Pizza Today - February 2018 - 65

On T
h e Ro a d

By Jeremy White
Photos Rick Daugherty

A

dam Sweet was
kicking it for a
well-established
and successful pizza
company in Arkansas, but
something was missing. Though he played
a prominent role in the
business's operations, he
felt like the low man on
the Totem Pole to a degree.
Point blank: he wanted to
do his own thing. There's
something romantic and
invigorating about taking
on a new project, and it's
even sweeter (what a pun!)
when you create something
from scratch. A musician at
heart, Sweet has a wandering soul and wasn't averse
to making a literal geographic move in addition
to a career move. So that's
what he did: packed up
his family and prepared
for a new adventure. The
destination? Bloomington,
Indiana - one of America's
most iconic college towns.
"My wife and I met
here 10 years ago," says
Sweet, "so coming back to
Bloomington made a lot of
sense to us. We had friends
here and the culinary scene
here was really blowing
up. Plus there wasn't an

Pizza proprietor
makes a big move
overwhelming amount
of great pizza here. There
were some spots, like
Lennie's and Pizza X, that
are really big here. Those
places are great, but they
are totally different from
what I'm doing. There was
nobody doing wood-fired
pizza, especially not from
this party, rock n' roll vibe
that we've got going on
here."
Sweet named the place
King Dough based on a
nickname he earned himself
when he first settled in
Bloomington.
"There is a place here
in town called Finch's
that I worked at," he
explains. "It does have a
wood-burning oven, but
it's not a pizza shop at
all. They do serve a little
pizza, but it's more like a
European bistro. It's a nice
restaurant and I love them.
But when I was working
there, I made the dough
a lot of times because I
just love it and I was the
one who understood how
pizza dough works. The
chef there gave me the
nickname King Dough
because of that. It was a
joke name originally, but it

stuck around."
It wasn't long before

King Dough was mobile.

Sweet didn't have the
capital necessary to open a
brick-and-mortar pizzeria,
but he was able to secure
one heck of a deal on a
mobile wood-fired oven.
He drove cross-country to
Arizona and returned back
to Indiana with $5,000 less
to his name, a dream and a
plan to start small.
"The mobile oven was
by no means paying the
bills when I first started
operating it as King
Dough," says Sweet. "I still
had to work other jobs to
make ends meet. All the
oven was doing was paying
for itself and building a
name for us so that people
would know who we
were right out of the gate
whenever we did finally
open our doors."
Eventually, Sweet
was able to raise the
capital he needed to

open a restaurant through
crowdsourcing. He used an
online platform to upload
his business plan and
solicit donors, and once
he got the thumbs up and

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Pizza Today - February 2018

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