Hawaiian Pizza creator Sam Panopoulos dies aged 83

A century later, a 20-year-old Greek named Sam Panopoulos found himself similarly disappointed. Stopping in Naples during a 1954 voyage to Canada, he found his first taste of “pizza” — a bun topped with sauce and spaghetti — uninspiring. Yet Mr. Panopoulos, who opened a restaurant in Chatham, Ontario, called Satellite, eventually warmed to the yeasted flatbread that Neapolitan bakers had popularized in the 1700s and that Greek chefs had whipped up for sailors more than a thousand years before. Searching for new pizza flavors one day in 1962, he reached for a can of fruit and launched a culinary revolution, topping his restaurant’s standard cheese pizza with bits of ham and pineapple. The result was sweet, sour and savory — a flavor combination hailed ever since as both revelatory and repugnant, a Canadian treasure and a “Polynesian perversion.”

Greek man Sam Panopoulos who created one of the world’s most famous pizza- “The Hawaiian”, has died at the age of 83.

Mr. Panopoulos who earned a place in history by putting canned pineapple and ham on a pizza at his Satellite Restaurant in Chatham, Ontario in 1962, had just celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary with his wife Christina.

He died suddenly in the hospital on Thursday, according to reports.

Mr Panopoulos had run a string of successful restaurants with his brothers Elias and Nikitas, after migrating to Canada from Greece, when he came up with his famous invention.

Originally whipped up as a novelty, the so-called Hawaiian Pizza soon became a worldwide craze.

Many criticised the topping and defending his creation, Mr Panopoulos told American media, "those days when I first came up with it, there was nothing to it... it was just another piece of bread cooking in the oven."

"Nobody liked it at first, but after that, they went crazy about it, because (in) those days nobody was mixing sweet and sour and all that. It was plain, plain food," he said.