Get Out of Here with Your So-Called “London Pizza”

If you’re a restaurateur or an entrepreneur, I suppose it’s only natural that you should want to see yourself as someone on the vanguard of some new, burgeoning, popular movement. No one wants to acknowledge that they’re simply playing the hits, or picking up where the last person or business left off. There’s an ever-present desire to find a way to not only call what you do distinct and special, but also identify how you’re helping to codify some surging new zeitgeist. This is how we end up with people proclaiming not only that something like “London Pizza” exists as a style, but also that this style is “the greatest pizza in the world.” So what if they seemingly can’t, you know … define or even slightly describe what the fuck it’s supposed to be? So what if half of the examples that come up when you Google the term are just standard pizzas with a handful of French fries on them? It’s the greatest in the world, haven’t you heard?

To which we obviously say: Get out of here with that shit. You don’t get to claim you’ve created some mind-blowingly unique thing without being able to describe what supposedly makes it so unique and special. It’s either distinct, or it’s not, and the most likely of outcomes is that “it’s not,” but is merely novel to its customers in the UK who may have had less exposure to diverse, non-chain pizza than in some other places. It’s hard to overstate how little new there is under the sun when it comes to the concept of pizza; to act as if you’ve pioneered some scintillating new style with practically no actual changes just reeks of arrogance and the belief that any tiny thing you do is of vast importance. That, or it’s just an understandable attempt at marketing, but still no less annoying.

If you like your pizzas Neapolitan-style and New York-sized, you might like “London pizza,” a fusion of both. https://tinyurl.com/ycxeebkm

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— WISH-TV (@wishtv.com) 10:30 AM · May 21, 2026

This is, clearly, a bit of a pet peeve for me personally–I have long been annoyed by brands attempting to forge newly created micro-styles in the space between existing styles purely for the purposes of marketing. In my years of craft beer writing, this was a frequent occurrence–one of the most memorable being the brief period in the mid-2010s when breweries were attempting to market “red IPA” and “white IPA” as distinct styles despite the fact that IPA was already frequently amber/red in color throughout history, or made with a portion of wheat in the grist that made those other ones “white.” These weren’t legitimate emergences of a new style; they were cynical ploys by breweries to argue to distributors/package stores that their brand needed additional space on the shelf to represent every “style of IPA” in an effort to squeeze out competitors. Drinkers and distributors didn’t buy it, and the likes of “red IPA” vanished after their brief blip of supposed existence.

“London Pizza” strikes me as much the same: A term dreamt up by marketers to apply toward a burgeoning movement of young pizza makers in the English capital, who are seeking notoriety and a hook to encourage tourism and curiosity. The breathless CNN praise piece that captured my attention and annoyance makes it immediately clear how extraordinarily loose this term is, even though people have apparently been slinging it around since 2019. Pretty much every person in the article has a different idea of what “London Pizza” supposedly is, my favorites being the two guys who suggest that London pizza has “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.” Except, you know, for the ones that don’t, and those pies are also “London pizza.” And the ones with handfuls of French fries: Also “London pizza.” As one guy describes it, London pizza is “a philosophy, bro,” with “a lot of these styles, but with no rules.” Sure, sounds like … not really a style at all then, right?

There’s just something annoying about a business acting as if it’s engaged in the world’s boldest experimentation when such ideas are already commonplace all over the planet. Oh, so you thought to put chicken tikka masala on a pizza? That’s so wild, man! Also: When I moved into my current home in the suburbs of Virginia in 2021, there were already not just one but two Indian fusion pizza places open within 10 minutes of me. What’s your next utterly groundbreaking idea? At least in Glasgow, they have the courtesy to deep fry their pizza into a crunchy monument to poor health, which I must admit is unique if ill-advised.

The United States is of course suffused with genuinely distinctive regional pizza styles that are far easier to define, because they have the history and consistency to back themselves up. Detroit took the rough outline of Sicilian-style pizza and developed it into their toweringly crispy, pan-baked squares. Chicago created the ever-divisive and tomato-dominated deep dish. Even Altoona, Pennsylvania wrought the American-cheese topped horror of their own abominable creation, which may not be able to call itself “appetizing,” but absolutely can call itself unique. We have so much pizza variety that we’ve become inured to it, and American pizza consumption has been steadily falling, with big chains like Pizza Hut in particular feeling the brunt of the pain. America is almost post-pizza at this point.

The UK, on the other hand, seems to be only more recently discovering how diverse the idea of pizza can be, and they’ve mistaken a wave of more adventurous chefs for the emergence of a unique local style mostly through a lack of interest in what the rest of the world has been doing with pizza for the last two decades. They just see something that could maybe help with the slow death of the traditional UK pub, and a marketing term that could help to draw in tourists who have already had their fill of fish and chips or mushy peas.

“There’s something very London about pints and pizzas,” says a UK food writer quoted in the CNN piece, offering a particularly insipid sentiment. Is there, really? The vibe that best captures London is “pints and pizzas”? There something uniquely London about that vibe? Is there any big, metropolitan city in the world where pizza is popular that wouldn’t say that “pints and pizzas” was also their vibe? Please.

Any way you slice it, I have my doubts.