Lenny's apizza finds a permanent home in Covent Garden
Max Lewis's New Haven-style pizza pop-up leaves the pub behind for a permanent site on Henrietta Street, opening 27 October in partnership with MJMK.
Lenny's Apizza opens its first permanent restaurant on 27 October, bringing New Haven-style pizza to 24 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden.
The pizzeria started in 2024 as a residency inside the Bedford Tavern, a pub in Finsbury Park. Max Lewis ran it there for two years, after spending time in Connecticut learning the style he now bakes. The residency ended earlier this year. Bookings for the Covent Garden site opened on 29 September, five weeks ahead of the launch. The Lenny's apizza Covent Garden debut is Lewis's first permanent address.
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The signature pie stays the same: half tomato and pecorino, half classic mozzarella.
From pub residency to permanent site
Lewis has partnered with MJMK Restaurants, the group behind Casa do Frango and AngloThai, to take on the Henrietta Street unit. MJMK supplies the operational backbone a pop-up lacks: a fixed lease, a bigger kitchen, and the logistics of running service seven days a week rather than a handful of pub nights.
The signature dish carries over unchanged: "The Lenny," a pie split in half, one side topped with tomato, garlic and pecorino, the other a classic mozzarella pie. Lenny's has said the wider menu will be revealed closer to opening, and prices have not been published.
What New Haven apizza means
New Haven-style pizza, or apizza, traces to Frank Pepe Pizzeria in Connecticut in 1925. The dough bakes longer and hotter than a Neapolitan pie, producing a charred, chewy crust with a drier top: more tomato, less cheese, less about the stretch of mozzarella than the crunch of the base.
It remains a minority style even in the US, let alone London, where Lewis's pop-up built its following on relative novelty as much as technique. A permanent site raises the stakes: a pub crowd forgives an off night from a residency pizza oven more readily than paying Covent Garden rents forgive one from a full restaurant.
Lenny's opens the same week as Forbici, another new entrant on nearby Tooley Street, adding to a crowded autumn for London pizza openings — see also Abbie Hendren's new kitchen at Trindle Stores in Kew. Whether apizza converts regulars beyond the pop-up's original fans is the question 27 October will start to answer.
