A north London mum has turned her teenage son’s all-consuming love of pizza into a takeaway with a mission that goes well beyond dinner.
Aparna Bangur, from Kentish Town, launched Pizza Party from a working kitchen on Regis Road after years of watching her 14-year-old son Aarav light up at the sight of a pizza box. The delivery-only business serves a short menu of crisp, London-style, veg-forward pizzas across Camden, Islington, Barnet, Westminster and the City of London, with orders coming in through Deliveroo and Uber Eats.
But the food, says Aparna, is only half the story. The other half is about who gets to make it.
This Kentish Town pizza takeaway has been built from the ground up as a training ground for autistic young people — a place to learn real kitchen and hospitality skills in a supportive setting, and to build the confidence so many need to find their footing in the world of work.
For Aarav, pizza means more than flavour. It is predictable, familiar and comforting — the same every time, in a world that often is not. “In our house, every pizza is a party,” says Aparna. “It doesn’t matter where it comes from, how it is made or who joins in. If there’s pizza, it’s a party.”
“People often tell me there must be a hidden superpower in there somewhere. Fourteen years in, we haven’t found a prodigy waiting to be discovered,” she adds. “What we have found is a boy with a full-bodied love of food — and pizza tops the list.”
The questions that keep her up at night will be familiar to every parent of a child with special educational needs: “Where will he work? Where will he belong? How much independence will he be able to build? And who is going to make room for him when I’m not there to do it?”
The scale of the challenge is stark. Government figures show that just 34 per cent of disabled people with autism in the UK are in employment, compared with 82 per cent of non-disabled people — one of the widest employment gaps of any group. Charities have long warned that autistic adults face barriers at every stage, from recruitment processes designed around neurotypical candidates to workplaces that are slow to make simple, inexpensive adjustments.
Small, deliberate projects across London are trying to close that gap. In Ealing, a sensory-friendly calm space at Ealing Broadway was trialled to give neurodivergent shoppers somewhere to decompress, while the City has backed a youth skills hub aimed at giving young Londoners a clearer route into work. Pizza Party belongs to the same quietly growing movement: practical, local, and built around what people can actually do.
Its answer is Pizza Party Prep, an internship programme run in partnership with Mencap. The first group of trainees will learn food preparation, kitchen routines and customer service in the Regis Road kitchen — along with the brand’s five-ingredient dough recipe — with the aim of finishing the programme more confident and more at home with the expectations of a hospitality workplace.
Aparna believes a pizza kitchen is a natural fit for the task. “A pizza kitchen has rhythm. Tasks can be broken into clear steps. There is repetition, but also progression. You can see what you have made at the end of it. It is real work, for real customers, in a real business.”
The ambition stretches further. As the business grows, Aparna plans to take trainees on as paid staff, and her long-term vision is a bricks-and-mortar neighbourhood pizzeria where autistic young adults can be seen learning, working and earning. She also hopes to place graduates with other pizza brands and food businesses.
“That is the bridge for us. Not pizza magically creating independence, but a working pizzeria creating the environment in which young people can learn, contribute, gain confidence and move towards employment,” she says. “Our measure of success isn’t how many people finish the internship. It is whether that experience opens doors.”
Kentish Town, with its fiercely independent high streets and strong community spirit, is fertile ground for a venture like this. The NW5 neighbourhood has long backed businesses with a social conscience, from community kitchens to cooperative shops, and neighbours here tend to rally behind projects that put people before profit. As boroughs across the capital invest in young people’s futures — Hackney has secured £1.3 million to transform its youth services — Pizza Party shows what can happen when that same energy comes from a family kitchen rather than a council chamber.
The brand itself is deliberately bold: loud, colourful visuals and a playful tone designed to stand out on a crowded delivery app. “Autistic young people are already far too invisible in the world of work,” says Aparna. “Pizza Party should make them more visible. We want to be loud, colourful, commercially ambitious and genuinely desirable.”
For now, the ovens are on, the dough is proving, and a small Kentish Town kitchen is quietly getting ready to welcome its first trainees. Every pizza, after all, is a party — and this one is inviting a few more people in.
