At 1pm on a Thursday afternoon, Sear’s Pizza on Skirving Street in the south side of Glasgow is bustling.

Every stool, booth, and outside bench is occupied with customers. Women with strollers, couples, friends and groups of students all murmur happily around glistening slices of pizza. I take my place in the queue.

One of Glasgow’s few pizza-by-the-slice joints, Sear’s is something like the city’s answer to New York’s famous Scarr’s Pizza: big, foldable slices, counter service and hip, retro interiors. There are neon lights in the windows, brick-style panelling, framed pictures and vintage décor pieces that all feel like a love letter to early 90s NYC.

After ordering a slice of pepperoni (£4.29 with the default 10 per cent tip), the girl at the counter takes it from the display case, pops it on a paper plate, and slides it into the oven behind her to heat it up. Within minutes, I have a warm slice in my hand. The cheese is slowly dripping from the sides of its crisp base; the pepperoni slices have curled into little bowls filled with shiny dots of grease. Happy days. Unless you are in the West End.

A few miles north-west at the original Sear’s Pizza on Chancellor Street, according to an ongoing planning battle, the company is insisting that its slices are cold (unless they have just come out of the oven). In an appeal against a council order to stop running a “hot food takeaway”, Sear’s claims the business involves the “sale of pizzas, usually slices, which unless just baked will be cold” – “not dissimilar to Greggs”.

The Sear’s appeal goes on to state their model is “no different from a bakery selling baked goods, and that falls within use class 1A”, adding that it is “frequented by a number of well-known celebrities including the actor James McAvoy and the singer Lewis Capaldi, who described it as the best........

© Herald Scotland