Three new fast-casual restaurants bring pizza-by-the-slice to Charing Cross road in Central London.

Here are my early takes based on single visits to NY FOLD, Fornetto and Vico.

NY FOLD

The New Yorkese way to attack a triangular slice cut from a large pizza is to fold it lengthwise, pinching the two corners at the top. This is what’s meant by “NY FOLD”.

But when I, a native NYer with decades of hands-on experience, tried to bend one of NY FOLD’s triangles down the middle it cracked instead. One large segment broke off from a corner. #NYFAIL

The crust was strangely brittle, hence the embarrassing break, but hardly bad. What will keep me from going back to this sleekly styled but tragically named slice joint, presumably a fast-casual showcase for a chain-in-the-making, is the utter blandness of the basic £3.95 Margherita slice. The red sauce may have been robust and flavourful, as the menu promises, but who could tell? Talk about scant: It must’ve been applied to the surface of the stretched dough with a nose dropper. There was ample melty mozzarella to fill you up but it desperately needed something with salt, such as grated grated Pecorino Romano. Or salt.

If you do go to NY FOLD, out of convenience or curiosity, I’d recommend, (A), your ordering something jazzier with more toppings and, (B), attacking your slice with fork and knife.

103 Charing Cross Rd, London, WC2H 0DT

FORNETTO

Snug Fornetto operates much like any pizza al taglio shop in Rome. Rectangular slabs of pizza pre-baked in a shallow tray are lined up in a glass display case. You point to the pizza variety you want. Ordinarily the server proposes various sizes by moving his cutter forward or backward, like a cheesemonger. But here at Fornetto you pay by the fixed portion, not the weight – from £3 per slice.

I like the pizza, with its airy crust, and love its location near the National Portrait Gallery, between Leicester and Trafalgar Squares. I’ll be back, even if some toppings lack punch and panache.

The Margherita (above right) was seasoned with stealth basil. I asked if we were expected to tear off fresh leaves from the potted basil sitting on counter against the wall. The charming Italian woman in charge smiled. The basil plant was intended for decoration, she explained, but if I wanted to help myself no one would stop me.

21 Charing Cross Rd, London, WC2H 0ET21

VICO

With Vico the team behind Bocca di Lupa, an acclaimed Soho trattoria, and Gelupo, a cherished London gelateria, turn their attention to quick, ready-to-eat Italian food. They call it “street food”, adopting the lingo preferred by property redevelopers, and liken the soaring, whimsically designed indoor food hall to a piazza – without, needless to say, the danger of being hit by a passing Piaggio, pigeon or panhandler.

If you are approached by a stranger on the pavement outside it will likely be by someone handing you a coupon for a free slice of Roman-style pizza al taglio. I used mine for one topped with guanciale (cured pork cheek), Pecorino Romano and pumpkin purée. It was a Halloween Carbonara, with the seasonal substitution of orange pumpkin for yellow egg, and it worked.

The crust of Vico’s pizza al taglio – £3 price for a small, 100-gram serving –  has a pleasantly crisp, with the small air pockets in its interior crumb collapsing to pressure. It feels right.

If the goal is decent pizza with good, creative toppings in a clean, upbeat environment that does much more than just pizza then make no mistake: Vico is viable, scalable, enjoyable and Westfield-ready.

But there is little evidence of craft in preparation and pride in presentation. When you approach the counter to order at a pizza al taglio shop your decision should not be an easy one: You’re picking from pizzas on display, not on a menu, and each variety should look more unmissable than the next. You should feel like a kid at an ice cream shop, overcome with excitement and paralysed with indecision.

Vico will disappoint dreamers like me who admire chef-owner Jacob Kenedy and were hoping it would accomplish for London pizza what Gelupo did for its gelato. At Vico there’s no eye candy in the pizza display case. You make your choice almost by default. It’s destination pizza only if your destination is Cambridge Circus.

1 Cambridge Circus, London, WC2H 8PA

A street food favourite in the heart of the West End, Yang Guang stuffs each bun with a plump little patty of minced and marinated pork, its juices easily absorbed by the piping-hot fluff all around it. As viewed in the photo at the top of this post I’ve squirted the pork not with ketchup but with Sriacha hot sauce.

Importantly, the meat filling, hand-shaped into one solid piece, is not mealy, mushy, strippy, chunky, BBQy, cabbage-y or sweet as it can be with other baozi. Sure enough there’s a burger in that bun – a fresh, moist, tasty, £1.70 Chinese pork burger.

see The Best £2.10 Pizza Slice in London

The menu positioning of the skirt-n-chips does a disservice only to the easily overlooked selections listed below it: suckling pig and dandelion, sea bass, baked celeriac & shard, bacon & beans. Like a vaudeville comic asked to take the late-show stage after the Marx Brothers you just don’t want to be billed beneath the St John’s take on steak frites. Here that classic duo is a crusty, crispy, saucy, succulent and thoroughly satisfying act to catch ’round midnight or thereabouts.

At £16.40 it would be one of the most alluring late-night relationships between quality and price anywhere were it not for a push-up wine list with premiums that make its exclusively French options look more fully bodied than they are (an act of illusion hardly foreign to Leicester Square). Having steak frites without red wine goes against my belief system, no matter how late the hour, but so does paying double, triple or quadruple the price of those steak frites for a bottle.

Please please, Mr Henderson, add a good, young £20 table red to the wine list, even if you have to list it in small print at the very bottom, beneath your phone number and url. Otherwise any overpriced alternatives printed below it might become as unnoticed as the poor schnook asked to close for Groucho.

Notes Music & Coffee is home to the UK’s first La Marzocco Strada, the Maserati of espresso machines. Sartori bakes its Neapolitan-styled pizzas in the wood-fired brick forno crafted by Strazzullo Michele, the Stradivarius of pizza ovens.

With its Strada platform La Marzocco introduces pressure profiling, a technology which allows the barista to customise espresso extraction to draw out certain flavour components and mute others. Ordinarily a barista would pull an espresso under a steady brew pressure of 9 bars for 25-30 seconds. With the Strada baristas can adjust the pressure as easily as a chef would the intensity of a burner.

Initially I dismissed pressure profiling as a gimmick and the Strada’s mechanical pressure paddle as nothing more than a play toy for baristas. (Sure I too wanted one in my bedroom, but that’s another story.) Notes Music & Coffee co-owner Fabio Ferreira changed my thinking in 60 seconds. He pulled two espressos for me using the same coffee blend – Has Bean’s Kicker – but changed their pressure profiles. He brewed the first shot under a pressure of 9 bars for the first 15 seconds and then lowered the pressure to 3 bars for the final 15 seconds. He brewed the second shot at 3 bars for the first 15 seconds, ramped up the pressure to 9 bars for an additional 10 seconds and then back down to 5 bars for the final 5 seconds.

The difference between the two was dramatic: The first shot delivered the lemon zing that puts the kick in Kicker. The second was sweeter and softer, likely the result, according to Ferreira, of the long, low-pressure “pre-infusion”. If any geek needed a rationale to spring for a gleaming new Strada, this was it.

The appeal of a Strazzullo Michele pizza oven, like that of a La Marzocco, can be as much about machismo as macchina. That the company’s made-to-order pizza ovens are now mostly exported to deep-pocketed clients in Japan, Korea, China and the USA only enhances their snob appeal back home in Naples. Thrilled merely to have Strazzullo Michele take its money, Sartori did not dictate such design details as the shape of oven’s benchtop or the colours and patterns of its decorative mosaic. Strazzullo Michele pretty much told Sartori how their Leicester Square oven was going to be.

The shiny, bright-coloured ceramic shell you see encasing the domes of brick ovens at famous pizzerias is missing. So, for that matter, is the dome – or at least the top of it. The low height and flattened roof of this model’s baking chamber enables even heat distribution and cooking. There’s little risk of incinerating the crust even before the mozzarella has melted and the dough has cooked through. Paolo, Sartori’s accomplished Neapolitan pizzaiolo, can liquify the fior di latte that floats over his exceptionally light Margherita without having to lift it up from the hot stone and suspend the pizza in the oven’s hottest reaches. The hot zones are everywhere.

Impressive as they are, the Strazzullo Michele pizza oven and La Marzocco Strada espresso machine depend on top-quality ingredients as well as the skill of the mano del operatore. At Notes Music & Coffee and Sartori the “operator’s hand” belongs to geeks who know enough to know there is always more to know.

Notes Music & Coffee, 31 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4ER (map) – 020 7240 0424

Sartori, 15-18 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JE (map) – 020 7836 6308