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Probably the only cheap pizza joint in London with serious charisma, Soho Joe is the kind of place that feels candlelit even when it actually isn’t. With dark wood booths and a well stocked bar, if you were a sexy-but-slightly-corrupt-politico in an American TV drama, you would be striking a deal over a pie in here. There’s also a basement that actually achieves the holy grail of basement dining: eating down here feels cosy, rather than intensely claustrophobic.
Soho Joe’s other massive selling point is that at lunchtime, it does pizza for a fiver. The best we tried was the brilliantly restrained bufalina: a thin, American-style base topped with fat, sweet cherry tomatoes and oozy hunks of mozzarella. A spicy diavola with pepperoni and red onion was also scrumptious, but in a greasier, more transient way. Also if you don’t self-define as a red-onion person be careful with this one: the onions were cut beautifully thin and tasted sweet and sharp, but there were millions of them.
What’s nice about this menu is that it’s pretty basic, featuring fast-food classics like ‘four cheeses’. There’s a steak sandwich and a caesar salad on offer, too – but don’t touch them. The sandwich was dry, and the salad was basically iceberg + dry chicken + ominously hard, curling shaves of parmesan. The pizza, thankfully is on a whole other level. Stick to that.