Adagio Pizza al Taglio

I went today and got the mushroom one and the margarita one. They were dry, a little stale and not that flavorsome. The girl behind the counter was indifferent and looked a little fed up. And the place is on the expensive side. At these prices I'd rather go to Princi or Malletti, both better than here.

Soho is awash with positively stomach-churning pizzerias, and I’m pleased to report that Adagio is a rare exception to the rule. Freshly prepared and sold by weight, Adagio offers a wide range of unique and mouth-watering flavours including my personal favourite, potato and truffle oil. At no more than £3.50 a slice you can be sure of good value.

I would heartily recommend Adagio’s excellent pizzas - be sure to visit when you're next in Soho.

Pizza sold by weight! Genius. Might be a a little pricier than the pizza slice merchants at Leicester Square. That'll be because at Adagio the quality is in the toppings.

Served up quickly and away I went with a slab of Pizza slice. Mozzzarella, Pancetta and Red Onion - lovely.

Try it once and love it.

American pizzas are round, did you know that? Italians make them square because they fit into ovens better and you don't waste those cornery bits. Adagio's passes the first test, the second is taste and it did very well there too; a great range of flavours and pizzas. KNow how they make it better? They use scissors to cut it and you pay by weight, enabling you to eat and pay for the

As part of a treasure hunt organised by Windows phone and Qype, once we'd found this little shop of my homeland they gave us some to taste and try. I wussed out and went for the piquant salami but wished I'd been brave enough to try something involving a numerous selection of good looking cheeses.

I'm not sure about the little grease-proof paper wrapped boards, kinda different and interesting with a bit of fun but also a little messy! Pizza bits and grease went a little everywhere as I hungrily ate my strips of pizza. I can understand trying to do something different to stand out but the excellent tastes on offer should be enough rather then what felt like a gimmick. As cutlery is the only thing I would change, go there and try a few slices out and yes the salami was excellent!

When she pulled the scisors out I have to admit I didn't know what to expect! It was a little scary then I saw her cut the pizza...

They cut a slice and weigh it so that you pay for what you get - an excellent idea for pizza and means you can eat only what you want and even get little tasters.

Absolutely fantastic and perfect for either a traditional sized slice or a lot of little pieces. YUM!

Thanks to a Qype/My Kind of Phone event, I recently had the opportunity to pop in and try a slice - cut with scissors and popped into the oven! I had no idea fully what this place was about until I just read the reviews below. I mean, it just looked like a pizza place, but different than others. That's the great thing about events - I learn about new places and try new things!

So, what I've learned is that the pizza is sold by weight - and ya know what? I think that's great! You can eat to fit your budget or eat to fill your tummy! Honestly, it's still not that expensive and it's a quickly-served treat in the heart of Soho!

I had the spicy salami - I recommend it!

Forget your boring pepperoni or Hawaiian pizzas, Adagio Pizza in Soho's Greek street offers flavours that are so much more interesting. I ordered the potato and truffle oil pizza and whilst potatoes on pizza could be construed as carb overload it actually worked very well. Pizza is sold by the slice and the dough is thin and crispy rather than thick and chewy which also scores points with me! I recommend trying the spicy sauce, which you'll find next to the counter. It might not actually be very spicy, but it will give your pizza a nice kick.

Forget those stalls that sell slices of congealed hawaiian pizza that have been sat out for days, this place offers a quick snack that even gets an Italian thumbs up.

With some fantastic, out of the ordinary topping options and large square beautifully baked bases, these are really a treat.

Priced by weight these are well worth a look

Adagio (from Italian ad agio, 'at ease') is a take-out or sit at a bar-stool style decent fast food. It's perfect for a great place to grab something quickly (often the case on a night in Soho) without resorting to fried/dirty fast-food.

The 'at ease' is possibly in reference to the giant rectangular very-slooow baked cooked pizzas which have a deep flavour and chewyness. A far cry away from the dodgy slices from nearby vendors.

The namesake is also one of my fave classical pieces by Barber. It was reworked by William Orbit who also gave Adagio the slow-baked treatment.

This Italian pizzeria is so good, Westminster council should rename Greek Street to Italian Street.

For photos see Greedy Diva @ http://greedydiva.blogspot.com/2010/02/adagio-pizza-al-ta...

"Adagio", in Italian, refers to a slow tempo. So, it may seem a strange name for what is essentially a fast food, pizza place, but there's a logic to the madness. Adagio Pizza al Taglio hails its pizzas as "slow fast food".

It's all about the dough, you see. The dough is nurtured lovingly by chef Shelley Squire, for a minimum of 72 long, laborious hours before baking. The Mariah Carey of the dough world, this special blend of flours hailing from Vicalvi, south east of Rome, requires all the pandering and indulgence of the temperamental diva herself. It's kept at specially controlled temperatures, and is fondled, turned and folded at regular intervals as it bubbles and billows over the 72 hour wait prior to baking. And should one of these specially controlled conditions vary in the slightest, the whole thing (including Shelley's sanity) could all go out the window. The man must have serious nightmares about dough.

I didn't decipher all of this just from eating it. I am a sudden expert on pizza dough since, having opened in Soho at the start of February, the Adagio crew invited me and TPG down for a tour of the works, a natter with the chef and a comprehensive tasting of some of their many varieties of pizza al taglio ("by the slice"). Since we're off to Bologna this weekend, and in quite the "bring on all things Italian" frame of mind, we scooted down there as fast as our imaginary Vespas could carry us. We didn't pay for the tasting, but rest assured the Greedy Diva remains scrupulous in her judgement.

First impressions might not blow you away. It looks like a fairly standard takeaway place, and has clearly been set up for an intended roll out. There are a few stools for eating in, but there's a definite sense that Adagio is attempting to bring to London the Roman concept of pizza al taglio as a light snack on the go. And it's open late for the boozey crowd.

There's a large variety of flavours (over 40 apparently) which change daily, and are intended to change to match the seasons. They're sitting out on display, to be heated up once you order. They don't look particularly outstanding at first glance, but that's often the way with pizza and pasta in Italy from my experience - the proof is in the taste.

The distinguishing feature of Adagio's pizzas, compared to most of its London contemporaries, is the base. It comes in the traditional Roman style (slightly thicker than the thin Neopolitan style and much thinner than the big hefty focaccia-like numbers you'll get at Princi and elsewhere). And they do it pretty much perfectly - crunchy but chewy in all the right ways, and cooked evenly all the way through, it's moreish and filling without being overly doughey (a la Pizza Hut), floppy or oily.

A trained chef, Shelley's got the dough down to such a fine art because he traipsed around Italy until he found the perfect pizza base in a small neighbourhood place, then spent a month training in Rome in the kitchen of its maker. He has replicated the routine, preparation and ingredients precisely, right down to the special 400kg mixer and a 700kg oven which were transported over from Italy to give this doughey diva just the conditions she requires. Imagine getting this baby in the doorway:

We tried a smorgasbord of flavours, from our least favourites (and there were only a couple) - the dangerously explosive cherry tomatoes with garlic peperoncino and paprika (which lacked some spicy bite), and the butternut squash and pancetta with garlic (a tad on the bland side) - to the ultra tasty (even if a touched lightly with the ugly stick) tuna with mayonnaise, artichoke puree and artichoke hearts on a tomato base, the baked aubergine, garlic and parsley with feta, and the juicy Italian sausage with broccoli and peperoncino. The potato with mozzarella and rosemary was also lovely - carb on carb never fails me.

While the toppings fluctuate in appeal, the delicious base is most definitely the highlight of these pizzas, giving the operation plenty of scope to play with toppings.

Made to measure and priced by weight - sample one big slice, or ask for bite sized samples of a few flavours. An average slice costs around £3.50 (and pizzas range from £1.90 - £2.10 per 100g).

I'm fussy about my pizzas, but I rate Adagio as one of my top places for a slice in London (along with Franco Manca, Red Pepper and Pizza East (reviewed earlier here), which are catering to a sit down crowd). I particularly love the full blown obsession that is going into getting this product just right. And I like the concept of a made-to-measure pizza snack for eating on the go - all while imagining you're strutting down the cobbled streets of Rome in your Armani shades with the Vespa parked just around the corner.

As a fellow connoisseur on the subjects of ladyboys and / or London's Italian food scene I would most definitely consider young Chris my equal, if not my superior. Once again he is bang on in this assessment.

Adagio have succeeded, where so many before have failed, in delivering an authentic slice of Roman-style pizza al taglio. With dough more slowly proven than Lord Ashcroft's tax status, a huge variety of tasty, seasonal flavours (some sensibly more attuned to the British palate) and lively atmosphere of the ubiquitous Roman in-and-out pizzeria, it comes as a surprise that the minds behind this Soho eatery are not exclusively Italian; thoroughly unsurprising, however, is the discovery of the palpable levels of research and preparation that have laboriously gone into this.

The only discernible difference is the price, weighing in at slightly more per gramme than in Italy. Considering the astronomicalocal [new word folks] rates / rents, this is easily overlooked and not really an obstacle when you consider there’s a similar disparity in cost when it comes to coffee and that doesn't appear to have been a detriment to our levels of consumption.

Adagio Pizza al Taglio brings the Roman concept of pizza “by the cut” to Soho. Priced by the weight, Adagio features a dizzyingly delicious line up of more than forty seasonally changing pizzas prepared fresh in traditional Roman style (thicker base than typical - and often wonderfully soupy - Neapolitan pizzas). Customers can order whatever size slice(s) they'd like with the usual request costing around £3.50 for a perfectly filling “on the hoof” meal or snack.

Fortunately for foodies on-the-move, not only are Adagio's pizzas expediently excellent value for money, they're also incredibly delicious! The pizzeria's seasonal menu features a line up of more than forty pizzas made in traditional Roman style (resulting in a thicker base than the more typical Neapolitan pizzas) and changes weekly with a dozen different pizzas to choose from on any given day.

Prepared fresh daily with most ingredients sourced from Italy, Adagio's sliced-to-please pizzas hit the spot with something for every pizza lover's palate. An impressive 72 hour proving process ensures a perfectly baked crust that won't leave you feeling bloated.

At last a place to sit and eat gurme pizza.
The crust is amazing.
Topping from another world
Six stars from us.

New pizza shop where they sell by the weight. Not super cheap (£1.90 per 100g; lunch came to £5.99), but reasonable for the area. Good selection of toppings. The best part was the base, which was superb. Will be calling again.