Alistair Houghton enjoys the comfort food at Little Pizza Kitchen, Waterloo

FINE dining is all fine and dandy, but sometimes you want a fine pizza. That fine dish is one that too often gets a bad rap.

We seem as a nation to have become conditioned to the idea that pizzas from many takeaways and freezer cabinets should be mounds of sweaty cheese and reconstituted meat atop doughy sponges.

But pizza can be a great thing.

I’ve been reminded of that over the past two summers, on jaunts first to Washington DC and then Seattle.

In Washington, 2 Amys was a revelation, its huge, crisp-based, pizzas putting to shame anything I’d had back in Blighty.

Even Adam Richman, host of legendary telly foodfest Man v Food, rates it as one of America’s best pizzerias.

In Seattle, local celebrity chef Tom Douglas takes pizza so seriously that he has opened "a pizzeria with a breadmaker’s soul" called Serious Pie.

Pie, by the way, is American for pizza. That’ll confuse Wiganers.

And then there’s Delancey’s, the pizza venture launched by noted food blogger Molly Wizenberg and her other half, Brandon Pettit.

It sounded so good that M and I walked for miles across freeways and byways to find it in an out-of-the-way north Seattle suburb.

"We could have got the bus, but that wouldn’t have been half as much fun. And it was worth it, with more crisp charred crusts, and meat and veg toppings complementing, not overwhelming, the tomato base.

Since then I’ve found some excellent pizzas in this neck of the woods. Tribeca, a fairly recent arrival, offers crisp, delicious and cheap pizzas to a hip-ish crowd in the centre of Liverpool. And if you venture just a few minutes north of Liverpool on the yellow rattlers, you can find just a short walk from Waterloo station, Little Pizza Kitchen.

It’s not little. But it is, I’ve discovered, a cracking pizza kitchen.