Pizza Express Brand Guidelines: Peter Boizot’s 1965 Soho Pizzeria and Its Owners Since

A Soho pizzeria opened in 1965.

Pizza Express began with one restaurant on Wardour Street in Soho, opened in 1965 by Peter Boizot. In a long profile published by MCA in December 2018, Mark Wingett traced the idea back to 1948, when Boizot was working as a tutor in Florence and came across a dish the locals called pizza. Back in London years later, unable to find one he liked, he decided to open a pizzeria himself. MCA’s account has him flying to Rome with his savings, asking at a pizzeria for an oven-maker and ordering an oven to be shipped to London with someone to run it; Restaurant Online, writing the same week, says he sourced the oven from Naples and a pizza chef from Sicily. The two accounts differ on the city, and both agree that the oven came from Italy.

Restaurant Online described the original Wardour Street site in terms of its contemporary look, a comparatively short menu and quick, friendly service, and called it a blueprint for modern casual dining in Britain. A second branch followed two years after the Soho opening, and within a decade there were sites around the country, MCA reported.

Growth came partly through franchising. One of the franchisees by 1989 was David Page, who went on to run the business. In 1993, according to MCA, Page teamed up with the entrepreneurs Luke Johnson and Hugh Osmond to buy Pizza Express from Boizot and float it on the London Stock Exchange; the chain had 63 outlets at flotation and later reached about 350, including 50 overseas, under Page. Restaurant Online adds that the franchises were bought back in 1996. Boizot stayed on as president of the company.

Music has been part of the brand since the early years. MCA wrote that Boizot’s love of jazz “became entwined” with Pizza Express; the company now runs PizzaExpress Live, which it says presents more than 1,500 shows a year across several venues, and it says it launched its own record label, PX Records, in early 2023.

Listed, private, listed again, then owned by its lenders.

The chain has changed hands many times since the 1990s. MCA lists the sequence: TDR Capital and Capricorn Associates took the company private again in 2003; in 2005 it returned to the London Stock Exchange as part of Gondola Holdings; and in 2007 the private equity firm Cinven bought Gondola. Under Cinven, Gondola also ran Zizzi and ASK Italian, City A.M. noted.

In July 2014 the sale of Pizza Express to the Chinese private equity firm Hony Capital was announced. City A.M. reported at the time that the chain operated in 14 countries, with 22 restaurants in China, and that the company saw the new owner’s knowledge of Asia as a way to grow there.

The next change came through debt. In July 2020 The Caterer reported, citing the Financial Times, that holders of the company’s bonds were in talks with Hony Capital over a debt-for-equity swap. In September 2020 Restaurant Online reported that creditors had approved a company voluntary arrangement at a virtual meeting on 4 September: it covered only the UK restaurants, not those in Jersey, Ireland or abroad, and provided for the closure of 73 restaurants and a reset of the group’s lease obligations. It was part of a wider restructuring that cut the group’s external debt and could pass majority ownership to its secured noteholders.

By April 2025 The Caterer was naming the chain’s parent company as Wheel Topco. That month, the paper reported, the shareholders put new equity into Wheel Topco as part of a refinancing in which bondholders agreed to extend the maturity of the group’s senior secured notes from July 2026 to September 2029; the chain then had around 350 sites. In September 2026 Restaurant Online named Bain Capital’s special situations unit and Cyrus Capital Partners among the owners.

How British Italian chains present themselves.

Britain’s Italian restaurant chains tend to tell their stories through a room and an oven. Pizza Express traces itself to a single pizzeria on Wardour Street in Soho, opened in 1965 with an oven brought from Italy, according to accounts in MCA and Restaurant Online in 2018. Franco Manca, which began in Brixton Market in 2008, says its founders built their own oven there before opening anywhere else.

Menus and naming are usually plain. Dishes are listed by ingredient and region rather than by invented brand names, and some chains publish where those ingredients come from: Franco Manca’s pages run through its flour, tomatoes, cheeses and coffee one by one. Restaurant names lean on a founder, a place or a simple description; Franco Manca, the company says, means “Franco is missing,” after the man who ran the market pizzeria before it.

The corporate pages tell a second story, about owners. Many of these chains have passed between founders, stock-market listings and investment firms. In 2014 City A.M. noted that the private equity firm Cinven’s Gondola group ran Pizza Express alongside Zizzi and ASK Italian; Franco Manca was bought by the listed group Fulham Shore in 2015, and Fulham Shore by the Tokyo-listed Toridoll in 2023.

Restructurings are part of that record too. Company voluntary arrangements, which let a business close restaurants and reset its leases with creditors’ approval, were used by Pizza Express in 2020 and announced by Franco Manca’s owner in 2026, according to trade press reports. Each guide in this series sets out what can be checked about a chain, who founded it, who owns it and what has changed, and marks what rests on the company’s own word.

Restaurants, franchises, delivery and a supermarket range.

The company’s own pages now open with the line “where your marble table awaits.” It says it runs more than 360 pizzerias across the UK and Ireland, has expanded to 12 markets internationally, sells a range of its products in supermarkets and delivers to homes. The name appears both as two words and run together as PizzaExpress, including on the company’s own pages.

Independent reporting fills in the recent shape of the business. In May 2026 The Caterer reported that during 2025 the chain opened seven restaurants in the UK and two in Hong Kong, and that by the end of that year it had 90 franchise sites, with new openings in India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Indonesia and Turkey. In March 2026 it launched Mac & Wings, a delivery-first concept, across the country, followed by its first smaller quick-service site, in Brixton, with self-ordering for eating in, takeaway and delivery, the paper said.

The company’s own account still starts with Peter Boizot and Soho in 1965, through all the changes of owner since. David Page, the franchisee who led the chain after 1993, later turned up at the head of another London pizza business, Franco Manca, according to MCA in 2015.

For a design guide, Pizza Express shows how a restaurant brand can keep its founding story at the front while its ownership changes again and again. Compare Franco Manca, a Brixton sourdough chain, and Zizzi, a former stablemate under Cinven’s Gondola group. For this guide we use a deep ink blue, a marble white and a tomato red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pizza Express’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.