So this is how the food world is supposed to work.
Restaurant critics tell us where to eat. We, fellow humans not in possession of their credentials, palates or expense accounts, follow their recommendations. It’s a serious business. The most mythical and powerful critics will sometimes never reveal their faces, like spies, superheroes or internet trolls. They reserve their tables under noms de plume and put on wigs and fake glasses in the taxi on the way to dinner. They eat multiple times at a restaurant to ensure they see it at its best and worst. And, when they finally deliver their verdict, it is definitive. A rave review will jam booking systems for months or prompt queues around the block, if it’s one of those goddamn no-book, lord-of-the-flies joints. A takedown could end in closure. The best critics are, in every sense, tastemakers.
Meanwhile, over in a genuinely uncool part of west London, a guy walks out of an old man’s boozer wearing a Hawaiian shirt with three buttons undone, shorts and Seinfeld-white sneakers and starts talking to camera. He’s been described, unimprovably, as looking like “Mark Zuckerberg after five years of hard drinking and even harder tanning” and he holds a pizza box. As soon as he reaches the pavement, he steps in chewing gum. He lifts his left foot and it remains comically connected to the ground with a white umbilical cord of goo. “Day-ruiner!” he huffs.
The man is in no sense anonymous, though he does also go by the pseudonyms “Davey Pageviews” and “El Presidente”. But most people will know him as Dave Portnoy, the 46-year-old professional bro and “inventor” of the US media-empire Barstool Sports, which he sold recently for $551m (Editor's note: he has since repurchased the company for $1). A large part of his celebrity, and now whopping fortune, is built on his “One Bite Pizza Reviews”, which are sent out to nearly three million Twitter followers, more than four million on Instagram and one million YouTube subscribers. And it’s not only Americans: for his first pizza reviews in the UK, in July 2022, Portnoy was joined by Tottenham and England footballers, Harry Kane and Eric Dier. Dier, giggling like a schoolboy, presented him with a Spurs shirt with “El Pres” on the back.
Back in west London, Portnoy starts the unboxing. He’s at Crisp Pizza W6, an operation run out of the basement of The Chancellors pub in Hammersmith, that only really started in earnest in 2021. He lifts the cardboard lid and shows a cheese pizza that looks… maybe a little burned? Between the moonscape of bubbling cheese, tomato and basil are gnarly black blisters. But Portnoy has no complaints. Schooled on the pizza of the East Coast of the US, he is unmoved by the global love-in with Neapolitan pizza: the pale, bendy, steamy pizzas from Naples that have overrun the world in the past decade, especially in the UK with chains such as Franco Manca and Pizza Pilgrims.
Crisp Pizza W6 is defiantly not like those. Portnoy detaches a slice and it stays rigid, like a diving board. “Zero flop,” he notes, approvingly. His mantra for reviews is: “One bite; you know the rules.” But his video shows him savaging the pizza like a coyote: cheese, spittle and crumbs flying all over the place. When he reaches the crust, there’s an audible, brittle crack. “OK, this is a totally different league from anything I’ve had in London,” he splutters, his mouth still full. “This is by far, by far, by far my favourite pizza I’ve had in London and it’s not even close.”
Portnoy awards Crisp an 8.1 out of 10: an epic, rare rating that places it in the stratosphere of his more-than-1,000 pizza reviews. His voice is so loud that the chefs can probably hear him without stepping outside the kitchen. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to this place now,” says Portnoy. “We’re going to see if I have international pull, because if I gave this score in the United States, they would have a line down the fucking road. In London, I don’t know: does Davey Pageviews have that type of pull? We’re going to find out, because this is the best pizza in London… This is as good as it gets.”
He poses an interesting, transgressive question. Who do we trust for our restaurant recommendations these days? Is it the writer for the august publication in a wig and glasses? Or is it some bloke in a Hawaiian shirt with gum on his shoe yelling at a passerby walking their pooch, “Hot dog! That dog had to be named Harold!”
Stepping into Carl McCluskey’s kitchen at Crisp, there is a wall of heat and sludgy air, like you’ve just landed at Bangkok airport. The room is a little bigger than Harry Potter’s bedroom at the Dursleys’ and its main feature is a snaking metal extraction duct. McCluskey, who is 35, is tall and rakish, with floppy brown hair. He wears a white T-shirt, a half-apron and Birkenstocks so encrusted in white flour it’s impossible to tell their original colour. He hunches over a marble worktop: every 40 seconds or so, he scoops up a wedge of dough, pulls it this way and that, spins a ladle of tomato sauce on it, adds some blobs of cheese, hands it to his cousin Pedro to slide into the Pizza Master electric oven and starts again.
McCluskey remembers well the day that Portnoy came to Crisp. It was a Saturday in July 2022 and McCluskey knew Portnoy was in London as he had already posted a couple of reviews on his channels. Just before midday, McCluskey received a call on his mobile — which was, madly, how he took orders back then — from an American number asking for two cheese pizzas, or “pies” as McCluskey calls them, in homage to the New York pizzerias that inspired him. “I put down the phone and looked at Pedro: ‘He’s ordered a pizza,’” recalls McCluskey. “It was the first one we’d done that day and it was the worst pizza we made last year. By a mile. Because we were just so rattled by the call.”
So, McCluskey knew a visit from Portnoy was a big deal? “Oh, yeah, I was massive into his reviews,” he replies. “He’s a very witty, funny guy. Can be a bit rude sometimes in the videos, but he’s very clever and he’s just sold his business for, like, half a billion, so he’s influential. I knew that if we did get him in, and he gave us a good score, that could be it. That could change… change my life. And that’s exactly what it did.”
McCluskey is not a chef — or at least he wasn’t before setting up Crisp. After school, he did a few odd jobs, including working as an estate agent in north London. At weekends, he played semi-professional football, picking up £200 a week playing as a centre back for the likes of Hendon, Wealdstone and Potters Bar Town. Some players made it out of the lower leagues into the pro ranks — McCluskey’s friend Luke O’Nien now plays for Sunderland — but he never quite had the application.
“I was semi-pro for 10, 12 years,” says McCluskey. “And since this has happened, I regret that I didn’t have the passion and focus for football that I have with pizza. If I’d had that with the football, I probably could have played a lot higher. Only now I realise, you just need to work hard and focus on something and it’ll work out. And I didn’t. I was naturally quite gifted, and I’m quite tall. But yeah, just didn’t have that desire to do it.”
In 2016, McCluskey fell into working at The Chancellors, which sits in a backstreet in Hammersmith, not far from the Thames. His grandmother had owned the pub since 1984 — McCluskey was born in the rooms above it and, as it happens, lives there again now with a friend — and he suspected that he might take it over when she retired. Back then, it was a pretty grotty boozer for locals that survived off its “wet” trade, ie booze. “My nan was old school, didn’t really want to spend any money,” says McCluskey. “Didn’t want to get food in. Just lived off the fact that Fulham Football Club is literally behind those flats, so we’d always have good days then. Riverside Studios was here when Chris Evans was on, so there always was a good crowd on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. But then obviously when the studio shut for redevelopment [in 2014], we lost a lot of revenue overnight.”
He’s talking about TFI Friday, the anarchic Channel 4 variety show Evans hosted that filmed across the road from 1996 to 2000. On the walls inside the pub are pictures from that time of McCluskey’s grandmother — “she’s the real-life Peggy Mitchell” — posing with guests from the show: Martine McCutcheon, Steve Coogan, Eddie Izzard. “Chris Evans, he basically lived in the pub,” says McCluskey.
McCluskey started making pizza in 2019. He figured that, if he ever did take over the pub, to survive financially he would need to serve food. He paid for some lessons with a consultant from Yard Sale Pizza, one of London’s hottest shops, and ended up doing four weeks with him. He made pilgrimages first to New York and then to Naples. He bought a Gozney pizza oven, which he set up in the pub garden.
“I near enough lost my mind for about a year,” says McCluskey. “I made pizza every single day. Without fail. Obsessively. Tried every flour in the world: bread flour from America, German flour. I just tried everything: water temperatures, dry yeast, fresh yeast… Because I didn’t have any baker experience or cooking experience. Just to see how the taste was.”
On Thursday nights in the pub, from 6pm till 9pm, McCluskey would give pizzas away for free: “I was embarrassed to ask for money.” When that became the busiest night of the week, he started charging a fiver. “But the response was crazy,” says McCluskey. “People were just like: ‘These are really good. You should keep at it.’”
Around this time, McCluskey made a breakthrough. He loved the ingredients from Naples, but he found Neapolitan-style pizzas too heavy. “I realised I liked the produce — the tomatoes, the cheese — but the actual dough wasn’t for me,” he says. “It was quite wet in the middle.” Meanwhile, in New York — especially at legendary pizza and calzone spot Lucali in Brooklyn, under chef-owner Mark Iacono — they were producing a crispy pie that no one was attempting in the UK. The fact the Chancellors pub is on Crisp Road was pure serendipity.
“I don’t know how to describe what it is,” says McCluskey of his pies. “Even pizza chefs that come here, they can’t put their finger in it. It’s kind of a mix. You’ve still got that chewy base, but it’s also crispy. And, from what I’ve had in New York, there’s only a couple places that are similar, but they’re a bit heavier. They use bread flour, while we use an Italian flour with a New York-style recipe. So it’s Italian produce with a New York-style recipe and I suppose you just get that mix of the two.”
McCluskey took over the pub from his grandmother in May 2020, when she feared the worst during the first Covid onslaught and decamped to live in Tenerife. He loaded up a credit card, and sold takeaway pints and Aperol Spritzes to passersby. With the money, he bought the Pizza Master oven and in the summer of 2021, when the lockdown eased, he started serving pizzas four nights a week. “We’ve only been open as a kitchen for a year and a half,” says McCluskey, shaking his head. “I’ve never run a kitchen or even worked in a kitchen before. Which is insane really, because of how busy we are.”
So, just how good is the pizza from Crisp? Is it “by far, by far, by far” the best pizza in London? Whichever way you spin it, Portnoy’s prophecy has come to pass. American tourists have been known to travel straight from Heathrow Airport to eat at the pub. A group flew in from Texas, apparently with McCluskey’s pizza top of their London to-do list. A family drove from Sheffield, only to find that all the pizzas had been assigned that day. The same thing happened to Harry Kane, whom Portnoy tipped off to visit Crisp before his review went live. Kane came with his wife after a match, still in his tracksuit.
“We were completely sold out,” says McCluskey. “And I had to offer some guy a round of drinks to get his pizzas. I said, ‘Look, I’m so sorry to do this but I’m going have to get one of your pizzas off you.’ But he was OK, though I didn’t tell him who it was for until he left, just in case.”
The demand remains out of control: McCluskey has to turn away up to 100 people a day. “I’d say we’re about four or five years ahead of schedule,” he says. “Definitely in numbers too. My five-year goal was to sell 1,000 pizzas a week here. We sell 1,400 in four or five days. I pinch myself every day.”
Portnoy’s review, of course, only gets you so far. The rest of the work was done by word of mouth and social media, where photos of McCluskey’s gravity-defying pizzas, often with the backdrop of the glistening Thames, do brisk trade. But what has really pushed Crisp over the top is exclusivity. It’s not about money; you have to put in some actual effort to order a pizza and see what the fuss is about. McCluskey knows this annoys people, but he doesn’t wholly apologise either. In the early days, it was just him and Pedro (now there’s a team of seven most days), and the prep — the two-day process of making the dough; cooking the tomato sauce for three hours — means there is a non-elastic number of pizzas they can turn out.
“People think we are taking the piss a bit,” says McCluskey. “But there’s only so many we can make in this kitchen. If we pumped out more the quality is going to dip. I can do 300 max on a day. But that’s more than enough.”
What McCluskey is doing also seems to chime with how we want to eat right now. In the golden days of the restaurant critic, the most desirable places to eat also tended to be the most expensive ones. “Michelin hunters” travelled round Europe ticking off places in the red book. Then the World’s 50 Best Restaurants came along and ranked fine-dining gastronomic destinations in a handy list. The 50 Best tended to prize Nordic experimentation over traditional chef’s toque French classicism and those restaurants — Noma in Copenhagen being the prime example — became the places for foodies to hit.
But now, that’s history: people like Portnoy and the rapper Action Bronson, with his Viceland series and his book Fuck, That’s Delicious, have punctured the pomposity of food criticism. And how we eat has changed, too: we want familiar food, made with love and skill, that isn’t ruinously expensive. The trend started in earnest in lockdown and has only become more of an economic imperative. In 2020, nothing was more desirable than Willy’s Pies, trad pies with superior fillings to finish at home, which were the brainwave of Will Lewis, a chef who had been furloughed from his job at Michelin-starred Brat in east London. Latterly, it’s been gourmet sandwiches: Chatsworth Bakehouse in Crystal Palace releases its lunch specials at 12:30pm on a Monday, which usually sell out within a minute. Like Crisp, there are wild stories of a couple flying in from New York (for a sandwich!), a guy who drove from Leicester and, on Saturdays, when you can’t pre-book, a queue that can be almost half a mile long.
“We have a large segment of young, middle-class people who want to self-identify with the queue culture,” says Daniel Young, author of the Phaidon book Where to Eat Pizza. “So they want to self-identify with the latest thing that is not expensive, but also requires some know-how and some work. It doesn’t come to your door. You have to be in the know, you have to figure it out. You have to queue, there’s a challenge to it. And then there has to be that high-impact reward. And so the reward is not a beautiful plate. The reward is a food that, as soon as you bite into it, it has that impact, which might be a great sandwich or slice of pizza.”
On a sweltering Friday morning in late May when I visit, McCluskey is already sold out for the day. The menu has four “traditional pies” — cheese, pepperoni, nduja and funghi — and two specials. I order a pizza that is half cheese, half “Vecna”: one of the specials that is topped with San Marzano tomatoes, mozzarella, parmesan and Dr Sting’s hot honey, and has been so popular that McCluskey now can’t take it off the menu. While I wait, listening to the excited chatter of the patrons around me, I realise something not especially profound: we are not really here for the pizza; we are here for the buzz.
The half-and-half pizza arrives on a metal tray, with a stack of napkins. I pick up a slice and, yes, no flop! I bite in and it’s immediately clear that I have never had anything quite like it: it’s oozy on top, dry and sturdy underneath. The tomato sauce has a pleasing sourness and the hot honey delivers a delicious zing. The angry black blisters in the dough impart an insane smokiness. But best of all are the sound effects: it’s like someone eating food on a radio play.
It’s a phenomenal pizza and one that I want to eat again. Afterwards, I go to the kitchen to check in with McCluskey. He recalls eating his first crispy, Brooklyn-style pizza, during the boom in the UK for Neapolitan. “When we went to New York,” he says, “it was, like, ‘It’s unbelievable. How does not one place exist in London?’ There’s probably space for another 100 of us. There’s 4,500 pizzerias in New York, all busy.”
As he talks, McCluskey is in perpetual motion: every 40 seconds grabbing a new lump of dough, stretching it, putting the toppings on, passing it to Pedro. It’s 2pm and he’ll be in here for the next eight hours with a “horrible” period between 7pm and 9pm. “So there’ll be a lot of swearing,” he says. “Me moaning most of the time.” After that, he’ll crawl upstairs to sleep for a few hours and then do it all again.
Next year, McCluskey wants to move out of the flat and open a slightly more formal operation, in a pub in Mayfair, but for now there’s only the relentless churn of being the Davey Pageviews-endorsed, It-place to eat in London right now. “I’m 100 per cent destroyed,” McCluskey admits. “Yeah, I’ve gone past it. But it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So that’s what I keep saying to myself. And we’re making good money. So that gets me through on a Monday and I’m like, ‘Right, we’re going the right way. We have to just keep going.’” ○
