Pizza

For some reason Amazon has started sending me various offers (restaurant, spa, experience) to my email and one of these offers that I got offered me to go to Sandy’s to have 2 pizzas and 2 glasses of wine for £16. I had never heard of Sandy’s and as it was quite close to where I live I decided to try it out and use this offer when my stepdad and his colleague were in London.

Sandy’s is a Corsican Pizzeria. As a reminder, Corsica is French island in the Mediterranean Sea, located west of Italy, southeast of the French mainland, and north of the Italian island of Sardinia, and the food in Corsica is a fusion of French and Italian cuisines, due to its close geographical positions with the two countries. Sandy’s is the first established Corsican restaurant in the UK. Apparently Sandy’s has a no reservations policy, or so I read, but I read this after my visit and after I had called them and booked a table for a Monday evening for dinner, so this is a bit misleading.

Rossopomodoro is an Italian restaurant focusing on pizza and I think it is quite similar to Pizza Express. Rossopomodoro has the same type of menu as Pizza Express, mainly pizzas, but also starters, some main courses and pasta courses and also a similar type of décor, very casual.

I was visiting my mum in Munich and we went for a quick lunch to Ocui. I have been to Ocui a few times now and it always delivers a consistent good meal. Located in the centre of Munich, it calls itself an open cuisine and once you enter you are given a card which you give to various food stations that you visit throughout your meal, and where they upload the price and then pay for everything you have had at the end when you leave. The dining room is large with tables of various sizes and shapes scattered around the room, so you can find the right seat for you, and in the middle there  are various food stations. There is a station for pizzas and antipasti where you can go and order your pizza (made to order) or other type of Italian starters and then wait until they are ready (you get a buzzer which starts buzzing when your dish is ready), and when you order each you give your Ocui card and the station puts in the price of the dish inside the card.

I think this place does the most overpriced pizza in London. Harrods Pizzeria used to be located on the first floor by the Food Hall but recently it has moved to second floor and my friend Yuri who is a consultant and did a project for Harrods said that it was one of the most money generating places in Harrods per square metre (after the expensive jewellery and watch section), as there was always a large queue of people outside the Pizzeria and whenever they got to the table they had already decided what to eat and their turnover was so quick (they bake the pizzas very quickly) a person would be done eating in 30 minutes on average, and on average pay £25/person per visit, so you can calculate how much they would make in 1 day from just pizza. They also used to have a singing pizza chef that would sing once in a while and everyone would applaud, but there was no singing chef when we went this time.

Pizza East is owned by the same people that own the famous Shoreditch house, Soho house, Electric Cinema etc and at the time of writing there are three branches of Pizza East, in Shoreditch, Notting Hill and Kentish Town. I think the Pizza East in Shoreditch, on the ground floor of the same building as Shoreditch house, where I went to on a Saturday night, is much cooler than the one in Notting Hill, so if you want to try it out make sure you go to the Shoreditch one. The Shoreditch Pizza East is probably one of the biggest restaurants you will see in London, and it has a superb New York cool vibe about it. It is a perfect place for a cool pizza dinner with your friends before some fun in Shoreditch (we saw many tables like that on Saturday when we went there).