Our Oven Story: From Mobile Pizza to Moorish

Chapter 1 | Part 3. Finding a Permanent Home

The mobile years were not all romance. George and Aurora went into business together with the gold Nova pizza oven, and what followed was a period that tested them in ways that are easier to laugh about now than they were at the time.

Some people really understood the whole pizza on wheels thing. For others, it was a hard sell, not always immediately legible to a client. That feels almost impossible to imagine now, given where British food culture has arrived, but informal catering at the time meant hog roast, the one reliable option for weddings and parties and village fetes. Arriving with a woodfired pizza oven on a trailer was something different, and it did not always land without explanation.

The practical reality was often harder still. Floods and wind and rain. Winding Somerset lanes and steep hills that tested the tow vehicle to its limits. Tears from both of them, on more than one occasion. If social media had existed then, it would have been extraordinary content. At the time, it simply required resilience.

They both had day jobs alongside all of this. The pizza business occupied evenings and weekends, fitted in around everything else.

The resting place, when it came, arrived through Sally Edwards, a friend George had known for years. Sally had a restaurant called 10 the Square, which George had originally helped to build as a contractor, doing the plumbing and constructing the staircase. Aurora had worked there separately. When Sally needed more help running things, the three of them came together.

What they created was Moorish: Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food, all cooked over fire. It was the first real bricks and mortar moment in this whole story where the oven, the fire, the catering instinct, and the right people all came together into something that genuinely resembled a business.

It came with real opportunity and real challenge in equal measure. But it was the beginning of something.

Next: a bread table outside the door becomes a farmers market, and a small cabin in the countryside offers an unlikely next chapter.