This February, award-winning pizzaiolo Michele Pascarella will open a new outpost of his west London pizzeria Napoli on the Road on Wardour Street. It will be the brand’s first central London location and an unusual foray into the world of fine dining, with a seven-course tasting menu offered alongside an à la carte menu.
Founded in 2016 with a wood-fired oven roaming London’s markets on the back of a three-wheeled Ape Piaggio, Napoli on the Road later established bricks and mortar pizzerias in Chiswick and Richmond. The team has built a reputation for its contemporary approach to Neapolitan pizza, and Pascarella was named best pizza maker in the world at the 50 Top Pizza Awards – a guide founded in Italy in 2014 that sends anonymous “inspectors” to evaluate pizzerias – in 2023.
The restaurant will be set across two levels and the seven-course tasting menu, which will be priced at around £100 with a drinks pairing included, will be served upstairs. Rather than offering a succession of Neapolitan pizzas, it will move diners through different formats, bases and textures. “The tasting menu is going to allow us to take people on a journey through seasonality, technique, memory and emotion,” says Pascarella. Courses will include focaccia-style bases, and crisp and triple-cooked pizzas, alongside more traditional Neapolitan styles, with a starter and dessert completing the menu.
“Pizza is often treated as casual food,” says Pascarella, “but we want to treat pizza with the same respect as any high-level cuisine.”
Meanwhile, the lower half of the restaurant will mirror the more casual, à la carte format of Pascarella’s Chiswick and Richmond branches.
Designed by Barcelona-based studio Isern Serra, the restaurant will seat around 90 people. Upstairs, the space will feel warm and Mediterranean, while the basement shifts into a more “futuristic” mood, with stainless steel finishes and a long communal table seating up to 20 guests. “We don’t want to create the vibe you have in a Michelin-star restaurant,” Pascarella says. “It must feel like you’re entering a home.”
The move into Soho carries personal significance for the Napoli-born chef. “When I started working in London almost 15 years ago, I was working in Leicester Square, just a few minutes from Soho,” he says. “I always thought, I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to open a place in central London.” Opening here, he adds, “feels like arriving in a new chapter of my journey”.
Napoli on the Road Soho will open in late February at 140 Wardour Street, W1F 8ZT, with takeaway pizza also available.
