Lucy Hunter Johnston

Pizza Express is the ultimate comfort food — you know where you are with a Fiorentina

IWRITE this seated at my favourite table, in my favourite restaurant, crying softly into a Sloppy Giuseppe with extra jalapenos. OK, fine. I may be exaggerating slightly. I’m a Fiorentina-on-a-Romana-base-until-I-die kinda woman, obviously.

But now that I’m drunk on the garlic butter dripping almost erotically from a particularly delectable sixth dough ball I, perhaps misguidedly, feel no shame in admitting that I was a little overcome with emotion yesterday.

You see, news broke that things are looking dire for we imaginationally-challenged diners who consider a Monday night not spent at Pizza Express a wasted opportunity for cut-price carbs.

Rumours of financial difficulty have been flying around the gas-fired ovens for a while — and the cavernous, cookiecutter dining rooms that now sit empty on most high-street corners, rather sheepishly, haven’t exactly done much to instil consumer confidence.

But now it seems the beloved chain is preparing for crisis talks with its creditors. Allegedly, at the last reckoning it was found to be in debt to the tune of £1.6 million per restaurant which, admittedly, is rather a lot of Pollo ad Astras.

The company is downplaying concerns of an imminent demise, claiming it is simply redirecting efforts to improve its existing sites and revamp its menu.

I’ll save them a cool few grand in consultancy fees: this would be a catastrophic mistake. A menu revamp is exactly what we don’t want. The point of Pizza Express is that it’s steadfast — a constant in the culinary whirligig. You know where you stand with an American Hot. A Padana is a Padana whether you’re in Plymouth or Preston.

And, to be blunt, innovation isn’t exactly its strong point. This is a firm which created a low-calorie pizza by… cutting out the cheesy, defining heart of the thing and replacing it with a limp, anaemic salad. Know your limits, guys.

Sure, it’s far from the best crust, and it’s not even the cheapest — but by God it’s the most reliable. And it’s this reliability that has made those ubiquitous grey marble tables the stage upon which the theatre of life’s most dramatic yet mundane moments are played out, nightly, across the length of the country.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Pizza Express has punctuated every significant moment of my life.

My first uber-crush was on a boy so enamoured with its bruschetta that he ended up working in his local branch — and breaking my heart over a heavily discounted single portion. I focused on the lone tomato pip making a heroic bid for freedom down his pockmarked, newly semi-bristled chin to avoid crying. Later, and along with every other child of divorce, the tricky teenage parenting years were navigated with bi-weekly servings of reassuringly ordinary lasagne and chilled bottles of Peroni.

My first date with my now husband was conducted over a Margherita, both of us too nervous to order anything that might be considered outlandish.

The outlet between my house and local hospital has become, reluctantly and then happily, a favourite haunt. It’s a port in a storm, a hug in a calzone.

Except, now that I’ve finished tonight’s plate of warmed-up nostalgia, I’m finally looking around. A handful of desultory delivery drivers are by the door, sheltering from the rain. There are two other tables occupied. A couple are tapping on their phones in a race to find a valid voucher code. We won’t be far behind them. Ah. Maybe that explains it.

It is steadfast — a constant in the culinary whirligig. A Padana is a Padana whether you’re in Plymouth or Preston