10. Alby's Pizza w/ Danny
A meal featuring bickering, *big* pizza and bullseyes 🎯
📍 Alby’s Pizza, inside Someday Finsbury Park, N4 3FU
📆 7pm, Tuesday 6th May
Hey stranger!
It’s been a while, and that’s on me not you.
It was bound to happen at some point; life got in the way. A mixture of new work patterns and trips and working-on-consecutive-Saturday-mornings-that-I-may-or-may-not-get-TOIL-for has derailed this pizza train. Maybe not a full derailment - not a “75 injured in mass incident” kind of derailment, more a 20 minute delay waiting for a free platform at Waterloo.
The good news is I’m back! AND ready to bring you more London pizzeria reviews. So, to continue the transport analogies, all aboard the second best ship there is: friendship (ranked second, because realistically no ship is beating the hovercraft - it’s a marvel of modern engineering).
This is edition number 10 of the London Pizza Pal newsletter - enjoy! 🍕
THE VENUE
Alby has set up his (presumably eponymous) pizza joint within a bar next to Finsbury Park station.
On the one hand that’s great, because it means the industrial furniture and neon signs don’t look out of place, and it guarantees a good drinks selection without commanding restaurant alcohol prices.
The downside is that it does make it unnecessarily hard to find. Not ideal, particularly if you were to (hypothetically) be staring directly at the venue quizzically in the rain without (hypothetically) realising it’s the right place, because it (hypothetically) says “Someday” not “Alby’s” on the wall outside. Tough, for whoever that hypothetical person was.
THE PIZZA
PRICE - 4 / 5
Upset by the pricing controversy on a large pizza from bygone editions, my guest literally came armed with a calculator to prove that Alby’s represents consumer value.
I forget the exact calculations, but this mathematical expression* is a good approximation:
APPEARANCE - 4 / 5
22 inch pizza? Great for novelty value, great for photos where you want to look like a child.
SERVICE - 2 / 5
Order at the counter, collect at the counter - limited chance to interact with any staff and so it can’t score higher than a two.
TASTE - 3.5 / 5
A crunchier NY style slice that packed a flavoursome punch - this pizza banged.
But, if you consult the menu, you realise every single pizza comes slathered in confit garlic oil. After, then, I’d eaten three massive slices, I was unsurprisingly full.
Could I have done the sensible thing and left the final slice, and / or have taken it home? Yes, yes I could.
Did I do that? Well, let’s just say that when the King invites the simple knave to sample the fares of his feast, does not the knave need to be careful of besmirching fellow peasants for cordially accepting such a fine invitation?
Exactly. And that makes you think, doesn’t it.
(To be clear, I spent the tube ride home feeling a bit sick because I ate too much).
AMBIENCE - 3 / 5
We had a comfy circular booth to sit in and the background volume in the bar (at the start) was a pleasant level. But, the music did crank up at random intervals and by the end was too loud for what was, ostensibly, Tuesday - I can imagine it’s vibey as hell on a Friday night (which depending on what you want from your pizza experience is both good and bad I guess).
Alby’s Pizza tasted really good but most importantly scored consistently well across multiple categories. It jumps into second place - above Pizza Express Live because it didn’t cost £35 to get in.
*By the way I know that formula is an equation not an expression because it has an equals sign, and that it doesn’t represent what I’m trying to say. Don’t @ me, it’s literally a joke.
THE GUEST
Name: Daniel
Job: Director of a Dental Practice
Last pre-pizza rendezvous: A few weeks ago
This is Danny!
Danny and I met in year 7 when he joined my school. We became friends via the inimitable Guy around the time we were sitting our GCSEs.
Our attitudes to life, friendship and growth, both then and now, have always been slightly different. Danny can thrive in chaos. I tend to thrive within the constraints of order. Danny can be quick to challenge the status quo, for intellectual stimulation and interest in subsequent dialogue, whereas for me that represents unnecessary instability and should be avoided.
That’s by no means to say either of our outlooks is right or wrong (15-year-old me would have categorically contested that) - anyone that knows the both of us will say “yeah, they’re just different like that”.
As we’ve grown into adults, though, it’s exactly why I’m most interested in catching up with Danny. What once, from my side at least, was a humorous but very real contesting of views has developed into open discussions around the ways in which we’re different, which always leaves me feeling enriched and slightly wiser.
Our dinner conversation was varied, encompassing all from what constitutes modern community, differing excitement levels around the concept of networking, and where we’d been on our holidays.
Our shared interests? Among others, Spikeball, a probably-ironic-but-in-a-real-sense-definitely-not-ironic appreciation of 679 by Fetty Wap, and though it pains me to admit it, playing with throwing knives.
That final point is our shared memory of each other - I ask all my guests to share a positive anecdote from our friendship as a moment of enforced, but always appreciated, sincerity.
On a countryside sojourn with a group of school friends in one university summer holiday, Danny produced his new flick knife.
To be clear, this was nothing out of the ordinary. When Interrailing together, a significant percentage of Danny and I’s conversations were disagreements over how many knives constituted “too many” to carry through various parts of the Schengen area - spoiler, my answer was “one is too many”, and I lost.
While our friends did more normal things like “chat” and “catch up” on the patio, Danny convinced me (with little persuasion) to practise a far more vital life skill - slamming bullseyes with throwing knives. To what end? To look cold as hell, obviously.
For the avoidance of any doubt, there is zero chance on this earth that either Danny or I would ever carry a knife, anywhere, let alone throw one at anything other than a hay bale in a garden in Hampshire.
But I can’t deny, hitting that first bullseye felt really really good. It was even immortalised on film:
What a video. The audible shock in Danny’s voice, the terrible celebration dance (if you can even call it a dance?) - stick it in the Louvre.
We’ve both held onto that. Not just because it’s a bit of fun, though clearly it was - it represents a mellowing of our views.
So often in gentle but audible opposition to each other’s outlooks, in a strange way that moment was the creation of a strange detente, an unexpected treaty. A mutual acceptance that we weren’t always going to love the same things and that we’d hold disparate views, but that fundamentally we could jump the fence to the other side and the unknown, and it might just work out for everyone.
It represents, in a word, peace. Peace, sponsored by throwing knives. Go figure, I don’t make the rules.
Thanks so much for reading this edition of the London Pizza Pal newsletter. Hopefully, it’ll be less than two months before the next one (no promises).
Danny’s private question to me, to which I answer as honestly as possible in person but don’t write about, was “are you happy?” - my suggestion to you is that you ask a friend this very question in the next week.
Want to ask me a deeply intimate (and potentially damaging) question? Or just eat some pizza? You can book your slot by using the calendar in the footer. Until then, stay sexy. 😎
Bye! 🍕
Want to be a guest and join me for dinner? I’m catastrophically behind on my guestlist but you can still book your slot using this calendar: https://cal.com/andrew-cowburn/pizza
That king/knave metaphor really did, as you suggested it might, Make Me Think. Several times, in fact