Singapore Welcomes Pizza Express

Pizza Is Not Junk Food

 I know I know, not another review about yet another pizza restaurant.  We can’t help it.  My brother Jerome and I love our pizzas.  He preferred the thick crust version and I adored the thin crust ones.  At home, Mom called it junk food. 

When we were younger, Jerome and I were brought up on Mom’s cooking of low salt and low fat dishes daily,  that we often had to sneak out for an unhealthy snack of chicken nuggets, burgers or curry puffs.  I remembered that even Dad had big meals during lunchtime at the office, anticipating a rather bland dinner.  He often had  roast duck, roast pork,  roti prata and soup kambing or anything else that would not have passed Mum’s scrutiny, governed by her “quack nutritionist” certification.  

Jerome and I can attest to the fact that pizza is not junk food.  It is worthy of claiming its own food group, under the label of “Healthy Food”. This is particularly so for the pizzas served at Pizza Express. How can a pizza that is made from premium flour, hand tossed and served with the freshest ingredients full of goodness from the garden be unhealthy?

So yes, there is cause for celebration.  Jerome had just informed me that Pizza Express had just opened its first outlet here in Singapore at Scotts Square.  In the past, I often looked forward to work trips to Hong Kong so that I could dash into Pizza Express at the airport for a quick meal before heading back to Singapore.

This post is a review done by Jerome when he visited Pizza Express yesterday for dinner.  No, I was not invited.  Sometimes, my brother can be quite useless.

 Pizza Express In Singapore

 Pizza Express was founded by Peter Boizot, a restaurateur and philanthropist in 1965 when he first obtained a pizza oven and hired a chef during his trip to Italy and set up the first outlet in Wardour Street, London. The rest is history and Pizza Express has since expanded regionally and globally over the years into the rest of Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East.

Jerome loved his pizzas smothered with tomato sauce and the creations at Pizza Express hit the spot with a good slather of homemade passata. The pizzas are available in both the classic (original and unchanged since 1965) and Romano crusts with the former being thicker and the latter being a thinner and crispier version. These are made from freshly kneaded dough that is prepared daily from premium flour.

A good range of pizzas are available and it was impossible to resist having a few at a single sitting.  Jerome ordered 3 whole pizzas for 2 persons to share.  So I am quite annoyed he had not invited me to dinner last night. 

The Lava from the classic range was topped with fresh olives, burrata, mozzarella, sweet cherry tomatoes, whole basil leaves and passata. The creaminess of the burrata created a delightful burst of flavours with each bite. He favoured the thicker crusts but the Romano pizzas here had made him rethink his preferences. The Pomodoro Pesto (Romano) was the pièce de résistance for him with its thin crust, which still provided a very satisfying bite. Crowned with mozzarella, passata, cherry tomatoes, garlic pesto sauce, basil leave and pesto Genovese, this pizza had left him impressed with how all the ingredients complemented each other to create a wonderful symphony of sensations for the palate.

The third pizza, a Margherita with the classic crust was a creation of mozzarella, basil and passata. So simple, so comforting and definitely a perennial crowd-pleaser.

 

His Verdict?  -  BELLY HEARTY YET HEALTHY

 

About The Writer:

This blog post was co-written by my brother Jerome and I. Although we are siblings who grew up 11 years apart, shaped by differing experiences to see the world from different perspectives, we do share a common obsession – FOOD.  We celebrate our passion for life with food.  However, our attitudes to food are quite different and the way we celebrate our love for food are also quite different.  Jerome lives to eat and hoovers everything edible that crosses his path.  As he shovels food into his mouth with that fork in his right hand, he takes photographs of what he eats, and posts pictures and notes up on Facebook with his left.  Often, his beautifully written prose about what he had eaten would be 7 paragraphs in length and would not have any punctuations in between because he had been too busy multi-tasking. 

I, on the other hand, eat to live. It is not just about my attempts to eat healthily. As I am a “cam-whore” and “social media hussy”, I spend about half an hour styling my food, taking photographs, writing notes and posting them across my social media platforms before eating them, right after the hubby has paid for the bill and is about to head out of the restaurant.  I enjoy reading all my posts about what I had eaten because I know that I had lived fully in spite of watching what I eat.  Welcome to the foodie world of the quirky Ong siblings.