Pizza. Name a better takeaway food and I'll give you winning lottery numbers. It's just the best.
I don't care what's on it (yes, I do pineapple always), I don't care which pizza restaurant or cheap frozen alternative it's from and I don't care what time of day I'm eating it or whose leftovers it is ('sofa pizza' scene from The Hangover makes me want to scoff one every time).
I've been eating pizza all my life. My family founded the UK's first pizza delivery business in 1982 and I've since eaten "pie"- as they like to call it in North America - all over the world.
So, it's no surprise to anyone who knows me that I was one of the first in line to sample the PizzaLuxe offering when they opened at the A1/A605 services at the back end of last year. As pizza generally goes, I thought they were pretty damn good.
They've now introduced a breakfast menu and yes, it's pizza. Genius. You can choose vegetarian or a full meat feast that includes sausage, bacon and egg.
Or, for the sake of this review, because I wanted to try something different, you can opt for what I had. The Pane Colazione is packed with sausage, bacon, a free-range egg and top and tailed with a freshly-baked pizza dough roll.
I have to say, I was impressed. The sausage was premium quality, the thought of the melted mozzarella is making me salivate as I type this and the roll - made from pizza dough - was excellent.
More importantly, the dough was indeed freshly made and this made all the difference. At only £4.95 you'll be hard pushed to taste anything as good at breakfast for the money.
And for those of you with taste-buds like a cockroach, there's the Ama O Odia. This is basically oven-baked tarmac (sorry, I mean Marmite) and pecorino cheese in a breakfast roll.
It's true that you either love or hate Marmite - I'd rather staple my eyelids shut than subject myself to that vile slime - but I know others will be reading this in eager anticipation of enjoying their perfect breakfast.
Sweet-toothed diners are also catered for. The Pane Dolce is a freshly-baked pizza roll, topped with lashings of Nutella and strawberries. I almost went for this but suddenly remembered I'd smashed a Nutella sandwich (with chopped banana and crushed cashews) for my midnight snack.
Breakfast hot drinks options are what you'd expect but what I didn't expect was how good the coffee was.
I'm a bit of a coffee snob, so I always have low expectations of what it'll taste like (usually bitter or worse, like paraffin) but I was pleasantly surprised by how smooth my flat white was.
I washed it all down with some homemade lemonade and that was decent too.
It's good to have a different breakie option and when it's prepared as good as Pizzaluxe do then it's very hard to resist making it a regular occurrence. Breakfast companions please apply here.
Pep Cipriano
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