Pizza Express

restaurant review: pizza express, rayleigh - BigSpud

My home town of Rayleigh has undergone a huge transformation in the past five years.

In 2010 restaurant after restaurant opened up and now the high street heaves with people of an evening.

The restaurant’s prime location on the crest of the town’s hill and attractive frontage has fuelled it’s popularity, and proves that Rayleigh is hungry for yet more eating options.

The children’s menu is something that has always felt like an afterthought at Pizza Express; they try so hard to give them things to colour, make and do yet the food is extremely limited.

The Pizza Express in Rayleigh is very welcome.

restaurant review: pizza express, southend-on-sea - BigSpud

Pizza Express Southend has had a makeover.

A short hop on the train from Benfleet as a teenager meant the cinema, cool shops and places to hang out.

With the cinema came a new parade of bars and restaurants including a Pizza Express in 1996 – a first for the area.

Twenty years later in 2016, the Pizza Express has been renovated.

With sides of calamari, polenta chips and olives, followed by the honey cream slice, ice creams and sorbets we left with very full tummies, and boxes of leftovers ready for a midnight snack.

Reys, restaurant review: This posh chicken shop is the long-awaited ...

So why have I made the trip to Cambridge for lunch in this particular posh chicken shop?

Behind the open kitchen, ranks of chickens rotate soundlessly and smell-lessly on spits.

Unlike Soho House's Chicken Shop group, which offers just rotisserie chicken and a handful of sides (at slightly lower prices), Reys' menu is a smash-and-grab of deep-fried wings, nasty open sandwiches, pulled-chicken buns and some Asian-inflected sides.

Deep-fried wings – disagreeable mouthfuls of fat, bone and batter –rapidly surrender their crispness to this one-note salsa; it masks any other flavour in a pulled chicken bun, and is slathered over – the horror – deep-fried battered sprouts, a dish which prompts my friend to hiss "who ordered the testicles?"

If they'd stuck to doing rotisserie chicken brilliantly, with a few solid sides, I could see it succeeding as a modern, slightly more upmarket rival to Nando's.

Pizza Express Reading Oracle - Pizza Express Autumn Menu Review

But in those days there were few options for eating out – and some of the original Pizza Express branches also had Jazz evenings.

Classic Italian Antipasto is a mix of delicious cured Italian meats – Finnocional, Coppa, Milano Salami and Calabrese sausage served with olives, artichoke, roasted tomatoes, mozzarella pepperdew peppers and a kind of cheesy flatbread with Gran Milano.

Crumbled pork and fennel sausage, friarelli (a kind of broccoli-type green vegetable), tomato, garlic oil and mozzarella finished with Gran Milano cheese and parsley.

My companion opted for the classic Soho 65, which is meant to be a vegetarian pizza, with mozzarella and tomato, black olives, garlic oil and rocket.

But, you can add a finish of cured Italian meats to any of the pizzas on the menu which is exactly what he rather perversely opted to do:) One of the Pizza Express developments I particularly like is the introduction of what appears on the menu as dolcetti – tiny portions of dessert served with a tea or coffee to round off your meal.

Jazz Club | PizzaExpress Live

Enjoy great pizza at an internationally acclaimed London music venue In 2015 and 2016, the PizzaExpress Jazz Club was named 'Venue of the Year' in the London Lifestyle Awards.

It has previously won Time Out and Parliamentary Jazz Awards, and was named by Downbeat magazine as one of the world's great jazz clubs.

What's on | PizzaExpress Live