Pizza Pronto: James Lowe at Figlia

You might have missed out on tickets to catch James Lowe cooking at Harriot, but that doesn’t mean you’ve missed out on seeing him entirely. In a surprising but very welcome plot twist back in 2020, Lowe, best known for elegantly wrought plates of fine British produce, flipped the script at Flor, his Borough Market restaurant, to make pizza during lockdown, and thus the magic of ASAP Pizza was born. Though it was shelved when life got back to normal, the food lovers of London loved it a lot, and have never forgotten about it. And neither have we.

And so, when James partnered up with the good people at Harriot for this Festival, we thought, aha! And we said to ourselves, the guys at Harriot are also the guys who have Tipo 00, who are also the guys who have Figlia, the excellent pizzeria in Brunswick. We twisted their arms, we twisted James’s arm, and now here we are, with Pizza Pronto.

This adventure is partly inspired by that ASAP moment, but mostly just about Lowe’s deep love of pizza. “In some ways, pizza isn’t that big a leap from what we were all about at Lyle’s – it’s an extension of our love of simple ingredients,” Lowe says. “Even though you’re basically working with the same few ingredients, that spectrum from crap pizza to something amazing is huge. And a great pizza is life changing.”

Lowe knows a thing or two about cheese and wine, too and will be plumbing the choicest wheels and the crunchiest bottles from Figlia and Grana to top his pizze and to charge your glasses. Expect a tight list of great pizzas (among them a clam pie, a speck and Gorgonzola, and Lowe’s famed take on the Hawaiian, which in its London incarnation married pickled Scotch bonnet peppers, grilled pineapple, red onion, and guanciale), feisty dippers, a list of Lowe-approved light reds, fresh wines with delicious acidity (“bangers – just bangers”) and some freewheeling high times.