Pronto Pizza: Pepperoni

When this arrived the other night I was concerned because it looked like they'd got my order wrong. Play 'Where's Wally?' on the picture above, except this time it's called 'Where's Pepperoni?'. You'll lose. It was there though, just hidden under the cheese. Like they were trying to smuggle it past the border that is my mouth, into the low-paying horticultural and landscaping industry that is my belly. It worked and I was awash with pepperoni/illegal immigrants. If my body was a democracy, (it's not, it's a dictatorship and I'm the dictator and I will be until I die) then a right-wing government would probably print off a series of campaign posters with pictures of evil looking pepperoni with exaggerated, racist facial features groping young girls, robbing old people and hogging jobs. Thankfully for struggling pepperonis all over the world, when it comes to meat immigration, I have a pretty relaxed policy. I don't think I even have customs or passport checks or anything like that. Everyone's welcome. Come on in. I might regret this one day, or even today in fact. Actually definitely today, because I've recently noticed a significant increase in the amount of tummy I have. It's OK, I'm going to start jogging twice a year. That should sort it out. I just wish someone had told me excessively eating stodgy, fatty foods on an almost daily basis and then lying or sitting down all the time would give me the chubbs. Misled youth or what?

Pronto Pizza is on Stoke Newington Church Street and has a whole selection of contradictory offers that you'd need a complex diagram to fully understand. I took the easy option and went for the 'Buy One, Get One Half Price'. Which was pretty good because they're not that expensive to begin with and assuming you have friends, (perhaps a foolhardy assumption) it means you can get an XL for around £7. Not bad. Also they're pretty tasty and have that kind of oil that makes paper transparent and if you get it on your clothes, it will literally never come out. This makes the whole thing more exciting because there's that little hint of danger. If you're not careful, you could ruin a t-shirt. The only way you could get higher stakes than that would be if you hot-boxed a slaughterhouse.

8 out of 10

Trattoria Da Luigi: Spicy Sausage

Story time! Actually wait, that's misleading. Calling this a story implies there's some kind of drama or suspense involved, or it has even the tiniest amount of narrative drive. I wouldn't want to lead anyone on by suggesting something like that. I'll be more specific and try again:

Dull story time! A few days ago my friends asked me if I wanted to meet them for a lunchtime pizza. I'm not going to tell you what I said because you should really be able to make a fairly educated guess by now, in the same way you should have caught on to the predictability of the 'sticking hands in flames = burns', and 'large Nazi memorabilia collection = a lot less custody' patterns of cause and effect. They told me to meet them at "The Il Baccio pizzeria on Stoke Newington Church Street". However, and I'm ashamed I haven't noticed this before, there are four different pizza places with 'Il Baccio' signs on that road. It is possible that there are more than four pizza places vying for the title of Church Street's premier Il Baccio, but I had to wander around three of them looking like I'd been victim of a particularly unimaginative prank before I found my chums.

See what I mean about dull stories? How uninteresting was that? The concise version of that 'story' would be: It took me longer than expected to find the restaurant. Snawn* or what? I feel sorry for my Grandchildren, they're going to hate hanging out with me. I'll be the senile, grey-haired equivalent of Nytol. I probably don't need to worry about Grandkids just yet. I hear to get to that point you need to cross the 'kids' barrier first, and to get to 'kids' you need to cross the 'fertile, vaguely consenting woman' barrier. Neither of which looks like it will be happening any time soon. Anyway this pizza was actually really tasty, and totally worth the wandering.

*To snore and yawn simultaneously.

9 out of 10

Whole Foods Market: Vegan Calzone

I now live in Stoke Newington. Stoke Newington's full of hippy cafes and yummy mummies with graphic designer husbands and over dressed babies; so it should come as no surprise that there's a Whole Foods Market that charges £80 for a pepper.* I went in once, mostly to see what rich people look like but also because I was hungry. They had this guy for sale for something like £3. At first I thought that was pretty good, but I realised that it was cheap because not only were there no dead animals in it, there was nothing from living animals in it either. Apparently some people have to eat food like this. It's a condition called 'veganism' and as far as I know, there is no cure. When's Blue Peter going to wake up and do a 'Save the Vegans' appeal? Kids could put signs up in their local butchers, have fund raising barbecues and hog roasts, maybe even sell a few t-shirts.

Sadly they didn't have any meat calzones, but if they did I would probably have had to take out a small mortgage to pay for it so maybe that's for the best. Just to be clear, I like animals, they're cute and it's funny when they think they're humans and do things we do, like wear clothes or act surprised when they're put in a microwave. However I like animals the most when they are dead and in my belly, so it was a shame there was aubergine pretending to be a slice of ham. God knows what the cheese was made out of, and anyway, don't cows like being milked? Surely it's like getting a sexy nipple pinch every day. Their self esteem must be through the roof.

6 out of 10

*This is hyperbole, I never saw a pepper that was £80, but you get the gist. If you don't, here is an explanation of the gist: The food is expensive.