At the table Fancy a five-hour queue for a pizza the action?

Only you know whether pizza is worth queuing five hours for, whether it is worth sleepless nights sitting in the torpid blue light of a smartphone screen searching in vain for a reservation that will never materialise. This is how it is with the Marlborough.

- DAVID ELLIS

It is because of Crisp, Carl McCluskey's pizza project. In 2022, Crisp became the biggest news in Hammersmith since the bridge closing when bro-fluencer Dave Portnoy disguised a credit card advert as a pizza review and declared it his favourite in London. Back then it was in The Chancellors, McCluskey's family boozer by the river. Now it is here, below a brand-new pub doing a very good job of looking very old, as it might have done before its days as a gothic-themed hangout, a knockoff Hammer Horror set with year-round cobwebs and skeletons, and loos hidden behind bookcase wallpaper. Truly a strange time for pubs, the Noughties.