The only way Valentin Palillero could get people to try his pizza in 2005 was to give it away. In June of that year, when Palillero, an immigrant from Puebla, Mexico, took over a failing pizzeria in a historically Italian neighborhood of South Philadelphia, he made several updates. The baked pasta was swapped for tacos al pastor, and the name changed to San Lucas Pizzeria. As part of the overhaul, he added a “Pizza Mexicana” to the menu with traditional taco components like avocado, chorizo, and refried beans.
In the beginning, the neighborhood wasn’t having it. Palillero and his wife, Eva Mendez, would sneak slices of their pizza into take-out orders and hand them out to regulars for free. “Some people thought it was weird,” he says. But a few people thought it was brilliant, and his unique pies began to catch on. When customers started calling into the restaurant and ordering the Mexican pizza by name, he began experimenting with pizzas inspired by other classic dishes, such as al pastor, carnitas, and mole—still some of the most popular flavors today.
From Neapolitan-Mexican pies in Cleveland, Mississippi, to slices loaded with Trinidadian oxtails in Brooklyn, young chefs are reshaping pizza to represent their cultures and our collective appetite.
Restaurants like San Lucas Pizzeria used to be outliers and could struggle to find diners who understood their vision. But in recent years, the US has become home to a uniquely American genre of pizza, as chefs from a wide range of backgrounds incorporate dishes traditional to their cultures into the pizza canon. There are Bangladeshi pizzas in Detroit and Filipino ones in Chicago. Sanjusan, a Japanese pizzeria in Minneapolis, makes its pies with Kewpie mayonnaise, while the Los Angeles restaurant Pijja Palace prefers squeaky paneer. Diners in urban Iowa and the nation’s capital have a taste for these inspired pizzas, whether they feature Lebanese toum or General Tso’s chicken. Even New Yorkers, with all their rules around making and eating pizza, have come around to slices topped with falafel, tteokbokki, and chilaquiles. Fusion pizzerias and their many fans are everywhere you look.
Chef Travis Matoesian had been working in Los Angeles restaurants for four years when he enrolled at the True Neapolitan Pizza Association in Italy in 2023. Had he booked a direct flight to Naples, he probably would have gone on to make textbook Neapolitan pizza. Instead, he stopped in Armenia to visit family friends. “I was traveling, I was cooking, I was writing down recipes,” he says.
By the time he arrived in Italy, the lessons started to blur. He couldn’t help but see pizza as a distant cousin of lahmacun, a Middle Eastern flatbread, and started to wonder how tahini would taste on a naturally leavened crust. When he returned to Los Angeles, he purchased a portable pizza oven and recruited his roommate, Alan Rudoy, to start El Gato Negro, an Armenian pizza pop-up. The crust is Neapolitan, but the toppings—braised lamb, pomegranate gastrique, Medjool dates—borrow from the pair’s favorite Armenian foods. “Pizza is one of those foods that everybody in the world has a reference point for,” Rudoy says. It’s an ideal medium for introducing diners to new flavors.
The uptick in fusion pizzerias owes in large part to new technology. Many started as pop-ups with portable ovens from companies like Gozney and Ooni, which were introduced in the last decade and marketed to home cooks. For around $1,000 for an oven that can reach 950 degrees, chefs can mimic the conditions of a commercial pizzeria at a fraction of the price, allowing them to break into the historically cost-prohibitive pizza industry. “If you wanted to start a pizzeria 10 years ago, there was a lot more overhead,” Rudoy says. “Now you can buy a Gozney oven and a tent and basically have a little pizza shop.”
Aaron Truong, a mental health counselor in Beaverton, Oregon, had never made pizza when he purchased a Gozney Roccbox oven in 2018. Initially, his motivation was to make pizza for his wife, Natalie, in their home kitchen. After he served his friends a particularly memorable pie topped with leftover bulgogi from his fridge, they convinced the couple to pursue pizza making full-time. “It served us well that we were outsiders to the industry,” says Aaron, who now runs Hapa Pizza with Natalie. “I didn’t know enough about pizza to know what’s acceptable or not.”
The Truongs interpret an array of Asian dishes through their pizzas. Since opening in 2023, they have, at various points, served banh mi pizza, kalua pork pizza, massaman curry pizza, and okonomiyaki pizza. “There's a lot of problem-solving that goes into translating some of these Asian flavors,” Aaron says. “It’s a lot of trial and error.” One of the best sellers, a pho-inspired number, resisted being pizza-fied for over a year. The problem wasn’t the brisket or bean sprout toppings—it was the sugary hoisin sauce that formed the base. It worked much better when it was replaced with a thick pho broth slurry.
Experimenting with pizza flavors isn’t new, says Scott Wiener, a pizza historian. Chefs have been making fusion pizza since at least the 1950s, although the emphasis was usually on toppings. One of the defining styles of that era was Indian pizza, pioneered by restaurants like Zante Pizza & Indian Cuisine in San Francisco. The restaurant tops soft, fork-and-knife pizzas with chicken masala and spinach curry.
The latest wave of fusion pizzerias is driven by chefs who are building on craft styles that were once thought to be “sacred or untouchable,” Wiener says, such as blistered Neapolitan pies and the New York slice. They blend flours in unconventional ratios and create hybrid styles that fit their tastes. “The walls are down.”
Like Palillero in Philadelphia, Randy and Ashlee Mclaren started making fusion pizza as a last-ditch effort to save their family business. They opened Cuts & Slices in Brooklyn in 2018 and struggled for the first six months. On the verge of closing, they started selling pizzas topped with jerk chicken, stewed oxtail, and other Caribbean foods. “To stand out in New York City, with there being so many pizzerias, we had to be different,” Ashlee says.
They don’t have to worry about a crowd anymore: The Mclarens have pizzerias in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens—and a slice for anyone who walks through their doors. There are curry shrimp pizzas and pies topped with chunks of golden, griddled waffles, totaling around 40 combinations in all. “We’re changing the narrative of what belongs on pizza,” Randy says. “We want to have something for everyone.”