At a recent lunch at PizzaExpress I shared the Antipasto starter (£9.90). This is a really nice platter of cured Italian meats with large green Sicilian olives, roasted tomatoes, baby mozzarella, sweet peppadew peppers and rocket with warm dough sticks.
This is a generous platter of antipasto. Very nice and fresh, though the peppadew peppers are quite hot and spicy. I really do like a good antipasto to start a meal off, the combination of flavours and textures is what makes it for me. With a dish like this it is too easy to prepare it all in advance and as a result it dries out. This platter though was fresh and felt like it had just been prepared fresh to order. The mozzarella for example looked and tasted like it had just been cut into slices. The cured italian meats, through probably pre-sliced, certainly hadn’t been left in the fridge for hours uncovered to dry out.
For my main course I chose the Etna pizza (£11.90). This was one of their Romana Pizzas, with hot soft n’duja sausage, roquito peppers, speck ham, mozzarella, tomato and grana padano. I do like the pizza from Pizza Express, they certainly taste a lot more authentic than pizza I have had elsewhere. Authentic as in Italian, a lot of pizza places have, what I would call, American style pizza and this is different to the pizza you can eat in Italy. The name Etna was certainly an indicator that this was a hot and spicy pizza. It wasn’t as spicy as you would think, so in my opinion was really nice.
Overall I enjoyed the starter and the pizza. It was probably a lot more than I would usually spend for lunch, but this wasn’t a usual lunch break.