zen'Za Pizzeria

The menu at zen'Za Pizzeria reads as a single document written for several diets at once. Vegan, vegetarian, lactose-free, gluten-sensitive, and omnivore guests order from the same screen, and the plant-based side is not a polite annex — it carries vegan versions of the kitchen's strongest comfort moves, including a vegan farmer's sausage and bacon pizza and a vegan cheese burger pizza. The pizzeria has run on King Street in downtown London since 2016.

The pies that anchor the menu are creative without being studied. Magnum P.I. is the playful tropical centre of the order, the safest first pie when a table wants familiar but not plain. From there the lineup branches into Vegan Cheese Burger ‘Za, Vegan Greek ‘Za, Thaco ‘Za, Renaissance ‘Za, L.O.V.E. ‘Za, Reuben ‘Za, and Rico's Famous Margherita — names that point at the kitchen's appetite for cross-cultural comfort food without abandoning the form itself. The list runs deeper than the top picks suggest, with a Southern BBQ Brisket, a Butter Chicken, a Souvlaki, a Balsamic Mushroom, and vegan editions of Magnum P.I., Barbeque, Renaissance, and Margarita carrying the same idea across the divide. Crusts are thin and mostly whole-wheat, fourteen inches across; an eleven-inch gluten-sensitive crust runs alongside the regular one. Add-ons lean on vegan cheeses, nutritional yeast, plant-based proteins, and a long line of vegetables, with mostly organic sauces and toppings holding the same line.

The structure says something about how the kitchen thinks. Most pizzerias build a meaty default menu and graft a vegan margherita onto the back page; zen'Za has built the vegan side as a full mirror of the omnivore side, with the same comfort-food anchors — sausage and bacon, a cheese burger, a Magnum P.I. — translated rather than substituted. A family eating off this menu can have one diner ordering Rico's classic margherita, another ordering the vegan version of the same pie, and a third ordering Thaco ‘Za, without anyone splitting the meal across two restaurants. The gluten-sensitive crust is not a smaller cousin to the main pie but a parallel build at eleven inches, and the vegan and lactose-free paths travel through the same online ordering flow as the regular one. Sauce, cheese, and protein add-ons run a parallel set of dietary flags, so the substitution work happens upstream of the order rather than at the counter.

Service is built to support that breadth past the dining tables. The kitchen runs dine-in, pickup, and delivery, with a weekly pre-order format of vacuum-sealed pizza sets meant to finish at home without losing the point of the meal. Lunch is reservable on Fridays if booked the day before; the rest of the week is a Wednesday-through-Sunday dinner shape, with the kitchen dark on Mondays and Tuesdays. Downtown placement helps — King Street puts the pizzeria inside London's Downtown Core, walkable from the river path and the office corridor, which gives the pickup window as much working weight as the seated tables hold. The dining room is small and informal, a warm corner storefront where a returning order does not need to be re-explained on the second visit, and the family running the place keeps the welcome closer to a neighbourhood pizzeria than to a downtown destination.

What carries the meal is a quiet decision to treat dietary need as starting design rather than a list of exceptions. Plant-based diners get a real pizza menu rather than a single workaround, gluten-sensitive guests get a separate crust rather than a shrug, and the omnivore side of the table loses nothing in the trade. The pies arrive named, specific, and built to share. The point of the pizzeria is the mixed table itself: one document, one kitchen, one shared order, week after week.