As one of the 900 pizza-loving Londoners attending the 2019 London Pizza Festival, which returns to Borough Market June 2nd, you will not have to settle for just one or two of the showcase pizzas and forgo the rest. You’ll be served quarter-pizza slices of all 6!

The only agonising decision you and your fellow ticket-holders will have to make entails choosing a champion from amongst these championship contenders:

QUEEN DATTERINI / Theo’s Pizza
datterini tomato & Procescco sauce, buffalo stracciatella, Tropea onions, basil, chilli sauce

TRUFFLE PIZZA / L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele
white truffle cream, fior di latte mozzarella, portobello mushrooms, Pecorino Romano, basil, black truffle oil

50 KALO MARINARA / 50 Kalò
Corbarini cherry tomatoes, steamed escarole, garlic, black olives, capers

ASPARTACUS / Gloria Trattoria
Vesuvio yellow tomato, buffalo mozzarella, sautéed asparagus, asparagus carpaccio, confit red tomato, buffalo ricotta, lime zest, powdered pesto

DUCK PIZZA / The Dough Shack
confit duck (or, for vegetarian version, wild mushrooms), spring onions, mixed chillies, hoisin sauce, garlic herb oil, fior di latte mozzarella, chilli honey, sesame seed crust

WEST IS BEST / Ffwrnes Pizza
fior di latte mozzarella, sage leaves, sobrasada (pork or plant-based), soft goats cheese, fresh basil, raw Welsh honey.

Book tickets below. For more information about the 2018 London Pizza Festival, click here.

Powered by Eventbrite

Ultimately, the festival, organised by Young & Foodish, was less a competition than an emotional celebration of pizza passion.

The great Neapolitan pizzaiolo Gino Sorbillo, who made the trip from Naples to eat pizza, not make it, summed it up for everyone:

“La pizza è tutto,” said Gino. “Pizza is everything!”

Margot and Fergus Henderson at Joe Allen

As a lad, my father would take me to eat at Joe Allen, the enduring West Side gathering place in New York’s Theatre District. He invariably ordered us burgers and not because it was the restaurant’s least expensive main dish. Most of the Broadway personalities seated near us knew to order the burger, too. It was the best thing on the menu.

The father of the great English chef Fergus Henderson of St John Restaurant fame also took his son to the great theatre-land haunt and also insisted he have a burger.

The happy discovery of Fergus and my shared boyhood experience was undimmed by two differences in our stories: First, Fergus’s father took him to the Joe Allen in London’s West End, not the one on Manhattan’s West Side. Second, the Joe Allen burger of his memory was never the best thing on the menu. It was the best thing off the menu: In London the burger has always been unlisted – the worst kept secret around Covent Garden.

I encountered Fergus this week at the London Joe Allen, sharing a table with his wife Margot Henderson, the chef at Rochelle Canteen, and trying the guest burger she had created for Joe’s. Her Margot burger, one of four burger collaborations to be featured at Joe Allen this month, consists of a Swaledale chuck mince patty layered with roast and raw beetroot, roast red onion, watercress, green sauce and Rochelle ketchup on a St John bun.

As good as Margot’s on-menu burger is, I secretly wanted the off-menu burger Fergus and his dad enjoyed all those years ago. And now I’m hankering to take my son to Joe Allen and – what else? – insist he polish off one, too.

The only agonising decision ticket-holders to make is choosing a champion from amongst these contenders:

GIUSEPPE by The Perfectionists’ Café
tomato, buffalo mozzarella, buffalo ricotta, ‘Nduja, confit tomatoes, Parmesan

AMERICAN PSYCHO by Wandercrust
tomato, mozzarella, Ventricina salami, Roquito peppers, chilli honey

SANT ORBINO by Santa Maria Pizzeria
tomato, smoked mozzarella, salamella piccante, burrata, tarallo crumbs

CONFIT LAMB by Hai Cenato
confit lamb neck, spiced aubergine, ras el hanout, mozzarella, yoghurt, mint

TRIBUTE by Mother
tomato sauce, Bigoncia prosciutto, Parmesan, Pecorino Romano, fresh basil, oregano, black pepper

PALOMA by ‘O ver
smoked mozzarella, chiodini mushrooms, pancetta arrotolata, black pepper, fresh basil

* Vegetarian alternatives will be available for all 6 of the pizzas above.

For more information about the 2018 London Pizza Festival, click here.

The ground floor of the 5-star Ned London, with its seven restaurants amid 92 verdite columns, repurposes a magnificent banking hall in the City of London. The Grade-I-listed former head office of the Midland Bank  was designed in 1924 by the great architect Sir Edmund ‘Ned’ Luytens for the clearing of transactions, not potato latkes. As a hotel lobby it is spectacularly sumptuous, but the scale of it is disorientating.

The Ned could stand to soak up some badly needed soul from Zobler’s restorative matzo ball soup. Or it could suck the soul out of it instead. Time will tell.

The Ned London grew out of a partnership between Andrew Zobler of New York’s Sydell Group and Nick Jones of the London-based Soho House & Co. Jones likes to bring over expert chefs on temporary visas to get his regional American restaurants off the ground in spectacular fashion, as he did with Pizza East and Electric Diner. To open Zobler’s he enlisted a legendary name or, more precisely, the heir to one: Zobler’s consulting chef is Isaac Gellis, the great great grandson of the Isaac Gellis, once the Lower East Side’s foremost purveyor of cured and kosher delicatessen meats. (Zobler’s is not a kosher restaurant.)

With his six-month visa nearly up, young Isaac’s future in London is uncertain and so too is Zobler’s enduring quality.

Go ahead, Nick Jones, prove me wrong. The potential for lasting greatness is there. Show me you have the will for it, too. Make Zobler’s even better, with or without Isaac Gellis.

Zobler’s #19 sandwich is a nod to Langer’s and that great LA deli’s Original #19 Sandwich – pastrami, coleslaw, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing on twice-baked rye. This homage is a beauty:

The toasted rye is packed with tender, high-impact, house-smoked pastrami, though the peppery kick is fierce, leaving a faintly bitter aftertaste. Less pepper and more fat on the meat would do wonders.

My dining companion, chef Jonny Rothfield, and I tried Zobler’s corned beef, the Jewish deli standard Londoners know as salt beef, on two sandwiches ordered a half-hour apart. The quality varied from cut to cut: The lean corned beef on The Purist, a no-nonsense sandwich dressed only with mustard (French’s, sadly, not deli mustard), was superb albeit a tad dry. The slices of corned beef on the wonderfully obscene Reuben, however, were marvellously moist and melty.

By asking just £3 for a bowl of matzo ball soup that actually has nice chunks of chicken in it and £8 for the powerhouse Purist, Zobler’s Deli offers incredible ROI – by which I mean the return on your investment, if not necessarily that of Ron Burkle, The Ned’s billionaire backer.

Go soon, before November 11^th 2017.