Market Lane Coffee: Can you tell us a bit about your background in hospitality?
John-Paul Aziz: I feel like I came into hospitality really late. Through a majority of my twenties and late twenties, I had other jobs – I was a photographer, a production manager in a creative studio, I worked in call centres. It was a real hodgepodge of jobs for about ten to twelve years.
Throughout those years, I had a couple of opportunities to learn how to make pizza from any pizza shops that would take me on, but I was always working for free. I’d call in sick at a call centre and go work at a pizza shop once a week just to figure out how to make dough. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was fascinated from day one.
But my real way into hospitality was through Market Lane. I was away on a holiday with an ex-Market Lane team member, Xander, and I was having a bit of a hard time at my job. He said, “You should come and work at Market Lane. The people are great, the culture’s really great, you’ll learn a lot.” I came back from the holiday and was lucky enough to get a job there, and that was my first proper hospitality job.
Can you talk about your journey from establishing The Travelling Pizza Pie to opening your first brick and mortar restaurant with Magma?
Yeah, it felt fairly unnatural! The Travelling Pizza Pie was my introduction to self-employment, and that came about in 2020. I never really had the chance to take off, it was hard operating a food truck through COVID. But it was a great exercise in creating a brand and practising something I loved.
Most people might take that experience and think, “The last thing I should do is open a restaurant.” But for me, it just showed how strong the dream was. I believed I could do it, and do it well. That belief felt like it would hold up regardless of what was happening socially, politically or financially. Pizza has the ability to surpass all of that.
