Has Pizza Express run out of dough?
As the chain faces crunch talks with creditors, Esther Walker charts the rise and fall of another beloved high street stalwart
The news this week that Pizza Express is under threat as it sinks yet further into the financial mire, with debts of £665million, has been met with genuine grief in the UK. Those of us who are sad that Pizza Express may disappear, are so because Pizza Express isn’t just a clean place to sit where someone will bring you mid-priced carbohydrate, alcohol and ice cream later if you’ve been good: it’s a British institution. It’s a well of memories. It is so instilled in my husband’s consciousness, for example, that he once had an entire dream about going into a Pizza Express, ordering a pizza, eating it, then paying and leaving.
Like those other high street stalwarts, Boots and WH Smith, there are no nasty surprises in Pizza Express. And there are so many sites and they are always so huge, that they are almost guaranteed to have space for you, even if you are a group of eight teenagers at 7.30pm on a Saturday night with no reservation.
Panicking fans of the ailing pizza chain have hit social media in their droves to complain about the risk of it folding, using the hashtag #savepizzaexpress. There are suggestions to eat at Pizza Express at least once this week; failing that, to buy a Pizza Express-branded pizza from a supermarket.
Pizza Express was founded in 1965 by Peter Boizot on Wardour Street in London. Inspired by a trip to Naples, he brought back a specialist oven and a chef from Sicily and started feeding Swinging London a lot of cheese and bread until their drainpipe suit trousers and miniskirts no longer fitted – surely the reason for the rising popularity in the Seventies of the wrap dress, which was far more forgiving after a huge Quattro Formaggi.
In the Eighties, Pizza Express defined itself as being the place where you could go for what was essentially fast food but in upmarket surroundings. If you were young, it was the place you could afford that felt grown-up. If you had children, it was somewhere that would actually allow them in, serve food you could all eat, plus wine. It was significantly different from Pizza Hut and its bright colours and bottomless salad bar. Pizza Express was, at the time and to the untrained eye, really quite chic. It was not expensive, but with its abstract art on the walls, the jaunty stripes on the pizza chefs’ T-shirts and the single carnation in each tiny vase on each table, it pretended to be.
Someone then had the very clever idea of buying up the most historic and beautiful building on any UK high street and filling it with as many round grey marbled tables as it could and bashing out hundreds of reliably tasty lunches and dinners to families and groups of teenagers.
Boizot was big on this, it seems, buying Kettner’s, the iconic Soho restaurant, in 1980, and effectively transforming the town house into a tablecloth-ed, high-end Pizza Express outpost – the very first to serve up dough balls, now on menus and supermarket shelves across the nation.
From an old gentleman’s club building in York to the historic Coinage Hall in Truro, whatever town you lived in or visited, the best restaurant was highly likely to be a Pizza Express. And you could walk in and sit down and order the same pizza you ordered in any other Pizza Express and it would be identical. Mine was La Reine – Italian ham, black olives, mushrooms, mozzarella and tomato on a Romana base – in case you were curious. And it was always delicious. It was the same principle that made Mcdonald’s a star – wherever you were, you could find a familiar place to eat. Because, when it comes to food, sometimes the last thing you want is to be adventurous. The last thing you want is a surprise, nasty or otherwise.
Pizza Express quickly became all things to all people. Where do you take your sister out when you go to see her at boarding school in Canterbury?
Pizza Express. Where do you take your parents when they visit you at university? Pizza Express. Where do you fall into on a rainy night when you are 23 years old with a girlfriend and need to have an emergency dinner to discuss the minutiae of your romantic life? Pizza Express. Where do you take your kids when their heads are literally swivelling round with hunger at 1.15pm in Leighton Buzzard? Pizza. Express.
I remember clearly going to York with an ex-boyfriend who refused, on principle, to go to a chain restaurant. So, we sat miserably eating terrible food in a grim little bistro while across the road, through the crystal clear windows, I could see the whole of the rest of York in that very Pizza Express in the old gentleman’s club, clinking prosecco glasses in the twinkling candlelight and throwing back American Hots and having the time of their lives.
Reader, I did not marry him. But, by the 2000s, pizza was not new. And other chains were getting in on the act. First came Strada, with a more comprehensively Italian menu, and then came a flood of alternatives, such as Franco Manca and Homeslice.
Then came an unholy trinity of monsters in the form of the Atkins diet and “clean eating”, followed swiftly by Deliveroo and Uber Eats, which wiped out, at a single blow, a huge portion of every high street food chain’s customer base.
At about the same time came social media and a simple change in food trends from high street dining to seeking out weeny single-issue pop-ups in remote places, or one-offs like Zia Lucia, a north London joint that never fails to have queues snaking out of the door.
Gone was affection for stuffed crusts and those endless salad refills (how much sweetcorn can one person eat?) or bottomless ice cream and toppings à la Pizza Hut; in came sourdough and charcoal bases and nduja. Even Pizza Express’s endless collaborations with famous chefs and the modern, lowercalorie offerings like the Leggera, a pizza with a hole cut in the middle and filled with salad, couldn’t compete.
Even I, despite such fond memories of the place, haven’t been into a Pizza Express for years. But that has been mainly because, until a few days ago, we had a branch of Pizza East – wood oven-fired pizzas served at a few London outposts, one of which is a converted warehouse – at the bottom of my road. But while writing this, I discovered that it, too, has closed. It looks like times are tough for everyone in the mid-priced carbohydrate business.
Pizza Express isn’t just a clean place to sit where someone will bring you midpriced carbs: it’s a well of memories