11. Pizza Express w/ Sacha
A meal featuring L&P, Lime ethics and lemon water 🍋
📍 Pizza Express St. Paul's, London, EC4M 8AY
📆 1pm, Saturday 7th June
🇮🇹 Sabato? Per la pizza? In questa economia? Mamma mia.
Mamma Mia indeed. Readers, I am so behind schedule. Not only do I have a backlog of 4 (four) dates to write about, I have maybe 5 (five) to reschedule and bookings until October.
So, Saturdays are no longer the preserve of Parkrun and the Premier League (let’s pretend I’ve been to more than one Parkrun, ever). Saturday has evolved; Saturday is pizza day. Does it make any difference? To you, no, but it does mean it’s taking up more of my time. So let’s get on with it.
This is edition number eleven of the London Pizza Pal newsletter - enjoy! 🍕
THE VENUE
Pizza Express brackets normal is different and distinct from Pizza Express brackets jazz bar. Comparing the two separately is essential.
Plus, my guest is somehow more of a Pizza Express fiend than I am. The app has a rewards system, my guest is the highest tier and has been for years - benefits include free dough balls, unnecessarily complicated set menus and even a cookbook (which I never redeemed when I had the Gold membership, because I’m a big stupid idiot moron).
Pizza Express was the only logical destination for our lunch. This is what we found.
THE PIZZA
PRICE - 2 / 5
The amount that Pizza Express charge is approaching eye watering.
Not a one star score, though, for there’s a silver lining. My guest in their infinite wisdom taught me that you can both get check-in rewards on your app simultaneously. I has (wrongly) assumed it was a one-person only scenario.
Great to know, one step closer to the cookbook.
APPEARANCE - 4 / 5
Let’s not lie, that’s an aesthetic looking pizza. Dare I say, quintessential in its image? Consider me daring.
SERVICE - 4 / 5
Our waitress had a lovely chat with us when taking our order (though I cannot for the life of me remember what about - it was about 6 weeks ago and lasted probably 1 minute).
TASTE - 4 / 5
I said at the jazz cafe (where the taste scored 3) that the Pizza Express ceiling is higher. This one banged. Four points.
AMBIENCE - 3 / 5
Big view of St. Paul’s Cathedral out the window and got a great 15 minutes of people watching waiting for my guest (who was, to no one’s surprise, late).
Also made me remember I came to this Pizza Express with my mum once, so that’s nice.
Minus marks because of the poster on the wall that just read:
CEL
EBR
ATE
Pizza Express beats its cousin on countback (meaning, the £35 jazz ticket is the differentiator). Pizza Express, old reliable, has my heart forever and always and I’m glad she came through once again.
THE GUEST
Name: Sacha
Job: Lawyer
Last pre-pizza rendezvous: Two weeks, on a train from Windermere to London
This is Sacha!
We met when Sacha joined the Sixth Form in 2014, but I don’t fully remember when we traversed the proverbial friendship Rubicon and became properly close.
We were in the same nine-person Literature & Performance class (think English for people that preferred watching books on stage than reading them), and by the end of school had evolved to being hanging-out-every-day, talking-all-the-time kind of friends.
Sacha is smart. Like, crazy smart. You might infer that because she’s a lawyer. I know that because she takes all credit for getting me above the grade boundary in Higher Level Chemistry - there was a time where she made me understand whatever the hell this means:
God it hurts my eyes.
But as useful it was to have Sacha as a private tutor, it’s our similarly stupid sense of humour that kept us friends for the following decade.
Our shared interests? !! HOT SOUP !!, anthropomorphising animals (Pterry the Pterodactyl is a decade long companion in our Facebook chat), and ‘Rat Scarf’ (20 Questions, but the most obscure Harry Potter references you can think of, e.g. the button that hits Dudley square on the head after Aunt Marge’s blouse bursts in Prisoner of Azkaban).
Our lunchtime conversation was manic. The highlight for me, in between nonsense comma general, was an ‘ethical conundrum’ Sacha faced. The ‘conundrum’ was pitched by Sacha thus:
I booked a Lime bike
A child tried to take said Lime bike
I said “Oh, I’ve booked that one”
The child walked away
Does that make me a bad person?
I’d argue it barely constitutes an anecdote, let alone a conundrum, and especially not an ethical quandary. A real skill, then, that Sacha took upwards of five minutes to say what is basically five sentences, and even more impressive that we eked out a further 15 minutes of conversation after.
My favourite memories of Sacha are all in realm of this sort of silliness. She’s not one to hold in a laugh, and remembering her scoffing at inopportune situations is joyous.
Coupled with a stoic non-propensity for bulls**t, Sacha was always destined to struggle on our L&P class theatre trips - where the whole point was to watch ‘imaginative’ and ‘creative’ stagings of classic texts.
I can think of three separate occasions of Sacha in floods of tears because she couldn’t stop laughing at the difficult Fringe theatre - and these are the memories we shared over lunch.
Number one: Frankenstein, Edinburgh (2015). What made Sacha laugh? Frankenstein’s Monster sat on stage, solo, naked, for the first 10 minutes. The constant grunting didn’t help.
Number two: Jane Eyre, The National (2016ish). What made Sacha laugh? A repeating thematic motif of the cast ‘running’ on the spot, each time accumulating more runners. By the third or fourth time (and I cannot stress this enough, there was no need for any running), Sacha had completely lost the plot.
Number three: Measure for Measure, Barbican (2015). What made Sacha laugh? After nearly 90 minutes of this Russian language performance (yes, it was subtitled), a montage; numerous, explicitly passionate depictions of prostitution on a revolving stage. Sacha was told by a teacher to be quiet because she was ruining the performance (she was, but not for us) and obviously this made her laugh more.
Even writing this now, 10 years later, is making my cheeks hurt. Great times, great people. I’m always down for more laughing like that, and Sacha is always game to do it too when we’re together. What a gift that is.
The backlog of write ups is beginning to loom over me. Thank god I’m Type B (ha) and can take that on the chin without worrying myself (ha ha)- lest we forget, this is a project I’m doing for fun.
The good thing is, even if I am worrying about it, which I’m not, I have unambiguously enjoyed every dining experience - including this one.
Did I oversimplify the Lime bike story for comedic effect? Who knows! That’s all part of the fun!
Thanks as always for reading, another review will be with you soon, probably. Catch you on the flipside.
Bye! 🍕
Want to be a guest and join me for dinner? Book your slot using this calendar: https://cal.com/andrew-cowburn/pizza