Ah, Pizza Express, my comfort blanket of a restaurant!

Oh I do love P.E. No, not Physical Education. I don’t think it will take many of you by surprise to hear that I was not a physical Adonis of a school child. I was the kind of kid that got friction burns from playing rugby! I most certainly didn’t look forward to going out on to that frozen field of a football/rugby/athletics pitch as a kid. The P.E. I’m referring to is Pizza Express. Yes the ever present chain of purveyors of Italy’s finest export, the Pizza. Actually, according to the OEC, the top export of Italy is Packaged Medicaments, but that kind of kills the flow of what I’m trying to say. Pedanticism over style, that’s what my mother always used to say. Well, actually she didn’t, but… I’m stuck in a cycle now.

New paragraph: that’ll help right? What I’m trying to say is that I’m a big fan of Pizza Express. It should be our worst nightmare by all normal logic. A restaurant that specialises in selling cheese (milk) topped bread (often soya) bases. And while there are other options, who goes to a sushi restaurant if they don’t like fish. Actually, Sushi just refers to a small cake of cold cooked vinegared rice, but… (Stop it, Louis!). The point is that despite Pizza Express being a haven for cheese coated bread they have fully understood the benefit of offering alternatives for people who have dietary requirements or just atypical preferences.

Not only is the allergen menu brilliant, but the range of substitutions that they offer makes eating out a treat. Obviously each Pizza shows up as containing milk on the allergen menu but they have a particular page for which meals can be made suitable for a reduced dairy diet. A quick cross-check against whether each pizza then contains soya and we’re good to go! I don’t know enough about other allergens to generally talk about them – but I do know they offer a gluten free pizza base as well!

Even without having the menu in front of me, I could quite happily choose the following selection from memory (which probably means I’ve had it a few too many times): Dough balls (with oil and vinegar instead of garlic butter) followed by a Pollo ad Astra made with vegan cheese. Mmmm. I’m hungry again now. What makes it even better is that the children’s portion of Penne Bolognaise is dairy and soya free and Piglet LOVES it. It was one of the few meals he would sit and systematically eat his way through as a baby when we did occasionally eat out. I think its for these reasons that it’s one of the first places we will often look for when we find ourselves out of the house and in need of somewhere to eat.

A few months ago we were flying back from Portugal where we’d been with the wife’s family for our summer holiday. The flight was mid-morning but ended up being delayed. As a result we had breakfast at something like six in the morning, drove to the airport and by the time we’d checked in, waited for the plane to finally board and flown home, it was something like 3 in the afternoon. Faro airport, despite offering multiple cafes and restaurants, proved virtually impossible to find anything suitable to eat and therefore we were all pretty hungry and grumpy by the time we got back to our car at Stansted airport. The first thing we did was put Pizza Express into Google Maps and drive to the nearest one (Bishop’s Stortford, if you’re interested).

Just to be clear, I’m not being paid by Pizza Express. I’m a long way away from commanding that sort of negotiation – the article would probably have been much better written if it was sponsored (and certainly none of the nonsense about medicaments or sushi or my mum would have made the edit!). But the reason I’m happy to sing their praises is that I think they’ve got it right and are almost certainly seeing the commercial benefits of it. By going above and beyond what many other chain restaurants offer in terms of allergy support, they get those people coming back time and again. And believe it or not, we’ve got friends! The number of times I have suggested Pizza Express as a suitable place to eat for a social gathering or a work event simply because I know I’ll be able to eat there and other people will like it. That can be as many as 10 people eating there just because one person can (yes, I reckon I have 10 friends!). That’s quite powerful. And that’s kind of what I want this blog to achieve. I would much prefer that it became easier for people like me to eat out because companies see the attraction of catering for us rather than black listing companies that get it wrong. But we’re not quite there yet, so a bit of both I think, for now.