Tag: Happy World Pizza Day

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.”

World Pizza Day: A Greek Canadian, Sam Panopoulos, “invented” Hawaiian pizza in 1962

Happy World Pizza Day! Some love it, and others hate it. But very few people…

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.”

World Pizza Day: A Greek Canadian, Sam Panopoulos, “invented” Hawaiian pizza in 1962

Happy World Pizza Day! Some love it, and others hate it. But very few people…