9. Alley Cats w/ Guy
A meal featuring [REDACTED], [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] 🤐
📍 Alley Cats Pizza, Marylebone, W1U 5QY
📆 7:30pm, Friday 18 April
Fry and Laurie. French and Saunders. Wissa and Mbeumo.
These are the definitive all-time great partnerships. If Guy and I were funny and / or successful, they’d talk about us in the same way. Despite those shortcomings, I am so excited to share this one with you.
This is edition number nine of the London Pizza Pal newsletter - enjoy! 🍕
THE VENUE
My flatmate and I went through a riffing stage in late summer 2022 where we referred to ourselves collectively as a fictional jazz duet of ‘Bin Dog and Alley Cat’.
It was short lasting and only memorable because I signed off a postcard with it that remains in the flat - else it would be lost to the annals of history. But it was enough to stand out when I put together my longlist of pizza restaurants in advance of this project.
I chose it for this week specifically because it is close to Euston, where Guy’s train was arriving, and because they do walk-ins only after 5pm - and I hadn’t planned sufficiently far in advance to book anywhere. Beyond that, I knew nothing.
Preparation is overrated - let’s get it.
THE PIZZA
PRICE - 1.5 / 5
These New York style pizzas are bigger than average (14 inch) but the £16 price tag for a Marg is very steep.
APPEARANCE - 3 / 5
I must admit I’m never a fan of a drizzled sauce on a pizza. It makes me feel uneasy and reminds me of terrorizers that insist on a dip to accompany their crusts, mayo or BBQ sauce the harbinger of greasy smears across water glasses and scrunched napkins.
SERVICE - 2.5 / 5
Yet another middling service experience. I await with eagerness a server that does anything positive of note.
Highlight in this category was at the end of the meal, when we were given a bespoke tablet device. I thought was an electronic bill reader / card reader combo, but was in reality an unnecessary fancy customer service survey.
On said survey, you could individually rate the items on your bill. The only thing I did, out of curiosity to see if it would work, was to click on the ‘Tap Water’ and mark it as ‘Tasty’ and ‘Would recommend’ because I thought it was a ridiculous option. It worked. I found it very funny.
TASTE - 2.5 / 5
Guy is vegetarian, and so we chose the vegan nduja pizza as our second sharing option. Both pizzas were okay - I did find them very filling for a thin-crust style and couldn’t finish what I was eating (unheard of).
My working theory is that the level of salt on both was dehydrating and masked genuine flavour. Either that or we over-ordered.
AMBIENCE - 4 / 5
Alley Cats was a lovely place to be! It did feel like a proper NY pizzeria with its red and white checked tablecloth and half-curtained windows.
Minus one point because a very irate man in the queue kept putting his head through the curtain around the entrance area to gesticulate at a poor waitress. Still don’t know what he was complaining about, there was evidently nowhere for him to sit.
It’s not a great showing for Alley Cats and sits second bottom in the leaderboard. I would still recommend it for a visit, but as one of the fancier joints so far, it did little to justify its exclusivity.
THE GUEST
Name: Guy
Job: Playwright
Last pre-pizza rendezvous: Four days ago
This is Guy!
Guy has been my closest friend for nearly 15 years. I met him when he joined the senior school in 2011 and is the first person I remember actively thinking “I want to be your friend.” We have been ever-presents in each other’s lives since.
We did the formative staying-up-all-night-sleepovers and angsty-teenage-drinking-in-the-park together. We’ve played more sport, done more theatre and had more arguments than I can possibly imagine. I’ve been the live-in cat sitter at Guy’s house multiple times and been for drinks and dinner with his parents, without him, twice.
Certainly, our friendship has blossomed since those two 13-year-olds sat chatting about Danny Welbeck’s potential in Mr Cross’ English lessons.
Our shared interests? This list is too long. Guy’s even started running for fun, which was one of the only historic differentiators (and yes, obviously I’m jealous that he’s quicker than me). Basically, it’s everything except chocolate, because Guy is ~~different~~.
In this sections about my guests, I champion candour and openness - because it’s more interesting to read, and because realistically who would I be trying to impress by being coy?
But, the coincidental timing of our dinner was such that we both had a lot we needed to talk about. And, given Guy is in the frontrunner for the ‘this is the person I am least protective about sharing my thoughts with’ award, it means that 95% of our conversation is too personal and not fit for public consumption.
It’s taboo. Classified. Redacted. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.
This is where the format points should save me - like I do with all guests, we may recount a fond shared memory of each other and be done with it.
But at this juncture I was presented with two challenges. The first? It was never a problem to find a treasured memory of Guy - the problem was always narrowing down 15 continuous years of friendship into a few representative paragraphs.
The second? Guy has never read this newsletter. Not once. He protests it’s because “I’m not really on Instagram” but I know for a fact that a) he knows what Substack is and b) he has an email address, meaning he hasn’t even bothered trying to subscribe.
So, to my oldest friend, I had to explain that I will be writing about this and that for the sake of content, if he could just take this seriously and respect my art, that would be great, thanks.
After a few moments of thought, contemplating the stringency of format alongside his own response, Guy picked, unprompted, the same memory I planned to share. But unlike Clemmie, I’m not going to come up with a non-clashing alternative. I think you’ll understand why.
(Considering this a warning, the vibe is about to change massively).
Three days after my mum died, with a week or so before the funeral, I went back up to university. I couldn’t face being in her house, I didn’t want to be in London. And besides, I was about halfway through my (already catastrophically late) dissertation.
I had made a determined commitment to myself that I’d be f**ked if I wasn’t going to finish my degree on time. So, I found myself grieving, in a mostly-empty house in the middle of the Easter Holidays, writing a 12,000 word comparative study of interwar propaganda in Japan and Britain.
Guy came to stay with me. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t offer. No hesitation, no choice given, no questions asked - he was there.
We went to Tynemouth and played beach cricket with a baseball while for some booming out Starships by Nicki Minaj on a speaker. We went to a stand-up night in a Italian restaurant and had Limoncello shots and laughed at the ‘comedy’. We watched the Champions League Quarter Final at my kitchen table, Raheem Sterling’s last minute winner against Tottenham disallowed for offside because Bernardo Silva feathered a touch.
But most of the time, we did nothing. Because, what is there to do? When the world has fallen away from under you, cut you adrift in an unnavigable sea of murkiness, how do you begin to start again?
In the midst of everything happening you find yourself a passenger - the football relentlessly continues and the sun keeps rising and setting and no matter how hard you try, you can’t make your unidentifiable and all-encompassing feelings go away.
I suppose, really, what you end up doing is carrying on. You do the things you’ve always done, and they’re the same but they’re different, and it’s indescribably awful, and everyone knows that, but there’s nothing to be done. You just carry on.
I was only able to carry on because Guy was there too. Beyond the obvious, Guy knew me and he understood my pain and comprehended the uniqueness of my grief.
He gave me the space and the patience and the forgiveness I couldn’t even begin to understand, let alone give myself. He didn’t know what he was doing, neither of us did. But he was unfalteringly selfless, incomparably generous, assertively brave - that we, together, could work it out.
Years later, looking back, I only remember the highlights from that week. The darkness was there, undoubtedly. The darkness has never left. But my only reflection of that specific time is Guy’s light.
How lucky.
How lucky I was to have him then, how lucky I am to have him now.
Thank you, Guy.
Goodness. Isn’t it nice when we all talk about our FEELINGS. Hope you weren’t expecting a gentle Easter Sunday read (if you were, consider yourself royally pranked).
I’m visiting Guy’s adopted Glaswegian home in early May. In between the planned fishing trip, camping and pub visits, he’s promised to take me to his favourite pizza restaurant there. So in two firsts for this newsletter, we’re going to have a returning guest and a non-London review. I promise the outlook in chapter two will be sunnier. The weather in Glasgow? Maybe not.
A final thought from me: I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing these and hope that you’ve enjoyed reading them. I’d love to commit to more ambitious ideas and your feedback helps me understand interest - please do drop a comment with your thoughts!
Thanks so much for reading, I hope to welcome you back soon.
Bye! 🍕
Want to be a guest and join me for dinner? Book your slot using this calendar: https://cal.com/andrew-cowburn/pizza