Escaping a brutal civil war, arriving in London not knowing the language and without money, Edin Basic, founder of the Firezza pizza restaurant chain, saw this as a life changing opportunity.

The chain now has 17 restaurants in and around London, including Wimbledon, Wandsworth and Herne Hill but it started from very humble beginnings.

Basic, 46, born in Bosnia, was forced to leave when the war erupted in 1992. He didn’t know where he wanted to go and admitted coming to London was completely by chance.

He said: “We went to Zagreb with my girlfriend and asked the lady at the travel agent for two tickets. She asked where we wanted to go and I said anywhere, and she offered us two tickets to London.”

From that point on Basic never looked back. He found a job washing dishes at a restaurant in Paddington, then worked his way up learning how to make pizza and pasta at another restaurant. He then went onto become area manager at Cafe Uno before moving onto Starbucks.

The restaurant founder said: “It was difficult to leave Bosnia at first. Coming to London without money, I had no choice, I had to make it. That gives you extra inspiration and motivation.

“It was very tough at the start, sometimes cash flow was very tight and we didn’t have money to buy food. I remember going to Sainsbury’s and paying by cheque because we didn’t have money at the time. It was really, really tough. Looking back I think lots of people would have given up.”

Basic said he always had an entrepreneurial mind and he saw new opportunities and concepts in the food delivery market.

He said: “We had these big American companies like Dominos, delivering a similar product and I thought we can do better than this. We can improve customer experience from food quality to everything else.”

Basic quickly found a site for his first restaurant in Chelsea and Battersea and designed and painted it with the help of friends.

To create the perfect menu, he decided to visit Naples, which he described as the ‘birthplace of pizza’. He found a chef who was from a proud pizza-making family and brought him to London.

The 46 year-old said: “He showed us how to make pizza, which is very simple. It’s simple but very easy to get wrong. A lot of people think they can make pizza but they can’t.”

The business took off from here and Basic started opening up restaurants all over London.

The pizza entrepreneur still goes back to Bosnia to visit his family but says he now feels like a Londoner after spending the past 24 years here.

He said: “I married my wife in London, and I feel like a Londoner now. I still love going back to Bosnia, it’s a beautiful country.”

Basic says though the war was difficult to take, it helped make him who he is today.

He said: “I’m not grateful for the war but in a way it made me who I am and has led to what I have done so far.”

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