Jazz is not my thing, but I would run a mile (ok, walk a mile) for pizza with golden thin crust smothered in creamy elastic cheese and shards of meat.
Jazz@Pizza Express, a stylish pizza parlour at Jumeirah Lake Towers, serves what it says on the tin. There’s music to be enjoyed while you bite into soft doughy pies and cheese drizzled with olive oil. And fortunately, this restaurant — with white marble tops, black contemporary couches bathed in dark pink and blue lighting — isn’t pretentious. It’s a place where you can eat pizza with your hand (but not in a savage-like fashion) or use the knife and fork and still not be judged. But we found there’s more to be enjoyed as we made our way to their Friday brunch.
As soon as we sat down, a bread basket straight from the oven materialised into front of us — go easy on it. After all, you need to leave room for an array of appetizers that will be served with some well-timed breaks. We began with baked feta cheese mushrooms and a chargrilled vegetable antipasto. The union between the roasted button mushrooms and salty, crumbled feta cheese made perfect sense, while the platter filled with grilled Italian aubergine, red and yellow peppers, giant Sicilian olives and tomatoes was like summer on a plate.
But its appeal paled in comparison to the flavourful cozze alla marinara (mussels in red sauce). Cooked perfectly, the seafood dunked in tomato sauce, garlic and crushed chilli was fiery and flavourful. The warm dough sticks are there to help scoop out all the gravy from the plate. Like any brunch, it’s a good idea to pace yourself. The appetizers were served in miniature format and can be repeated as many times as your heart demands.
What came next was a portion of warm vegetable and goat’s cheese salad and the classic Nicoise salad. The portions weren’t overwhelming but the goat’s cheese salad felt slightly repetitive. The warm aubergine, marinated artichoke, tomatoes drizzled in olive oil was reminiscent of the vegetable antipasto that was served during our first leg of our brunchathon.
But all was forgotten when the mains arrived. The brunch is designed in such a way that you can choose either pizza or pasta. My partner and I decided on Arabizza pizza and pasta Linguine alla Genovese con Pollo. The latter was modified to penne pasta in pesto and cream sauce. The green beans, the new baby potatoes and the marinated chicken tossed with pasta was creamy, not stodgy, and the trimmed green beans gave it a good bite. But your meal isn’t complete without having a slice of the super-thin Arabizza pizza with toppings of chicken, mozzarella, mixed peppers, jalapeno and olives. The thin, charred-in-the-right-places crust gave the no-frills pizza a smoky flavour and the toppings were fresh.
What made it all the more enjoyable was the live jazz music in the background. Even to an untrained ear, she sounded good.
For desserts, it was a trilogy sample menu. There were scoops of freshly made gelato, cheesecake (cream cheese, crumbly biscuit and fruit coulis) and chocolate glory. Our unanimous vote went to the gelato scoops, Italy’s sweet gift to the world. Those were like tiny parcels of heaven and with those in, you are game for pretty much anything. Who said jazz is highbrow?
