A pizzeria in England is charging customers ten times as much for ordering pineapple on their pizza, reports People.
Francis Woolf, owner of Lupa Pizza in Norwich, told the magazine that the £100 (US$122) price tag is meant to encourage customers “to make better choices when it comes to their pizza.” He added: “We’re not fans of pineapple over here and we don’t think that anyone else should be either.”
Lupa Pizza, which opened in June 2024, offers some toppings that would make pizza purists shudder, such as beef shin rendang and garlic whipped tofu. But the “tropical menace”, as head chef Quin Jianoran terms it, is where it draws the line. “I’d rather put a bloody strawberry on one”, he told UK tabloid the Daily Mail.
Few dishes divide opinion like “Hawaiian” pizza – as the dish is called when pineapple is added. To opponents, adding pineapple is a violation of the principles of good taste. Pizza in its purist form – a delectable combination of dough, tomato sauce, cheese and perhaps a little fresh basil – needs no tinkering. However, to others the snobbishness over pineapple on pizza is an instance of cultural elitism. Hawaiian pizza fans could also be in the silent majority. A 2017 survey found that 53 percent of Britons actually enjoyed the dish.
Believe it or not, Hawaiian pizza doesn’t trace its roots back to the picturesque island chain, but to a small eatery in Ontario, Canada. Sotirios “Sam” Panopoulos immigrated to Canada from his native Greece in 1954, opening the Satellite diner not long after arriving in his new home. Pizza was not well known in North America at the time – the New York Times introduced it to its readers in 1944, the word ‘pizza’ having appeared in print for the first time only four years earlier.
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Around the same time Panopoulos was launching his eatery, Hawaii became the 50th state and obsession with Tiki culture, fruity cocktails and pineapples soon followed. Chunks of Hawaiian brand pineapples, added to a ham pizza by Panopoulos in 1962, gave this iconic dish its name.
By the time its creator died in 2017, Hawaiian pizza had already become the highly divisive topping we know (and some hate) today.
Months earlier, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proclaimed his support for this “delicious Southwestern Ontario creation” in a tweet, a response to the then-president of Iceland, Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, who told a group of schoolchildren that he would ban the pineapple pizza if he had the chance – a comment he was later forced to clarify.
Instead of endless warring over Hawaiian pizza, perhaps the solution is to refine the dish and accommodate those of more fastidious tastes.
Washington DC eatery We the Pizza, for example, makes a version with a less sweet sauce, and thinly sliced, roasted pineapple instead of the sweet, syrupy chunks most of us are familiar with. The creation has been known to win over even the most ardent Hawaiian pizza haters. Perhaps the chefs at the UK’s Lupa Pizza should take note.
