The Best Pizza in London Right Now

Pizza has increasingly become London's default form of social dining.

It works across almost every part of the city's rhythm — dates, post-pub dinners, large groups, solo lunches and neighbourhood restaurants that people return to repeatedly. Over the past decade, London's pizza culture has shifted from chain-led casual dining toward something broader and more layered, where technical Neapolitan cooking, Roman-style spectacle and smaller independent operators now sit alongside long-established institutions.

What makes London interesting is not that it has one dominant style. It is that different versions of pizza now reflect different versions of the city itself.

A note on locations: where restaurants have expanded, we have listed the original site. The first room usually tells you most about what a restaurant actually is.

Napoli on the Road

Original location: 9A Devonshire Road, Chiswick W4 2EU

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.4 / 10

There is currently no more discussed pizza restaurant in London.

Queues form regularly outside the original Devonshire Road restaurant — a reflection of how far London's pizza culture has shifted toward technical precision and product quality. The dough is highly structured: soft, light and carefully fermented. Toppings remain restrained enough to let the base speak. What distinguishes it is consistency — the restaurant operates with the intensity of a destination opening while feeling firmly neighbourhood in scale. The original Chiswick site remains the one to visit.

La Luna di Luca

19 Friars Stile Road, Richmond TW10 6NH

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.2 / 10

Luna di Luca sits at the opposite end of the register entirely.

Smaller, quieter and built around repeat local custom rather than city-wide attention, it reflects something important about London's food culture — that the strongest restaurants are often the ones that become part of a neighbourhood's routine. The appeal here is reliability over novelty, familiarity over spectacle. In Richmond, it has earned both.

Circolo Popolare

40–41 Rathbone Place, Fitzrovia W1T 1HX

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.5 / 10

If Napoli on the Road represents restraint, Circolo Popolare represents the opposite — and is completely unapologetic about it.

Loud, visually excessive and designed for groups, it has become one of the defining examples of modern social dining in London. Pizza exists alongside oversized pasta, exaggerated desserts and interiors built for the camera. The restaurant understands that people come as much for the energy as the food — and engineers both accordingly. Book ahead.

Florencio Pizza

14 Seymour Place, Marylebone W1H 7NF

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.5 / 10

Florencio reflects the independent side of London pizza — a smaller operator building a strong following without large-scale expansion or heavy branding.

Tucked into Seymour Place near Marble Arch, it succeeds through immediacy: the restaurant feels connected to its surroundings rather than constructed for visitors. The wood-fired base is crisp where others lean soft, with toppings that lean into contrast rather than comfort. One of the quietly rated 4.9s in the city. Closed Mondays.

Santa Maria

Original location: 160 New Cavendish Street, Fitzrovia W1W 6YR

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.3 / 10

Before much of London's current Neapolitan wave existed, Santa Maria was helping define it.

The restaurant helped establish a more traditional approach to pizza making in London well before the current wave of publicised openings — and its influence is still felt across the city, particularly in the emphasis on dough quality, restrained toppings and a direct connection to Naples itself. Santa Maria now has several London sites. The Fitzrovia original remains the reference point.

PizzaExpress

Original location: 10 Dean Street, Soho W1D 3RW

Vitae Lifestyle Score9.1 / 10

Including PizzaExpress in a list like this is a deliberate choice.

Founded by Peter Boizot at this Soho address in 1965, it remains one of the most culturally significant food businesses Britain has produced. For decades, it normalised pizza within British dining at scale — making it familiar and affordable across the country before independent Neapolitan restaurants became the reference point. There are now over 400 PizzaExpress restaurants in the UK. The Dean Street original still operates, and still carries the jazz club downstairs. London's current pizza culture exists partly because PizzaExpress established the category first. That deserves acknowledgement, not apology.

Who it's for

• Anyone trying to understand how London's pizza culture has actually evolved over the past decade — beyond the headline openings.
• Visitors and residents looking for a single map across the city's most distinctive Neapolitan, independent and institutional pizzerias.
• Readers who care as much about the social context of a restaurant as the food on the table.