Pizza Express

It’s Pizza Express. So the pizzas are four star — nothing revolutionary, but good tasty affairs. The drinks on offer are predictable.
This one gets a mediocre review from me though for two reasons: firstly, it’s one of the duller setups I’ve seen from a Pizza Express, and secondly, the service (as several other reviewers have pointed out) was terrible. The waitress was offish and inattentive, ordering was laborious, the food was slow.
And, what’s more, she evidently thought she was giving first class service: the only time we had any real interaction was when she brought over a bunch of Pizza Express feedback forms, asking us to give her and the branch a top review. We politely nodded (oh so English) before leaving the restaurant and discarded the forms at the next possible opportunity.

The point of chain restaurants, as best I understand it, is consistency. If you go to McDonald’s and your burger’s a little bland, you probably won’t feel aggrieved because, hey, it’s McDonald’s — what did you expect?
(Not that I have anything against McDonald’s burgers, BTW. I find the key is wine matching — if you knock back a couple of bottles of pinot beforehand, they taste sensational).
So when you rock up to Pizza Express, you know what to expect, or ought to — average pizza, slightly overpriced.
Not, it appears, in Camden.
My takeaway Margherita and Hot Americano were stone cold and soggy. I kind of suspected they might have been, ‘cos i’d seen a couple of boxes sitting behind the counter for about ten minutes while I was waiting. So i asked the manager, who assured me they weren’t the same boxes and these were fresh from the oven.
OK, so they replaced the pizzas without protest when I asked. But because I didn’t discover the truth till i got home it meant an extra trip to the restaurant and back.
They didn’t apologise, and they didn’t comp me anything either.
You’re much better off paying the two or three quid extra 400m down the road at the York and Albany. It’s overpriced, but it just about lives up to it. And at least you know what you’re getting.