Pizza Express

This is my favourite of the Bristol Pizza Express branches. The Clifton location is lovely and the interior is far more upmarket than your usual chain restaurant, but unfortunately the food here (as in all Pizza Express branches) has gone downhill of late, in my opinion. On a recent visit, my thin and crispy pizza with pesto and cherry tomatoes was lukewarm and the cheesy garlic bread portion was rather small. Overall, I was disappointed, although the piano playing is a plus point.

The food is great, I had dough balls for starter and two bowls of pasta for main corse.
The service is very quick.

Pretty good average restaurant if you’re looking for a simple italian meal. They have some quirky items on the menu, the square pizzas with salad in the middle are quite novel but as it goes, I’d rather go to a restaurant that is a little more unique and less mass produced. Each to their own though!
Staff were busy but helpful when I was in on a Saturday lunchtime, the food came quite quickly and there were no issues with anything — even the dairy free pizza my sister ordered was managed fine.

Nestled alongside the pretentious restaurants of Clifton Village lies a little enclave of cheap yet overpriced chain Italians. You can almost trace a line between Pizza Express, Zizzis and Strada. Perhaps, if you were really running low of entertainment options, you could even have starter, mains and dessert in each.
Pizza Express is the cheapest and most downmarket of the three. It’s a turn as many tables in a night as you can, fairly generic sort of chain. This particular branch is more aesthetically pleasing than most (they can be very outdated looking these days), and its wide windows give onto a very pleasant stretch of the village.
My impression with most chain restaurants is that unless you pick up one of the many vouchers in circulation, they are invariably overpriced. Although an evening at Pizza Express isn’t as steep as many other restaurant options, at the end of the day the food is basic and pasta and pizza cost almost nothing to produce. Better hop across the road to the far more satisfying and different Thali Café.

Pizza express is normally a very standard affair, the pizzas are good but too small, the salads are good but only because of the dressings, the one thing that always saves it is the location.
Not here the location is as standard as the food which, as I said, is good but nothing more. I wouldn’t take anyone here, especially if I was paying, the food is too expensive (unless you have a voucher) and the restaurant too characterless. Since I found the salad dressings in the supermarket I have very little reason to go to Pizza express.

This is quite honestly the poshest Pizza Express I’ve ever been in. I’m not joking — it’s the sort of chain restaurant that you could actually take a date to and not feel like some cheapskate bum. To show you just how posh this place is, they actually employ someone to play the grand piano that they have in there, which creates a damn fine atmosphere. The food, as you can imagine, is exactly the same as all the other Pizza Express restaurants, which ain’t that bad for what it is, and their salad dressing (which you can actually buy in supermarkets) is absolutely divine. The restaurant itself is split into two open-​plan levels, so ideally you either want to be by the window on the street level (don’t worry, this end of Regent Street is very quiet, so you won’t have anyone gawking your special lady), or up on the balcony level, so that you can feel all VIP or something. Highly recommended.

Clifton Village, I have noticed, does hold host to many chain restaurants, Pizza Express being one of them. But this branch is definitely more atmospheric than the other three in Bristol. Set in an old building, taking up several number on Regent Street, they offer the familiar choices of pasta and pizza, which you can watch the chefs making. There are four eating areas to choose from — make sure you get one where you can watch the band, if it’s a live music night.
Obviously the dough balls are a must when it comes to the eating. And I’m pretty partial to the pizza with the egg on top…

Eating at chain restaurants is never ideal, but it has to be said that Clifton Village boasts one of the better Pizza Expresses. It’s pretty big so more suited to group eating, though there are some smaller areas which are more suitable for dining for two.
I went about a year ago, though I was more attracted by the 2−4−1 offers they were giving away with the Sunday Times than anything else. The Sloppy Guiseppe is certainly the best pizza on the menu; I personally found the Diavolo a little too hot — and that’s coming from someone who throws cayenne paper on pretty much anything!
This is a pleasant enough place, though unless you can get a voucher (which they do seem to give a lot of away), it’s probably best saved for office Christmas parties and the like.