Why would a leading restaurant critic from New York, a town with outstanding pizza and an ingrained pizza culture dating back over 100 years, move to London, a town with neither, for the pizza? The short answer?
I was misinformed.
Happily, pizza in London keeps getting better. Pizza-passionate locals like Home Slice Pizza and Pizza Pilgrims are baking pizzas outdoors in food trucks, street carts and mobile ovens or indoors in pubs (The Oak), bakeries (SOS Pizza at E5 Bakehouse) and even double-decker buses (The Big Red). That none of these indies made it on my revised list of top 10 London pizzas speaks to a improved pizza landscape.
So knowing what I know now and given how much things have changed for the greater good would I now advise a New Yorker to move to London for the pizza? Short answer?
But if a New Yorker were presented with an opportunity to move to wondrous London in 2012, be it for work or love or the Olympics or Georgian squares or everyday wit or everyday weather or BBC2’s Allegra Stratton or Scotch eggs, pizza would no longer be a reason to categorically refuse.
Now isn’t that progress?
It’s great to hear a New Yorker speak well about our pizza here in London. We hope to someday make you chaps from across the pond envy our pizza instead. Cheers!