2. Pizza Express Live w/ Grace
A meal featuring Ratatouille doppelgängers and a whole lotta jazz 🎶
📍 Pizza Express Live Soho, Dean Street, W1D 3RW
📆 6:30pm, Tuesday 7 January
Readers. What a treat I have in store for you.
It’s got everything! And by everything, I mean a healthy dose of sentimentality, cartoon lookalikes, and of course, everyone’s favourite thing - pizza.
This is the second edition of the London Pizza Pal newsletter. Enjoy! 🍕
THE VENUE
Pizza Express is a foundational stone of my psyche.
It’s where as a family we used to go out for lunch after church on Sundays (no criticisms but I am not religious, I think we went so that I could go to the local primary school)
It’s where I had my sixth birthday party - a pizza making masterclass (yes, it was every bit as awesome as it sounds).
I even have Gold membership status on their app because I buy FAR too many of their supermarket pizzas.
In essence, my Pizza Express lore goes hard.
Surprising, then, that I’ve never been to their flagship venue in Soho, Pizza Express Live.Every night, in this not-so-secretive basement, a jazz ensemble lines up for the diners.
Finally, I had my excuse to go.
THE PIZZA
PRICE - 1 / 5
£13.45 for a Classic Margherita is not wallet friendly, but the reservation cost is what informs this rating. To secure your table, you need to book. Booking buys you a ticket. My ticket was £35.
It did not include food.
That means really the pizza was really £13.45 plus £35, for a total of £48.45.
Ouch.
The price score only avoids a zero because at least you can see where your money is going - straight to the musicians in front of you.
APPEARANCE - 3 / 5
That’s a pretty good looking pizza. The size of the charred air pocket is particularly appealing to me.
SERVICE - 3.5 / 5
I felt like a Roman Emperor in Soho on Tuesday - a server bringing me libation and the finest food of the Mediterranean, all while the man played tunes for my amusement.
No complaints - the food came quickly and there was never any fuss. Only slight mark down was the inevitable Pizza Express confusion around how to use vouchers (yes, my gold membership got me £20 of free food 😎)
TASTE - 3 / 5
On its day, I think Pizza Express’ pizza tastes better than a three. But I can only rank what’s in front of me, and on this occasion it was middling.
Also, the eagle-eyed among you will recognise we didn’t order a Margherita and so have ruined the control experiment.
But plainly, if you’ve lived in England and haven’t had a Margherita from Pizza Express before then you must accept you’re really not the target audience of this newsletter.
AMBIENCE - 6 / 5
You’re annoyed that I’ve broken the scoring system? And given six out of five?
There’s an unbelievably talented jazz quartet playing six feet away from my pizza, for goodness sake. What more do you want??
A total of 16.5 pushes Pizza Express Live above Pizza Union to first on the leaderboard. That’s really only for the price - if you want a novel pizza experience with amazing entertainment, I cannot recommend it highly enough.
THE GUEST
Name: Grace
Job: Drama student & Maths and Sciences tutor
Last pre-pizza rendezvous: 1 (one) day ago
This is Grace!
We were both involved in a university production of The Canterbury Tales in early Summer 2017, but given our overlapping friend circles we’re certain we would’ve first met long before that.
Luckily, a mutual apathy for our origin story hasn’t proved problematic - we’ve been together now for five and a half years.
Our shared interests? Among others: dinosaurs, Leah Williamson, and a ruthlessly competitive attitude to all games that has been know to worry others in the vicinity.
The dinner conversation, when not limited by the jazz, was characteristically silly and revolved mainly around two things:
1. The absurdly long dessert spoon I was given that I used to steal the foam off Grace’s cappuccino from afar, and
2. The suave, solo diner in my eyeline across the restaurant, who with his glass of red and dour expression was the spitting image of food critic Anton Ego from Ratatouille:
WHERE’S THE RAT, ANTON? I hope he doesn’t mind my surreptitious photo.
I thoroughly enjoyed recounting happy memories with Theo last week over our pizza, and was excited to do again with Grace.
The memory she shared was from July 2019. We’d been dating for about a month - a whirlwind of graduating, returning home, holidays and trying to work out what the hell was going to happen next.
Visiting me in London, we’d made good of the sunshine and had lunch on the riverside in Richmond, before meandering up to the Park to see the deer.
Sun-kissed, we opted for the shade of a big oak tree, did the NYT crossword (badly) and accompanied by mint choc chip ice creams, watched the steady flow of planes descending over Twickenham to land at Heathrow.
The day was leisurely, tranquil, comfortable. I’m excited to have more days like that with Grace.
Fast forward to May 2024 for my happy memory.
Four months into a new, non-stop job, I was very tired. We were meeting friends in the Lake District for a much anticipated holiday, but wanted to carve out some quality time together first.
We travelled a day early, and spent the extra night in a gorgeous room above a pub way out in the Cumbrian countryside.
Despite having spent seven hours in the car together, and being fundamentally exhausted (not least cos I’d nearly rear ended the car in front by excitedly shouting ‘Spaghetti Junction!’ after seeing it on the map), we had one of my favourite ever meals together - for no other reason than because we were together and we were happy.
Our previous diner’s question for Grace was rooted in Medieval History:
The Carolingian king Charlemagne, later Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was preceeded by the Merovingians Fredegund and Brunhilda. In your own words, which of these medieval queens slayed more, and why? 💅
Understandably, at this point Grace questioned if I was even speaking English and said she had no idea who these people were.
She said she would get back to me with some bullet points, but hasn’t, so let’s just say Fredegund because it sounds like Fred Again. I’m pretty sure she has no interest in the music of said Fred, but realistically what are you mean to do with Theo’s question.
On which note, it’s time to leave you.
Thank you to Grace and to you, reader, for joining me in this second edition of London Pizza Pal! I do hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I did.
Grace has posed her secret question to the next guest, who I’m meeting on January 14th, so tune in next weekend for the newsletter.
Bye! 🍕
Want to be a guest and join me for dinner? Book your slot using this calendar: https://cal.com/andrew-cowburn/pizza
I, too, once nearly crashed due to excitedly shouting "Spaghetti Junction!"
Fantastic episode especially Ratatouille geezer