15 October 2025

London’s pizza scene is in search of a soul

We are in danger of confusing skill with flair

I read a bold claim from the good people at GQ last week. “London is the best pizza city in the world,” the quarterly reported. Men have been imprisoned for lesser iconoclasm. But I am sure that the Italians will react with composure and proportion to this sledgehammer diplomacy.

GQ tells a simple story. PizzaExpress, that eden of cheap marble and children’s birthday parties, was hegemonic for around 50 years. Franco Manca came along in 2008 – a chain where customers must chew their way to eternity if they wish to finish their dinner. Neapolitan-style pizza (soft bases with puffy crusts and thin sauce) was soon the default setting for the London parlour, with Santa Maria Pizzeria in Ealing leading the way, and all of a sudden the market exploded. Now, Naples pizza is standard pub fare for whatever London’s answer is to the 2015 hipster. Every day – one can only assume – a new wood-fired oven is built to sustain the ballooning demand.

And so, on a Tuesday night in a fit of journalistic rigour, I am at the Perseverance in Bloomsbury to test the hypothesis. We eat pizza supplied by D4100. There is a lot to like – it is grounded in Neapolitan technique, with salty, fatty sausage meat, burdened by the zeitgeisty practice of drowning everything in “hot honey” and whipped feta. Three days later I reach my pizza quotient – at the Shakespeare in Stoke Newington (full of men with moustaches and earrings) we share a bland, wouldn’t-write-home-about-it Margherita. Which means it is still delicious.

Because pizza is conceptually loose (the ur-pizza might have been a Greek flatbread served with grapes) it is vulnerable to expansive variation. Chicago style is closer to a tomato pie; in New York it is typically served by the slice, with a milkier cheese than we are used to here. And so on. In London, there are no frontiers – whatever you want, you can get. At Crisp in Hammersmith handsome Londoners line up for hours to eat perfectly balanced, acidic sauce on teeth-cracking crunchy bases. At Ria’s in Notting Hill you can order the focaccia-adjacent Detroit iteration. And New Haven – a style born from the question “what if we burned the shit out of lunch?” – can be found at Lenny’s Apizza in Finsbury Park.

I have never been served a bad pizza by any of these places. Not the case in Naples – one recent summer, a surly waiter all but frisbeed a half-cold Vesuvio in my general direction with the kind of mirth locals only reserve for tourists. But there I was in a place where the pizza is a literal expression of geography and economic status – dinner for the urban poor made with southern Italian ingredients. In New York it is the story of immigration, as Mediterranean hot-headed Catholicism meets the muted palates of New World Protestantism. In London? The quality is hard to argue with, but the trend is rooted in nothing more than Instagram likes.

And so, we are in danger of rewarding technical literacy in place of soul, of confusing skill for flair. It is like elevating a draftsman with photorealistic capabilities to the status of a great artist – or misconstruing the task of a stenographer to that of a historian. It is an argument that is guided by reason and economics (boring!) not imagination and emotional force; one that over-indexes execution at the expense of romance; that prioritises formal competence over truth and beauty. This instinct is how otherwise intelligent and decent people lock themselves into defending indefensible positions – such as “Raphael is as interesting as Michaelangelo” and “Ronaldo is as fun to watch as Messi”.

At the end of this transformative culinary decade, London has emerged as something like a pizza John Lewis. Everything you could ever need is there – after it has been stripped of flair, elan, temperament, style and wit. (In this way and many others John Lewis is the spiritual antithesis to Italy.) London’s deracinated pizza landscape is varied and vast but it lacks any of the meaning found in Naples. We must not mistake cosmopolitan dazzle for charm.