Just outside the borough
I couldn’t help but order a few pizzas from just outside Southwark to satisfy my curiosity. Given this geographic cheekiness, these pizzerias are unrated for the purposes of this group test.
50 Kalò di Ciro Salvo
Despite the alleged reputation of the original restaurant in Naples, the crusts and bases of 50 Kalò’s pizzas were a somewhat variable affair. On one order, the crust was thin, but only reasonably soft and with merely satisfactory to below average levels of puffiness and elasticity. Everything was greatly improved on a subsequent order, although it was still a tad too chewy with not quite enough puffiness.
The best part of the margherita was undoubtedly the slippery and taut mozzarella with its creamy heft. It easily outshone the tame umami of the tomato and the faint fragrance of the basil.
The combination of fior di latte mozzarella and parmesan made for a luxuriantly creamy and umami white pizza. It was a fine foundation for the distinctive bittersweetness and fleshiness of the artichokes and the tanginess of the lightly chewy bresaola beef flaps.
50 Kalò’s tiramisu was oddly uneven. One portion had a heap of custardy cream tinged with bittersweet dark chocolate and a small but still reasonable helping of soft, squishy biscuit fingers. The other was just a blob of dairy with all the taste milked out of it.
Despite the wee portion size, the ricotta and pear torta – or a cheesecake to you and me – was well-crafted. The initial hit of sugary sweet and grainy pear was true to the fruit, while the milky cheese layer and tightly-crumbed base made for a fine follow-up act.
While moist and etherally light, the promised lemon-flavoured elements of the sponge cake were more aspirational than reality. The lemon juice custard and peel-scented sauce were generically sweet rather than zesty or tartly acidic in any way.
Even by the standards of hazelnut-chocolate spreads that are actually mostly chocolate, the brown stuff on the Nutella cheesecake was only occasionally nutty at best. The moistly fluffy cheese layer had a lot going for it; less so with the loose-crumbed biscuit base. It’s somewhat baffling that so many pizzerias not only insist on dishing up Nutella-based desserts, but rather mundane ones too.
Given the uneven efforts of 50 Kalò di Ciro Salvo, something has clearly been lost in translation in the move from Naples to London delivery and takeaway. Reputation, it turns out, isn’t everything.
Star rating: unrated
Margherita price: £11.45
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Bella Italia
Stalwart chain Bella Italia is perhaps best known for its cavalier attitude towards the fair distribution of tips among its staff (which is hopefully now in the past).
The margherita from The Strand branch was an unappealing construction that also belongs in the past. With none of the promised basil and barely any of the promised oregano, the meek melange of cheese and tomato would be more at home on a pizza from an old school takeaway than on a pie from a graspingly aspirational chain. The dusting of semolina on the crust couldn’t disguise the hard, slightly above average supermarket-quality crust. At least it had the decency to be thin and light.
With the ‘Pinsa Queen Margherita’, Bella Italia attempted to vajazzle its tired and drab melding of cheese and tomato with a couple of other ingredients and a different base. Sundried tomatoes made their presence felt with their distinctively sweet pop and tang, while buffalo mozzarella added occasional hints of milkiness and heft. Having basil pesto stand in for fresh basil is, in theory, a clever substitution. In reality, the pesto used barely tasted of basil, never mind anything else that’s supposed to be in that Genoese sauce.
The base and crust resembled stale focaccia which is either a sign of inept genius or genial ineptitude. All in all, this was a modest improvement over the dreariness of the standard margherita.
Although the tiramisu arrived looking a bit like a crustless crumble or Eton mess that had inadvertently stumbled into a tumble dryer, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Although there was nothing more to it than booze-soaked sponge, this did at least mean it tasted of something – which is an actual achievement given the objectionable tiramisus served by some of the pizzerias in this round-up.
Bella Italia’s casatelle proved to be unexpectedly winsome. Although the pastry was a tad too papery, it was thin and light. While the promised honey seemed to be missing and the filling was more icing sugar than cream cheese, it still had an appealing fluffy zestiness to it. Nibble off the top of each mini-empanada, drop in some of the crushed pistachio scattered inside the takeaway carton, and you have a winner.
Bella Italia were barely trying at all with their margherita and trying a bit, but not hard enough, with their pinsa margherita. The pizzas were less bella and more rubella.
Star rating: unrated
Margherita price: £9.99
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
Frankie and Benny’s
The two Frankie and Benny’s pizzas I had failed both in terms of basic competency and in fulfilling the overwrought ambitions of the menu writers.
The thin and bready bases just about managed to stay on the right side of hard. Just. They appeared to have been liberally dusted with semolina in a vain attempt to disguise their textural deficiencies.
All of this was a poor foundation on which to build a margherita, so naturally Frankie and Benny’s continued piling on detritus and dross. Bland cheese and no basil were bad enough. Recalcitrant tomatoes were even worse, with an acidity that regularly swerved into sourness.
I wasn’t expecting Texas Joe’s-level brisket from Frankie and Benny’s brisket-topped pizza, yet I was still surprised at just how cack-handed this meat-topped pie turned out to be. The ‘brisket’ was mushy pap inexplicably dressed in what appeared to be a cross between a cheap barbecue sauce and sweet chilli sauce. That combination led to a bracing sweetness that easily overwhelmed whatever tang the barbecue sauce might have had, as well as the bland cheese and the incongruous rocket. As inept mockeries go, this one is a work of art.
The fluffy cream cheese layer of the ‘New York City’ cheesecake was actually quite enjoyable. Everything else was not. The thin biscuit base was sodden by an excessive amount of caramel. The combined sweetness of the latter and the meringue shards was an exercise in real-time tooth decay.
To describe Frankie and Benny’s pizzas as dank and debased would, it turns out, be excessively lenient and generous.
Star rating: unrated
Margherita price: £8.90
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Bin.
L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele
The Soho branch of this famed Neapolitan pizza maker does deliver as far as Southwark. First, the bad news: while the bases of these unexpectedly large pizzas (roughly 12-13in) were thin and floppy, the crusts were just a bit too chewy – working my way through it was almost as chore-like as listening to the office bore ramble on for hours at a time.
The good news is that the toppings were top notch. The lactic milkiness of the mozzarella, sweet umami of tomato plus the aroma and almost zesty ting of the basil came together beautifully. Everything was perfectly balanced with no one topping crowding out or overwhelming the other.
The cheeseless Pescatora is extravagantly spendy for a pizza at £28.90, but the vibrancy of the toppings was undeniable. Although the promised scallops were missing in action, the plump prawns honked with both freshness and a musky funk. Mussels still in their shells were briney and fleshy, while squid was firm and bouncy. Even with the sweet umami tomato, the sheer bulk of these oceanic toppings meant this was less a pizza and more of a seafood platter served on an edible carby plate smeared with tomato.
The pizza fritta here was a smidge thicker and doughier than the one from Theo’s, but it was still a remarkable testament to the art of deep frying. Golden-hued and almost grease-free, the intimidatingly hench yet wafer thin Italianate pasty had a delicate crispness that gave way to a gently tuggable chewiness. This eminently moreish dough envelope contained milky ricotta, brawn-like ciccioli and smoky, gently fatty pancetta. It was all bound together with a modest yet unmistakably potent dusting of freshly ground black pepper.
If you’re after some of those bracingly fresh prawns from the Pescatora pizza, but in a more manageable size, then the prawn carpaccio starter may suit. While almost in the same pricing ballpark as the Pescatora (£16.90 and £28.90 respectively), the heaping of crustaceans was reasonably generous and their quality was indisputable. Henchly curvaceous yet firm with an almost citrusy sweetness, they were so enjoyable that I was almost primed to overlook the promised but missing garnishes of pistachio and shaved truffle.
Although the dark chocolate coating of the Bronte sponge cake was nothing to write home about, this dessert still had plenty of charm. The delicately soft and moist sponge was a fine conveyor for the pistachio sauce which was remarkable for its flavoursome faithfulness to the nut.
I’m fairly certain that the curls of nodini are deep-fried knots of pizza dough. In any case, each loop was gently crisp then chewy. Dusted with crunchy demerara sugar for an extra textural twist, then doused with more of the that delectable pistachio sauce, these nodini were direct in their delightfulness.
While the tiramisu was small, it was perfectly formed. The eggy and custardy cream cheese layer draped seductively across the delicately soft sponge, while hints of dark chocolate and coffee wafted about. It was all impeccably tasteful, flavourful and balanced.
The Delizia Limone is the unfulfilled promise of all those lemon drizzle cake slices that you’ve ever bought from a bake sale out of politeness, finally given spongiform. A seductively eggy and buttery core of cream cheese came encased in a delicate fruit-tinged sponge which was itself lacquered with a custard mildly evocative of the fruit. Both boldly creamy and subtly fruity, it was surprisingly beguiling.
Despite the issues with its crusts, L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele would’ve come close to winning this group test due to the sheer quality of its toppings – if it had actually been based in Southwark. Alas, its inclusion here is merely as an honorary curiosity – but what a delightful, spine-straightening curiosity it is.
Star rating: unrated
Margherita price: £14.50
Crusts- bin, sin or win? Sin.
Conclusions and The Winners
It won’t surprise any of you to learn that there’s a truckload of bad and mediocre pizza out there in the London Bridge/north Southwark area – and thus almost certainly throughout the rest of the capital too.
As no-one out there seems to be pushing the state of the pizza arts forward in ASAP Pizza’s absence, if you want quality pizza that actually tastes of something then you have to seek out a Neapolitan-style pizza. That’s not to say that the tried-and-tested Neapolitan style is the only way in existence to make a cracking pizza. But if you want a pizza in this part of town that won’t leave you filled with regret then you have to get one from Bon Vino Enoteca Maltby Street, Crust Bros, Franco Manca, Pizza Pilgrims, Flatboys, The Three Stags, Bad Boy or Fresco at Mercato Metropolitano.
While perusing that list of winners, it’d be tempting to think that the pizza centre of power in this part of London has decisively shifted away from high streets and late-night old school takeaways to retail developments, residencies and street food halls. Especially given the headlines about the financial problems at Pizza Express.
That may be true if taste and texture are your paramount concerns. But, at the risk of sounding even more patronising than I actually am, it’s different for the people that can’t tell the difference or for whom cost, convenience and predictability/familiarity are more important than taste. For them, the big chains and old school takeaways (not to mention supermarkets and their pizzas) continue to hold sway and at least some of them were unexpectedly bustling with trade during the course of this group test.
One final thought. Given the national fixation on deep-fried food, it’s perhaps surprising that pizza fritta aren’t more widespread and popular in London and the rest of the UK. They certainly can be damn delicious in a way that a standard pizza cannot. Whether this is an untapped opportunity or an understandable omission given the culinary conservatism represented by the state of pizza generally on this island, is a topic for another time.
– TPG
The Picky Glutton 