Peter Boizot
Restaurateur who founded the Pizza Express chain in 1965 and made Britain a nation of pizza lovers
PETER BOIZOT, who has died aged 89, opened the first Pizza Express in Soho in 1965 and built the company into a national institution; he became a major philanthropist, supporting causes ranging from Venice, jazz, football, hockey and his native Peterborough, to the Liberal Party, for whom he stood twice as a parliamentary candidate in the elections of 1974.
Working as a tutor for an Italian family in Florence in 1948, Boizot fell in love with the country and enjoyed his first taste of pizza. A vegetarian from the age of five (having reportedly been fed on raw liver as a baby), he found the meat-free peasant dish was just what he needed.
After National Service in the Army and studying at Cambridge he returned to Europe, living and working in France, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, including a time selling postcards from a barrow in Rome. His love of pizza grew and he found that almost every continental city he visited offered authentic pizza.
On his return to London in 1964, however, he was unable to find any restaurants that served it. It was a time when Wimpy and Berni Inns provided the staple fare for the dining-out classes. There were no purpose-built pizzerias, and Italian restaurants were not keen since better profits could be made from other dishes.
Urged by a friend to do it himself, Boizot paid £600 to buy the Romanella restaurant in Wardour Street, Soho, from a businessman who had set up a restaurant called Pizza Express which had failed.
Determined to be authentic, Boizot ordered a wood-burning pizza oven from Naples and a chef from Sicily, built a counter with a Formica top and opened for business. At first Pizza Express sold slices of pizza served on greaseproof paper. Plates and cutlery, and the then revolutionary Mediterranean accoutrements of terracotta tiles and spotlighting, were introduced later.
The capital’s foodies flocked to relive their gastronomic experiences in Italy, and two years later Boizot opened a second branch in Coptic Street, Bloomsbury, refurbished by Enzo Apicella (who would design more than 80 Pizza Express restaurants), followed by outlets in the Fulham Road then Notting Hill Gate the next year.
The brand flourished with very little advertising because Boizot preferred to rely on word of mouth. “I made pizza in front of the customers, which was a novelty, something people had never seen before,” he said, “and it made them talk to their friends about the restaurant. You know, ‘a place has opened down the road and you can see the chefs making pizzas’. And there they were, stretching the dough out with their hands.”
Appropriately for an operation based on an Italian product, Pizza Express managed to retain a strong sense of family, despite many of the outlets being franchises, reinforced by the restaurants’ modern aesthetic, influenced by Apicella, who became the first to throw out the Italian restaurant staples of raffia-clad Chianti bottles and plastic grapes. Pop artists such as Sir Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi were commissioned to help fill the walls of the establishments.
To keep customers coming back, Boizot introduced a number of innovations which related to interests close to his own heart. Aside from the novelty of watching their food being cooked, from 1969 customers at the restaurants, notably the Dean Street branch and at Pizza on the Park, could enjoy live jazz. The chain also developed its own bands – the Pizza Express All Star Jazz Band and the Modern Jazz Sextet.
In 1975 Boizot introduced the Pizza Veneziana, which carried a 5p surcharge that went directly to the Venice in Peril Fund. The surcharge has since been increased to 25p and more than £2 million has been donated to the charity so far.
Boizot, a jolly, affable man with bushy white eyebrows, remained president of the company despite it being sold several times, making him an estimated £40m, money he used to pursue his many enthusiasms.
Though Pizza Express has gone through many ups and downs, it now has more than 470 restaurants across Britain and 100 overseas in Europe, Hong Kong, China, India and the Middle East, though an attempted launch in the US flopped after customers complained that the portions were too small.
Peter James Boizot was born in Walton, Peterborough, on November 16 1929, to Gaston Boizot, an insurance inspector, and his wife Suzannah, and spent his early years in the city, attending King’s School, where he was head boy, and singing in the Peterborough Cathedral Choir, before going on to St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, to read History.
Though he sold the chain in the 1990s, for a time Boizot, “for sentimental reasons”, retained ownership of two of its restaurants, Kettner’s in Romilly Street, Soho, and Pizza on the Park at Hyde Park Corner. In London he also owned Condotti in Mayfair and a pub, the Carlton, in Maida Vale, where he converted the basement into a changing room for the Hampstead and Westminster Hockey Club, for whose veterans’ side he turned out for many years.
A pillar of the fight to save the character of Soho, in 1981 he founded the Soho Restaurateurs Association, and as owner of Kettner’s introduced a 25p surcharge on Bellini cocktails to raise money for the Soho Community Environment Fund. He founded the Soho Jazz Festival and set up a private distribution magazine, Boz (his nickname), featuring articles about the preservation of Soho, jazz and other interests, and columns by the likes of Larry Adler and Sheridan Morley.
Boizot also invested heavily in his home town of Peterborough, acquiring and then modernising his favourite local haunt, the Great Northern Hotel (turning it into an unlikely stylish stopover for the tired train traveller), giving £100,000 to Peterborough Cathedral Choir, and in 1996 purchasing the former Odeon cinema on Broadway, which had been closed in 1991, reopening it in 2001 after a £9 million makeover as a top city centre entertainment complex.
In 1997 he bought the struggling Peterborough United FC and over the next six years, as its owner and chairman, invested some £7.5 million to put it on a firmer financial footing.
For many years, however, Peterborough was one of the few British cities without a Pizza Express, Boizot explaining that by the time he returned from London, the last thing he wanted was a pizza. “I have a gentlemen’s agreement [with the new owners] that they cannot go there without consulting me first,” he explained in 1997. The city had to wait another 10 years for its first outlet.
In 1986 Boizot was appointed MBE, and in 1996, for his Venice in Peril charity efforts, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. He was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Cambridgeshire in 1998 and made a Freeman of the City of Peterborough in 2007. In 2014 he published his autobiography, written with Matthew Reville, Mr Pizza and All That Jazz.
Boizot was unmarried, one profile explaining that it was not that he did not find Miss Right, but rather that “he had so much fun looking that he just carried on.” His hobbies, he told Marketing magazine in 2001, included “Women! But then the older you get, the fewer you get.”
Peter Boizot, born November 16 1929, died December 5 2018