Nomad Pizza in Whitstable is reaping the rewards of taking life by the dough-balls

If Jon and Vicki Crwys-Williams can be described as anything, it’s bold.

We’re talking almighty leaps of faith, including quitting jobs in London and moving 320 miles to Cornwall with no home or work to creating an award-winning pizza takeaway and then selling up to move to Kent.

But it’s this boldness - and an unwavering vision to create pizzas like no other - that has led them to become among the country’s best at what they do.

If you’ve had food from Nomad (@nomad_pizza _ whitstable) in Whitstable, you’ll see for yourself.

Despite pizza not initially being on their agenda when they moved to Kent, they’ve done it again and created a thriving craft pizza takeaway, a world away from your generic chains.

But to get to where they are today has taken some balls.

This included leaving their jobs, living in a tent for a month in St Agnes (while Vicki was heavily pregnant no less) and opening their pizza takeaway during the busy height of the tourist season in Cornwall - a baptism of fire, Jon admits.

But steadfast in their aim to create a high-quality product - a world away from your typical Margherita - they won the hearts (and stomachs) of the Cornish people and soon found themselves winning awards.

In fact, so successful was their Cornish Pizza Company that it also features in three West Country cookbooks.

Jon admits the whole pizza idea came off the back of a throwaway comment someone had made while they were trying to decide what they could bring to the St Agnes community.

“It really stuck with me,” he recalls. “I previously spent a lot of time travelling abroad, picking up odd jobs, and so I had some experience working in restaurants.

“I also studied leisure and tourism and worked as a chef and waiter at Pizza Express.”

So, after eventually finding a premises, the Cornish Pizza Company was launched in 2012.

“We had a very fixed idea of what we wanted to do with it as far as the product and the branding,” Jon explains. “We didn’t want to make a generic bog-standard pizza takeaway with frozen rubbish and didn’t want to be a stereotypical Italian.”

For them, it was all about creating a high-quality product using the best local ingredients.

And they even decided to ditch the word pizza, instead naming each one after Cornish mines, known as ‘wheals’.

“We stuck to our guns and people didn’t really understand why we weren’t calling a Margherita a Margherita and so on,” he recalls. “They had some really funky names instead - Wheal Kitty, Wheal Jane, Wheal Fire. We did our pizzas our own way and the name reflected that.”

Very soon, they were raking in the awards, with things going from strength to strength.

But feeling cut off down in Cornwall, the couple, now with two children, decided to relocate to Canterbury and sold the business as a going concern.

Pizza was far from their minds at first and instead they took on teaching roles, but Jon couldn’t shift the idea of launching again.

The old pet shop in Whitstable, run-down and available, caught their eye, but with no money left from Cornwall they had to scrape together the cash.

But luckily they did, opening up during lockdown in 2020 and recreating what they had in the west.

He says Whitstable was the perfect place for them.

“One of the main reasons we chose it was because we felt some kind of similarity with Cornwall.

“The Cornish people are very proud of being Cornish and their local produce and they are very protective of small, independent businesses. Whitstable is the same and very proud of its identity and community, so it very much relates to local products. So it was the perfect fit for us. They are the right customers who get us and our ethos.”

Like in Cornwall, the pizzas are known as something different. Here in Kent, Jon went with apple names to reflect the county’s fruit-farming industry, so there’s the Cosmic, Rambo, Flamenco and Priscilla among others.

“When I looked at the names, I thought ‘This is an absolute gift’,” says Jon.

He says they’d done it before, they knew their product was good, but nonetheless were still shocked when they won Best Independent Pizza Delivery Award at the PAPA Industry Awards 2020 just months after opening.

They have also been finalists at the National Pizza Awards 2021.

“We’ve been bold and quite brave, but it seems to have paid off,” he adds.

https://www.nomadpizzawhitstable.co.uk/