Review at a glance: ★★★★☆
Only you know whether pizza is worth queuing five hours for, whether it is worth sleepless nights sitting in the torpid blue light of a smartphone screen searching in vain for a reservation that will never materialise. This is how it is with the Marlborough.
It is because of Crisp, Carl McCluskey’s pizza project. In 2022, Crisp became the biggest news in Hammersmith since the bridge closing when bro-fluencer Dave Portnoy disguised a credit card advert as a pizza review and declared it his favourite in London. Back then it was in The Chancellors, McCluskey’s family boozer by the river. Now it is here, below a brand-new pub doing a very good job of looking very old, as it might have done before its days as a gothic-themed hangout, a knock-off Hammer Horror set with year-round cobwebs and skeletons, and loos hidden behind bookcase wallpaper. Truly a strange time for pubs, the Noughties.
The ghosts of that pub and the Greene King washout that followed have been exorcised with claret-coloured paint, anaglypta and French polishing. It looks rather a lot like the Devonshire, which is not a coincidence: the Dev’s Charlie Carroll and Oisín Rogers have had more than a hand in all this. “Come for the pizza, stay for the Guinness,” reads a sign, explaining the meeting of minds.
I’d not stay for the Guinness as it is — head as thick as a ploughman’s sandwich — but Rogers has a knack for sorting these things. It’ll come. Hopefully the pizza doesn’t make its way upstairs — there are murmurs — but it’s hard to see how it would. On a Thursday night, the place was so chaotic with customers, McCluskey was manning the doors himself. Waiters wouldn’t stand a chance.
Besides, they’re working double-time already. In the Crisp dining room, the trad-pub dissolves into something like a New York speakeasy: bare brick walls, steakhouse-red leather banquettes, a still from The Godfather. Tiles somewhere between burnt orange and a longed-for tan, Tiffany lamps. It has been expertly lit: this unpromising recipe is actually rather gorgeous. It hums and crackles with a babbling crowd. This is the room to be in, you think, the room everyone else is waiting for. It helps that the pizza ovens cook down here: the smell is so good you hope it seeps into your clothes and hair, that you might wake up the next morning and take another breath of it.
The menu is as it was in Hammersmith, and not broad. There are eight regular pizzas to choose from, and a number have only marginal differences between them. Not something I begrudge: why mess with a formula that so evidently works? The pizzas are as the name suggests, near New York style — not floppy — but not foldable either, and thin, with dough blistered as in Naples. It is distinctly its own — or was until the rip-offs started popping up.
The Vecna is built cheese-first, marinara sauce added later, pepperoni slices glistening. Hot honey lifts it, the sweet spice adding to the gentle heat of the sausage. For me, who likes Neapolitan pizza, this was too crunchy, but I can’t fault the execution; it delivers exactly what’s promised. Pizza preferences are personal. I preferred the bar pies — bigger, flatter, less brittle. In this guise we had the Tie-Dye, a margherita made with tequila sauce and topped with a spiral of pesto, looking like a trippy Scooby Doo sequence. With floppier dough, and a little smokiness in the sauce, this was the hit. We ordered a pizza each, an error: one between two would be enough. Better if we’d avoided the baked pepperoni “crisps”, too, which were nothing of the sort, just limp slices. We ordered marinara sauce for dipping, but quickly failed to see the point. There’s fine-tuning to figure out.
It is a beautiful room serving the same pizza that made it so big in Hammersmith. Hard to knock, that. Is it worth queuing five hours for? I can’t answer — truthfully, I messaged McCluskey for a reservation. Perks of the job and all that. I do know life is fleeting and this is a city not short of choice. There are many excellent places with empty seats. But they are not Crisp, and your time is your own.
The Marlborough, 4 North Audley Street, W1K 6WD. Meal for two about £35; crispmayfair.com
