A pizza chain in the Bay Area of California has announced plans to launch two Indian flavors – Chicken Tikka and Paneer Tikka.
The restaurant Square Pie Guys plans to introduce the limited variants of its Indian-style pizza on April 25. This is the result of a collaboration between cookbook author and recipe developer Hetal Vasavada and Square Pie Guys’s director of marketing and innovation, Priya Kane
“Is this authentic Bay Area cuisine? I think so. I think tikka masala is Bay Area, I think Indian pizza is Bay Area, and I think in Square Pie Guys’s pursuit to represent the Bay on Detroit-style pizza — this does exactly that,” Kane was quoted as saying by Eater San Francisco.
Vasavada and Kane have christened them as Paneer Tikka-ish and Chicken Tikka-ish Pizza, which let them feel less beholden to ideas of traditional Indian food, the media outlet wrote. As Indian American kids, both Vasavada and Kane grew up in families wherein such fusion was normal
Vasavada grew up in North Jersey — “It’s the town where they filmed Sopranos,” she says, laughing — where her mother would exchange homegrown tomatoes and eggplants with Italian nonnas. “Italian-Indian has been what I grew up in,” Vasavada told San Francisco Eater. In Jersey, her mother would make deep-dish pizzas with “masala-fied” pasta sauce and vegetables on top. Kane, meanwhile, says she grew up experiencing something similar, it said.
“Through our conversations, we’ve been discovering [fusion] is more a cuisine that is being developed in real-time,” Kane says, “and it’s one that represents first-gen Indian Americans. I did grow up eating masala pasta — my mom would add turmeric and bloom spices, and then toss in [pasta] shells. I think in that vein, it’s like, yes, Indian flavors make sense on pizza,” Kane told Eater San Francisco.
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