It probably hasn’t escaped your notice that as a middle-aged man churning out two and a half thousand words a week about some restaurant or other, I’m about as far from the food and drink zeitgeist as it’s possible to be. Restaurant blogs have been dead for years, local papers too, and even the broadsheets are gradually fading away. Instagram influencers are passé too, even if Reading’s handful are still scrounging the occasional free meal (the latest from the Hilton in Kennet Island). Nope, apart from the occasional increasingly desperate Substack, food reviewing is all about TikTok and Instagram reels these days. 

The most prominent is an account called Topjaw. Topjaw, for the uninitiated, consists of a posh bloke with floppy hair (who used to be a model) in front of the camera and a less photogenic bloke, presumably also posh, behind it. The posh bloke with floppy hair interviews restaurateurs in London getting vox pops about where they think you can find the best pizza, burgers, coffee and so on in the capital. He’s trying to perfect that fake almost-estuary accent posh people do when they’re trying to sound less posh, like Tony Blair used to do. He’s not managed it yet. 

The usual suspects come up in those vox pops time and again – the Dalston bakery Dusty Knuckle, the Dexter burger at The Plimsoll in Finsbury Park, the Soho hype factory that is new pub The Devonshire (a place where nobody can snag a reservation but there are mysteriously always tables available for celebrities, critics and, well, Topjaw). We’re never paid by any restaurant we feature, says their bio, although they’re not averse to doing paid partnerships with the likes of Bicester Village, of all places. They may not be paid a fee, but God knows if they pay for their food.

Still, all power to them: their format is quick and entertaining, and you find yourself watching it whether you like them or not. It’s already spawning imitators – mainly in Bristol, where you see some people trying the vox pop format – and maybe one day it will translate into a TV show for them, or a paid gig or an appearance on Strictly or I’m A Celebrity.

You might wonder what any of this has to do with Reading, so I should explain. A couple of months ago, during a bumper week of tosspots on Topjaw, they interviewed not only Ed Sheeran (who turns out to be as basic as you would expect) but also hereditary columnist and bigoted human bin fire Giles Coren. Coren was clearly desperate to appeal to a new demographic so was doing his usual dreary, sweary trying too hard schtick, only even more manic than usual.

But in the course of dispensing his tiresome opinions he happened to say that he thought the best pizza in London was done by Zia Lucia. “They have this charcoal base which apparently doesn’t make you fart” he added, not as hilariously as he intended. Hang on, I thought, haven’t they just opened in Reading?

Well, yes, they have. Zia Lucia opened at the start of April on St Mary’s Butts, where ASK used to be, their first branch outside London. Their website talks about their origins in Islington over 15 years ago, and they also bandy around the slightly random stat that they are the world’s 38th best pizza chain (before you get too excited, Pizza Pilgrims finished 27 places above them and the Big Mamma Group, which Coren loathes, came third). Even so a first branch outside London, coming to a town that had lost Franco Manca and Buon Appetito, felt like it was worth investigating.