Za restaurant review: They’re taking the Piz

The food world has changed. And despite its efforts, Pizza Express has not kept up. Ed Cumming visits its latest outpost: a ‘to go’ version of the traditional restaurant; an idea that came from the customers, apparently. But is the customer really always right?

Slogans on the walls of the new Fenchurch Street location outline the Za ‘philosophy’ (Ed Cumming)

I am very fond of Pizza Express. Aren’t we all? Watching its travails in recent years has been depressing. Except perhaps McDonalds, no restaurant is more familiar.

Most British adults could order without looking, off-handing the menu to the waiter with a flourish. It is the first restaurant I remember going to.

A slice of American Hot brings memories of childhood flooding back. Parties where you got to make your own pizza. Jumpers for goalposts, large Peronis, fags over a cheesecake.

The names are like old folk heroes: La Reine, Sloppy Guiseppe, Fiorentina. Many restaurants count themselves lucky to last more than a year. It’s 54 years since Pizza Express opened. Unthinkable.

But the omens are circling. Designer Enzo Apicella, who gave the restaurants their signature style, died in October.

Like many things born in the Sixties, Pizza Express is responding to these upstarts with a ginormous midlife crisis

Founder Peter Boizot followed a couple of months later. In January it was reported that the chain owes more than £1bn.

A statement from the company blamed rents, the minimum wage and sundry “well-publicised cost headwinds”. The group is staring down the barrel.

The truth is the world has changed and Pizza Express, despite its efforts, has not kept up. Ironically this old-fashioned charm is one of the things people like about it, but a company with nearly 500 branches cannot trade off nostalgia alone. Design refreshes and low-calorie pizzas with holes in the middle and more salads have not held back the tide.

The menu has bloated like a Chinese takeaway’s without much to show for it. Newer, nimbler restaurants are eating Pizza Express’s lunch. Pizza Pilgrims, Homeslice and Pizza Union in central London; Franco Manca everywhere. They have more interesting toppings, shorter menus and softer dough. More importantly, they are much cheaper.

This is a chain clutching at its lost youth like Leo grasping for Winslet on the flotsam

Like many things born in the Sixties, Pizza Express is responding to these upstarts with a ginormous midlife crisis.

The latest innovation is “Za”, a new all-day fast-casual “concept” – a “diffusion line of a diffusion line”, as one friend put it. This is a chain clutching at its lost youth like Leo grasping for Winslet on the flotsam. Even the name. Especially the name. Za, your mate trying to create a nickname for himself at university. They’ve kept the old font, no doubt the result of many meetings about “Brand DNA” and “typographic heritage”.

The first branch has opened at Fenchurch Street and the plan is apparently to start rolling it out across the country. “Last throw of the dice” has not been used in any official documents I’ve seen, but you sense there is a lot riding on the enterprise. Hony Capital, the Chinese private equity firm which bought the group for nearly a billion pounds in 2014, did not do so to nurture a British institution into obsolescence. (Although fair play if they did, that’s some soft power.)

Pizza slices are available, along with wraps, salads, drinks and, in the morning, breakfast (Ed Cumming)

Lest anyone doubt Za’s inspiration, it is opposite a branch of Leon, like a fast-caj hall of mirrors. It is a bright, light two-floor cafe with glass walls on two sides, bland to the point of oppression. Fake plants crawl down the fixings. Pot plants sit in the middle of tables. Slogans on the walls outline the Za “philosophy”: “Everything just right. The way it should be. To bring you freshly prepared food. Food that not only tastes great but makes you feel great too.”

You order and pay at the till and then stand along the counter to wait for your tray. Pizza slices are available, along with wraps, salads, drinks and, in the morning, breakfast. Everything can be taken away. The bumpf says the slices mark a return to Boizot’s original vision, but I expect he would be horrified by what he saw. The original genius of Pizza Express was that it felt more sophisticated than the bill suggested. You could take a date there and not feel like a cheapskate. You would only take a date to Za if you were a coward who wanted to send a message. Between three of us we ordered one of each of the six slices on offer, slightly less than a single whole pizza; two portions of dough balls; a sad little chicken salad; and two cans of slightly bubbly white wine and the bill was nearly £60. Afterwards we were still hungry.

It’s not that there isn’t an opportunity here. Pizza by the slice is one of the great joys of New York or Rome. On the whole the UK does it badly. To withstand reheating and heavy, greasy toppings, the crusts must be thicker, made with higher-protein flours. The slices at Za are, in effect, larger Romana-base Pizza Express pizzas that have been cooked, cut and then left out ready for reheating on one of those little metal conveyor belts. Even in the normal restaurants, this style of pizza has a tendency to cool and congeal. The thin crust and toppings mean the heat dissipates quickly. Being left out and reheated only exacerbates the problem. We opened our boxes onto miserable triangles of what-might-have-been.

The whole place hums with misspent money, the kind of cash bunged to brand consultants and design agencies to wrench an idea, a Pizza Express-inspired Pret rival, into existence. But there is no sense of hospitality, the alchemy that at its best, Pizza Express was able to replicate across hundreds of locations in the UK. Pizza is not like an avocado wrap. It is hot, oily, happy food to be savoured, not something to be snatched between Barry’s Boot Camp and a two o’clock catchup in the breakout area.

In a statement about the new direction, managing director Zoe Bowley said the idea came from the public. “We spoke to thousands of customers and the idea really came from them,” she said. “They said they wanted to see Pizza Express turn up in a slightly different format alongside our dine-in experience. The message came through that there were occasions when our customers still wanted that Pizza Express experience, but to go.” The customer is not always right, and thousands of customers can all be not-right at the same time.

I hope Pizza Express finds a way to innovate, but with Za they are… taking the piz.

Should you go? No
Would I go again? No