During a recent lunch break we paid a visit to Theos Pizzeria in Elephant. You may be aware that for two years we’ve crowned Theos as having the best pizza due to their creative toppings and sourdough base. However, with metabolisms not being what they used to be, for lunch we dropped the pizza and opted for their signature sandwich, the panuozzo. 

Described as a wood fired sandwich, Theos use the same delicious slow fermented pizza dough but reformat it into a sandwich-like form. Your scribe had the sausage and gorgonzola panuozzo, which was also rammed with creamy and salty gorgonzola, grilled mushrooms, mozzarella chunks, and rocket. On the side was a red chilli which packed a real punch, so it was used sparingly. 

Matilda from the digital subscriptions team sometimes gets overwhelmed with too many options, but with just four handy panuozzos to chose from she had the broccoli with anchovies, mozzarella and pangranatto. Pangranatto being a sort of crunchy garlicky breadcrumb, that might seem odd in a sandwich but was actually a nice crunch to complement the soft broccoli and mozzarella. There was a good but not overpowering flavour of anchovy to round things out and of course the bread itself was sublime.

The panuozzo is £6.50 which when you think about it, is about as much as a fancy sandwich at Pret nowadays. Matilda wanted a glass of wine but when we reminded her what happened the last time she had wine at lunch we had water and the bill was under £15. And with the mounds of cheese and filling kept us filled until dinner. As no one actually pays for this site, as we were leaving we asked Matilda exactly what she does at the office. She smiled and said coyly, ‘you know, I INVOICE’. OK. 

Pizza helped us in many ways during lockdown. For some it was like a familiar blanket in troubled times. For us it reconfirmed that we can no longer pull off skinny jeans. We at Runoff Towers find that by a mile the best pizza in Greater Kennington is Theos up in Elephant. Our opinion has been seconded by no less than Vogue Magazine (which might not be an accolade as I doubt their readers actually eat pizza).  And now they feature award winning Tiramisu. 

On the pizza front my colleague had the aubergine and Gorgonzola. An adventurous choice, the aubergine was very soft and this was offset by the sharp hit of pecorino followed by the blue hit of Gorgonzola. Your scribe had a ‘my pressure needs to be checked’ salt kick of an anchovy, capers, olive and mozzarella pizza. All the salty elements were balanced well, and the best element of these pizzas is that they are served on a sourdough bread that is blistered on just the good side of being burned. 

Indeed, Theo’s has just won an award for best Tiramisu in London, and in our opinion it is well deserved. It ticked all the boxes of ‘Italian almost trifle’ with a perfect balance of strong coffee, dark chocolate, creamy mascarpone and served between layers of soft cream. 

Upon hearing about this accolade some female members of the Runoff team, and a surprisingly large number of men, implored us to include a picture of the man behind the triamisu. When we observed that this serves no purpose other to objectify this young man they said ‘yeah, and what’s your point’? So in order to avoid industrial action please find his photo below.