This year we went to Pizza Express as usual but ate so much and so slowly that we missed the carol concert. The restaurant is based in the old post office and possibly the town’s finest family eatery. We were served a really delicious three-course meal from the Christmas menu by an excellent waiter called Nick Selway.
The pizzas are always pretty special - they are becoming ever more inventive in fact - and someone recently came up with the idea of putting an entire roast meal onto a pizza. Tom was almost beside himself as he was served a porchetta romana, which featured small curls of pork crackling and little bits of apple sauce, among other delicacies. He gets a bit overexcited in the presence of pork. Once he couldn’t stop laughing because he was so overwhelmed by the taste of the pork belly that he was eating.
The only downside during the main course was that the smell of the gran padana cheese on Tom’s pizza was so powerful that our seven-year-old Betty threatened to go and sit on a neighbouring table. I managed to win her around with the promise of pudding.
About three hours after arriving we finally left the restaurant, in the dark, with brief flashbacks of the year we left Pizza Express in a snowstorm and got trapped on Whitecross Road. Luckily the weather held and we spent the journey home attempting to sing carols at our shouting children, to make up for the failure to get to the cathedral.
Thank you to Pizza Express for the meal very kindly supplied to us free of charge.
