La Porchetta

This is the place to be if you happen to be in Camden. Located just opposite the Roundhouse, they do the biggest pizzas you’ll ever find. With a huge variety of pizzas to choose from, there is something for everyone. I went with a group of friends and we all enjoyed what we ordered. The food was great, portions were huge and the atmosphere was perfect!

I came to this expecting to be disappointed, and I wasn’t disappointed in that respect, if you see what I mean. I used to go to the Upper Street branch and thought it was just boring and second rate, although friends loved it. So before at a gig at the Proud Gallery which we were helping organise, a few of us came, guided by Qype Radar, to the Chalk Farm Road branch. And although the bill at the end was incredibly reasonable, and the portions huge, the food was absolutely rank. My lowlight was a spaghetti vongole which even 12 hours on is making me retch at the thought of it. The clams were over-mature over-cooked little gristle-balls which had long since fallen out of their shells and given up hope of ever dying to give pleasure. And, bizarrely, there were too many off them - a horrible gravel at the bottom of my plate hat never got smaller, no matter how much I toyed with it to try and make it look as if I’d had some food. My companions didn’t complain, but their food too looked grey and canteen like. So cheap and not very cheerful overall. Wouldn’t return if I could help it.

La Porchetta struck me as a nicer version of Pizza Express, mainly due to it just having a less chainy feel but also having a wider menu. Having said that though I did end up jumping down the road most travelled aka an americana pizza.

As mentioned below, the salads are pretty unexciting but thats not what you go there for, you go for pizza and pizza is what you get, in abundance. The sheer size of the thing made me feel full before i’d cut a slice. As someone who loves climbing an edible mountain I got to work and devoured my pizza and it was delicious.

It won’t be the best place you ever go but it’s simple, not too expensive and fills a whole very nicely.

Here in London over the holidays with my wife, staying just down the street from La Porchetta. We stumbled into the restaurant (that looks like a chain, but we don’t know if it is) half-asleep and cracked out from an entire day of traveling from San Francisco via Amsterdam. Now that I think about it, La Porchetta has about as much charm as Amsterdam’s airport.

The waitstaff was friendly and probably overly attentive as one reviewer has already mentioned. They swarm your table like Italian bees. We didn’t order too much from the menu, just a couple of Peroni’s (those are what they are anywhere), a couple salads, and a pizza. The salads were more like coleslaw, as they were pretty much shredded cabbage with some sort of tangy ranch dressing (not all that tangy). I can’t really remember what was on the pizza, as it wasn’t that memorable. Ham? Chorizo? I don’t know, something meaty.

I’d say that this place is good in a pinch. No where close to the world’s best pizza. It’s mediocre, but not bad. Prices are OK.

I had a great experience at La Porchetta last night before attending a gig at the Roundhouse, just across the road.

Looking at the menu outside, I noticed several options for those of us weaklings who suffer from food allergies and got very excited about it.

Upon entering the restaurant, it had a wee bit of a corporate feel to it, but that was gone by the time I had my first glass of house red and some delicious mussels. By the time my lamb came around, I was thoroughly enjoying my meal and the atmosphere. Extremely attentive waitstaff (I don’t even know if they have servers for separate parts of the restaurant because we had at least 4 different people serve us) who don’t let you wait for anything.

Prices are excellent and the food is decent and satisfying. I would certainly recommend it. And I want to go back to try a cheese-free pizza without requesting it specially.

This is a difficult one for me because I dont know why I don’t like La Porchetta…but I just don’t like it. My dislike is apparently quite irrational, because all my friends seem to quite like it. Maybe it’s because something has always gone wrong when I’m there - like the time that I recommended that my friend have the four cheese pizza, because I’m generally a fan of that flavour, but La Porchetta’s version turned out to be rancid (and she’s never let me forget it…) Or perhaps because of the time that the waiters wouldn’t stop banging metal plates because it was about 100 different people’s birthdays in the restaurant. Or maybe it’s just because they don’t have white onion. Seriously, I asked for onion to be added to my margherita pizza and they said they didn’t have any - what kind of Italian restaurant doesn’t have a white onion on the premises???
La Porchetta may be cheap, but I’d choose to pay a pound or two more and get the pizza i want in a pleasant restaurant any day…