Pizza, the lovable flat bread with toppings, has been having a bit of a moment. Outside of its native country, the food item has spawned numerous kinds of ‘authentic,’ each with its loyal followers. Its reliance on distinct, rigorously honed techniques and its diverse appeal to everyone from sodium-loving children to fine dining aficionados, have made pizza something of a cult food item. The receptiveness of its form and flavor allows for chefs and restauranteurs to simultaneously uphold and reinvent gastronomical tradition. It is no surprise then that pizza restaurants have become sites for architectural as well as culinary innovation. Centered around a massive oven—a piece of machinery that can sometimes drum up the same kind of talk as a sports car—the pizza restaurant has inherent architectural concerns and features that have now become the inspiration for creative design.

As we learned from Fast Co. Design, British chef and television icon Jamie Oliver has a colorful legacy back at home, including a chain of pizza joints called Union Jacks. The newest Union Jacks to join the wood-fired British pizza scene is located in none other than the Central St. Giles building designed by Renzo Piano. But starchitect aside, Oliver’s latest pie-slinging enterprise boasts a lively interior designed by local studio Blacksheep that sprinkles in kitschy elements of post-war nostalgia with bold graphics and cheeky decorative accents. Take a look at Union Jacks and a few other pizza restaurants deserving of some architectural spotlight, after the jump.

Inside Renzo Piano’s slick new building, London’s hip locavores can dine amidst vintage paraphernalia such as old TV sets (broadcasting the restaurant’s chefs at work, no less), bespoke trinkets collected from Oliver’s travels, and old-school stools, chairs, mismatched tables and signage reminiscent of the good ol’ days. As Fast Co.’s editor Belinda Lanks reported, the biggest design challenge for Blacksheep was “creating an intimate dining experience in a building where covering the glass walls was strictly verboten. The solution was to construct a partial box set back from the windows with three walls surrounding a central elevator shaft.” Lanks described the finished result as “whimsical without being cloying, a locavore’s version of Chuck E. Cheese.”

[All images via Fast Co. Design]