‘London pizza’ is now a thing — and some say it’s the best in the world

Breadstall is among a new breed of restaurants selling pizza with a distinctly London twist. (Toby Hancock/CNN via CNN Newsource)

Ask Gerry del Guercio and Paul Delany what they thought of New York’s pizza and the response is emphatic: “Underwhelmed.”

While New York’s slices may have a global reputation as some of the world’s best, they pale in comparison to what’s on offer in their home city, say these two pizza obsessives. London is now serving the greatest pizza in the world, they claim.

“We never really found anything that we liked better than our favourites in London,” Delany said.

Del Guercio and Delany run “Bite Twice,” a popular food review series on Instagram and TikTok and have reviewed around 600 pizzas in the U.K. capital, a mission that inspired them to open their own pizza restaurant, Carmela’s.

It’s also taken them to the heart of an emergent new slice — the “London pizza.” This variation on the classic dish has grown popular in the city over the past few years, ushering in a wave of new restaurants.

London pizza has yet to make it to the list of destination-linked classics — Neapolitan, Roman, Sicilian, Chicago, New York and New Haven among them. But those involved in the scene insist it should be, even if it’s hard to define.

According to Del Guercio and Delany, London pizza tends to take the high-quality ingredients of Neapolitan, the visual appeal and size of New York, the dark char and long cook of New Haven and Roman-style, and experimental doughs.

London pizza has “a lot of these styles, but with no rules,” Del Guercio said. “It’s a philosophy, bro,” Delany joked.

Del Guercio and Delany claim to have coined the “London pizza” term themselves, but U.K. food journalist and author Clare Finney first wrote about the concept in a 2019 article.

“The joy of it, and the beauty of it, is that it’s hard to define,” Finney told CNN.

London pizza has become a “a real celebration of the many different and distinct communities that make London what it is,” she said.

Despite Del Guercio and Delany’s apathy toward New York’s slices, the pair said that Carmela’s pizzas are inspired by what they found on the East Coast of the US.

“We’ve been to every major pizza city to try it all, and we’ve taken ideas from every single one of them to create Carmela’s,’ Del Guercio said. “That’s what every other London style pizzeria has done.”

The slice is right

Sebastian Vince developed his version of London pizza during lockdown. Vince owns Breadstall, which began as a takeaway baking business in the leafy suburb of Clapham. When restrictions were lifted, he began serving his experimental slices and quickly recognized the new opportunity.

Using a precise mix of pre-fermented and fresh doughs, called a biga, his pizza is known for being simultaneously crispy and chewy, with an airy crust.

Renowned British food critic Jay Rayner described it as “almost the best pizza I’ve ever tried,” second only to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Tokyo.

What makes London pizza so interesting, Vince says, is that chefs “don’t have that tradition, and therefore dogma.” Instead, amateurs are allowed to experiment.

Breadstall, now fully converted into a pizza operation, opened a new location in London’s central Soho district in 2024. It sells around 10,000 slices a week during peak times, using two and a half metric tons of dough to make them.

Though there are some tables and chairs, it is counter service only. A quarter of a 20-inch pie is £7, or about US$9.50. The model, Vince says, makes it a viable lunchtime option, and a relatively affordable meal.

Breadstall would not be the first chain to experience success in the capital. Franco Manca pizzerias, started in the south of the city in 2008, capitalizing on Londoners’ new hunger for pizza beyond established fast food giants like Domino’s.

The restaurant, serving classic sourdough pizzas, took off but since expanding to 70 nationwide locations, it’s fared less well, reporting a a £3.2 million (US$4.3 million) loss in 2024. It recently announced it was closing 16 venues that were “no longer sustainable.”

London-style pizza restaurants, though, are booming.

‘Pizza-dilly Circus’

Pizza is everywhere in London. At the end of the street where Breadstall’s new Soho venue is located there’s a superstore with an advertisement showing off its prize-winning pizza. “Welcome to Pizza-dilly Circus” it reads.

The relatively short walk from Angel tube station to del Guercio and Delany’s restaurant Carmela’s passes no fewer than seven pizza restaurants, from artisanal Neapolitan to chains.

Londoners will queue for hours to get into some popular pizza joints — among them Crisp.

Started by Carl McCluskey in his grandmother’s pub in Hammersmith, a quiet neighbourhood in west London, Crisp quickly became one of London’s most sought-after pizzerias.

The marriage of pizza and pubs was an obvious match, said food writer Finney. Pubs were struggling to make money doing food, she said, and companies like Yard Sale Pizza began partnering with pubs to offer pizza deliveries to customers’ tables.

“There’s something very London about pints and pizzas,” she added. “Pizza has fitted into pubs in a particularly neat way and a particularly London way.”

It is not just hungry customers queueing up for pizza but potential investors.

Everyone is “looking to get record deals,” Vince said. A lot of people already have them. Dorian Waite and Philip Eeles, who co-founded the popular burger chain Honest Burgers, invested in Breadstall two and a half years ago. Three more locations are opening in London this year.

Del Guercio and Delany are opening a second restaurant in the Covent Garden shopping district, and McCluskey moved to a new location in the upscale area of Mayfair in early 2025.

Talk of investors and expansion feels a long way from the lockdown experiments that started this new craze and the experimental “punk” attitude that del Guercio and Delany think has made it such a success.

Naples calling

At 3:30 p.m. on a recent afternoon, Michele Pascarella’s newest branch of “Napoli on the Road” in Soho was full, and customers were still walking in. The 34-year-old Italian chef’s popularity exploded in 2023 when he was named pizza chef of the year by 50 Top Pizza, an Italian guide which rates restaurants around the world. Last year his ragu-topped creation won pizza of the year.

While the new London-style restaurants produce thin and crispy offerings, Pascarella, who began learning his craft as a teenager in the Italian town of Caserta, is a master of Neapolitan pizza.

He started “Napoli on the Road” as a pizza van, selling his creations at farmers’ markets during the day, and working in a restaurant at night.

He opened his first restaurant in the west London suburb of Chiswick in 2019. Four years later, when he picked up the Top Pizza award, his venue’s phones became jammed for months.

His Soho restaurant is his third, and Pascarella plans to serve the U.K.’s first pizza tasting menu at this new location.

“We are trying to elevate the game about pizza, because people still go to a pizzeria saying, ‘It’s just a pizza.’ It’s not just a pizza,” he said.

But is his pizza ‘London style?’ His decadent ragu-topped pizza feels a world apart from the thin, crispy slices coming out of Vince’s oven.

“It’s just my pizza,” he told CNN. His pizza is “not really traditional,” he said, but if London pizza is characterized by an attitude of experimentation, then, Pascarella said, his pizza is London style.

Despite the abundance and variety of pizza, “people still look at London like we’re a B-list of food,” del Guercio said. But is London on par with the other great pizza cities?

To Pascarella, “London deserves to be at the top.”