I moved house last week, and suddenly everything changed. My little slice of Reading, my walks, maps, routes and routines were no more. No more waking up in the Village and mooching into town for lunch, no more strolls round Reading Old Cemetery or Palmer Park, no more number 17s and Little Oranges buses, no more Retreat just round the corner. After seven years of East Reading life, it was time for something different.

So on moving day Zoë and I found ourselves standing, sleep-deprived, outside a large house that wasn’t quite ours yet, rented van parked up in the drive, waiting for the agent to arrive and check us in. Meanwhile, across town, movers were loading boxes into a far bigger van from a far smaller house that was no longer ours. The sun was blazing, and I strolled across Cintra Park to Greggs, of all places, to pick up coffee and pastries. This is my neighbourhood now, I thought to myself.

I’m writing this over a week later, after seven days of unpacking and tip slots and IKEA trips (I’d forgotten how depressing that place is) and everything is starting to take shape. A lot of the boxes are unpacked, the kitchen is in some kind of order and, best of all, we finally got a new bed – high off the ground, with a big firm mattress, like climbing on to a cloud at night. The walls are fresh-painted white, the blinds are new and Venetian and the rooms flood with summer sunlight.

And every morning I wake up and can’t quite believe I live here, in this new place.

There’s a clothes line in the garden, and I get to experience the meditative joys of hanging out the washing, taking it in when it’s been dried by the sun and smells of heaven. Let’s not talk about the huge rent hike, or the council tax band of this place, or the fact that I can’t afford to eat out quite so often: let’s just think about the smell of that washing from the line.

On our very first night, exhausted but with the rest of the week off to unpack and settle in, we wandered to pretty much our nearest restaurant, Kungfu Kitchen. Like me they moved recently, although a few doors down Christchurch Green maybe isn’t quite as big a shift as mine. And their new site is lovely and snazzy – especially the light feature projecting fish onto the floor – but it was also reassuring just how like their old place it was. The food was still outstanding, and the welcome was the same, because Jo and Steve do not change: I particularly enjoyed Jo frogmarching customers to the loo, proudly boasting that Kungfu Kitchen has the best toilets in the world. Her words, not mine.

But Kungfu Kitchen is only one of our nearest restaurants, and I popped into one of the others to take something home the following night, just before an England match, fresh from a purgatorial trip to the tip. Dough Bros opened in March at the top of Northumberland Avenue and has built up quite a following in three short months. It’s run by a couple of friends, one of whom also runs the neighbouring barber Short, Back & Vibes.

I stopped by on a sweltering hot day and picked up a couple of takeaway pizzas, and as I waited I chatted away with Robbie, one of the owners. He seemed to know his stuff when it came to pizza, and told me that he was a fan of Sarv’s Slice (“they use the same flour and tomatoes as us”, he said). But he also said that his pizza was a little different from Sarv’s, and different from the floppy Neapolitan style that’s taken over the U.K. I saw that in action as he took both my pizzas out of the oven, tapped the bottom and decided they needed a little longer.

I didn’t have to talk to Robbie for long to realise that he was a proper pizza obsessive, and as I watched him pipe ricotta onto one of the pizzas I found myself thinking that this place, if it lived up to my experience up to that point, could be something very special. Robbie said that business was picking up, although there were some quiet weeks, and that they were trying other channels, mainly Instagram, to get more customers.

I liked his candour, as evidenced when I asked whether Dough Bros made its own chicken tenders. “No, we buy those in. Pizza is the thing we’re passionate about here.” I respected that, and later on he gave me Dough Bros’ mission statement in one short, simple sentence. “We’re trying to transcend Whitley,” he said.

Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, or spoil what follows, I liked my pizza very much. It was significantly better than England’s ropy performance against Slovenia that night, and both of them were better than the torrent of dross that came out of the gob of ITV’s chief prattler Sam Matterface. I liked it so much that I recommended it to my sister-in-law when she came to visit the new house, and she collected a couple of pizzas to take home to the rest of the family.

And I even liked it so much that at the end of the week we ordered a couple more, this time via Deliveroo, which we ate on our big comfy sofas in the new house while watching the last televised debate between our old prime minister and the new guy: for some reason, I associated Dough Bros takeaways with stodgy bore draws.

When I put a picture up of my pizza on Instagram I got one of two responses. Either people said “that looks good, where is it from?” or “that’s from Dough Bros!” That, more than anything, made me think that Reading was divided into two camps: Dough Bros fans, and people who hadn’t been there yet. So this week, one night when Zoë was working a late shift, I ambled back across Cintra Park to have my pizza in for a change.

Dough Bros is near the end of a run of shops at the top of Northumberland Avenue, before it descends the hill into the heart of Whitley. Short Back & Vibes is next door, and brand new Indian restaurant Curry Rasoi is at the other end. Inside you get a clear idea that a lot of Dough Bros’ trade is probably takeaway, because it was on the basic side: a few no-frills tables and chairs on one side of the room, two booths on the other.

The ceiling tiles were black and white checkerboard, which gave the disconcerting feeling that the room was upside down. One wall had a couple of guitars mounted on it, the other had some framed LPs and various pieces of wall art which looked like they came from a section in Home Bargains called “I just opened a pizza restaurant”. I promise this is affectionate, by the way: I rather liked it. I felt like I could have been in America, by a dusty freeway, instead of in RG2.

The menu was extensive, but also interesting in terms of what was and wasn’t on it. Many of the tried and tested combinations weren’t offered – no capers, olives and anchovies for me – and the menu gave a refreshingly wide berth to some of the on-trend toppings you see everywhere. That means ‘nduja only crops up in a couple of places, there isn’t any burrata to be seen and even hot honey, which seems to be ubiquitous in pizza joints lately, is deployed sparingly.

The overall choice was more American than Italian but even then there were some interesting curveballs designed by Dough Bros – one involved biltong, and might have tempted me but for the presence of sweetcorn. A couple involved a barbecue base rather than the classic tomato and again, appealed but perhaps for next time. And most tempting was the most oddball of all, the “Rogan”: Robbie had told me on a previous visit that it was based on a conversation between Joe Rogan and Elon Musk on a podcast about whether anchovies and pineapple was a genius pizza combo or an aberration.

Leaving aside the idea of ordering anything endorsed by a Covid vaccine denier, or social media’s single biggest tosspot, I think it sounds rather interesting, and I can’t rule out ordering it on another occasion. But I decided against it, and in the back of my mind I worried that ordering it would give out some weird signal that I really wanted to get drawn into a conversation about investing in crypto. I’ve lost track of the number of baristas over the years that have tried to give me the chat about crypto, come to think of it.

Anyway, for my sins I reordered the pizza I’d eaten the very first time I tried Dough Bros, the one which Zoë, stricken with pizza envy, had ordered the second time we tried Dough Bros. The Honey Honey was a comparatively simple affair – double pepperoni, ricotta and hot honey – but having tried it once I was very much in a hurry to try it again. My order, for a pizza and a can of elderflower lemonade (Dough Bros doesn’t have an alcohol licence) came to fifteen pounds fifty.

They don’t rush at Dough Bros, and nor should they. I was quite happy sipping my lemonade, looking out the full length windows at the summer evening outside, people watching and contemplating my new surroundings. I felt thoroughly transported, I thought I had a decent pizza on the way and nowhere in particular I needed to be any time soon. I was the only customer, and it seemed to be a quiet Tuesday: unlike my previous flying visit I didn’t see people turning up with their green Deliveroo backpacks, ready to find pizzas a new home.

When my pizza arrived, I remembered just how good they looked and how huge they were – fourteen inch, I think, a big, stretched, irregular wonder. This is not a pizza assembled with an eye on cost control, the way the likes of Franco Manca used to be, and the toppings were as generous as they were haphazard. It really was a beautiful thing, a symphony of red yellow and white, with a slight glimmer from the plentiful drizzling of hot honey. I’d enjoyed it at home, several minutes after it had come out of that oven, but I realised that this was the real deal: no delay, no messing about. Out of the oven, onto a plate lined with paper, sliced into eight and brought over without delay.

I sighed with happiness, and then I set about my task.

It’s kind of delightfully incongrous how on trend this little place near the edge of Whitley is, by the way. I read a piece in the Telegraph last week about how Neapolitan pizza was on its way out and American pizza was the hot new thing: crispier, more rigid pizza without that sloppy centre. It cited the much hyped Crisp Pizza W6 in Hammersmith as the vanguard of a new movement offering New York pizza, and mentioned other trailblazers in Hertfordshire, in Margate, in Brighton. But would you believe that you can also get exactly that kind of pizza here in Reading, on Northumberland Avenue? Me neither, but it turns out you can.

And it really was a beauty and, just as importantly, an utter joy to eat. Forget all those times you’ve gingerly picked up a piece of Neopolitan pizza to find the tip of the triangle drooping platewards. This was a rugged pizza, to be folded lengthways and devoured. The tomato sauce was deep and impeccable, the pepperoni a crispy guilty pleasure. And the little dabs of ricotta, offset with the slight tickling heat of the honey, made every bite slightly different but equally wonderful.

I can honestly say that it was one of my favourite things I’d eaten all year and as I’ve experienced a few times in the course of writing this blog – when visiting the likes of Clay’s, or Kungfu Kitchen, or Bakery House, or Namaste Kitchen for the first time – I had this feeling of real good fortune that of all the towns across England where these chaps could have opened their restaurant, they happened to pick Reading.

It bothered me a little that the restaurant was empty, although when I’d chatted to Robbie the week before he said it was generally very busy, and I felt that pull, familiar by now, that I wanted to do what I could about that.

There’s very little more to say: I had already settled up, so I told Robbie that it was marvellous and I prepared to make my way home through Cintra Park, full and happy, watching significantly more active people than me running, kicking balls and making the most of the long evenings. But before I did, Robbie asked my name and told me he remembered me from the previous week. I imagine he remembers all of his customers: he struck me as very good at that sort of thing.

So there you have it, that’s Dough Bros: a marvellous spot, and the unlikeliest of discoveries. If you live nearby, I recommend going. If you live further away, get a delivery and pop the oven on to pep it up when it arrives (if your oven is big enough to accommodate one of their whopping pizzas, that is). But either way, if you like pizza at all I think you might want to check it out. Whitley is very lucky to have them, but I do kind of hope that they manage to achieve their ambition and transcend the place. Fingers crossed that this review plays a small part in that.

Dough Bros – 8.4
87 Northumberland Avenue, Reading, RG2 7PT
07922 477519

https://www.instagram.com/doughbrospizza_reading/