The cuisine originated in the ’90s and has gained popularity worldwide since. Today it’s being introduced to new audiences via the internet and by taking a new approach to culinary innovation.
The video starts with an image you know well: man on bended knee, woman staring down at him. Bliss awaits, surely.
“Excuse me, can I take you on a date?”
“Ew, no way. Get out of here.”
Unfazed, the man, who is wearing a paper bag over his head (in hindsight, maybe that should have been a sign that something was amiss), unzips his hoodie to reveal that he’s wearing a polo embossed with the logo for Pizza Twist, a California-based franchise that’s been serving Indian-style pizza and pasta across 100 global locations since it launched in 2017. The woman, who is wearing a shirt with the same logo, is suddenly remorseful.
“Oh, I didn’t know you work at Pizza Twist? Take me on a date! Take me on a date!” He turns away and, in the next scene, is standing alone, smugly cutting up a thick-crust pizza bathed in gooey cheese and chunks of red onion, slices of green chilis, garlic chicken or cubes of paneer, and cilantro. “How About Now” by Drake blasts in the background.
The video is only a few seconds long, but it has been causing a lot of virtual commotion. On Instagram, it has 2.6 million views, 48,000 likes, and 864 comments. “Am i the only one who thinks this lady is super cringeee,” asks one user who sparked outrage among other commenters: “Chup ho jaa aur apni account delete kar de.” (Translation: “Shut up and delete your account.”) Other users make racist comments, claiming they don’t want to get sick from the food or threatening that “Trump is watching,” while even more people hype up the food and earnestly ask where Pizza Twist is located (the branch that made this video is based in Cherry Hill, New Jersey) so that they can plan future visits to try their food.
Since July, Pizza Twist Cherry Hill has been working with 5Jab Media Marketing, a New Jersey–based marketing agency that helps businesses make content that is surreal and memorable while also maintaining an aura of spontaneity—as if a group of your friends got together on a Friday and storyboarded their weirdest and funniest ideas into existence. In that time, dozens of Pizza Twist’s videos—all of which somehow incorporate pizza and are filmed at the store featuring the staff—have gone viral, racking up millions of views each and increasing visits to the store by between 20% and 30% in the last two months, according to the location’s owner, Japundeep Singh.
Singh adds that the videos have been viewed everywhere from Texas to Canada to India (in fact, 15% of their viewership is in India) and have helped boost Pizza Twist sales across the country. The day I met with him at the restaurant he manages, he told me that higher-ups from the franchise were planning to come speak with him about setting up a corporate page.
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Pizza Twist’s success comes as South Asian pizza is resonating more broadly. Dalvinder “Tony” Multani is largely credited with creating the cross-cultural cuisine at Zante Pizza & Indian Cuisine, the San Francisco–based Italian restaurant he took over and transformed in 1986. When he started combining North Indian curries with pizza dough, he only served his creations to restaurant staff. But, with a bit of encouragement, he started selling the pizza to the public. To this day, Zante’s makes Indian pizzas that start with a slow-cooked, tangy spinach and broccoli curry sauce or a creamy masala sauce.
The pies are then drenched in mozzarella cheese, decorated with toppings like tandoori chicken and eggplant, and sprinkled with green onion and cilantro to finish. Multani adds Indian spices like turmeric, fennel, ginger, and cumin to the crust, which give it a distinctive yellow color. He feels that this medley of spices, as well as the use of Sprite, which makes the crust especially soft, sets his pizza apart. Patrons of the restaurant add that the mint and tamarind chutneys that accompany the pizza also add to its appeal.
Since Multani pioneered Indian pizza nearly four decades ago, the creation has spread across the world. You can find dozens of shops in South Asian enclaves in California and New Jersey, in the Twin Cities, in London, and in India itself. Pizza made its way to India in the 1980s via high-end Italian restaurants. In 1991, India’s finance minister, Manmohan Singh, began a process of economic “liberalization” that lowered subsidies and import duties and effectively made room for outside businesses to come into the country for the first time. Chains like Domino’s and Pizza Hut entered the country in 1996.
At this point, Indian pizza took on a life of its own, especially among the middle class, who viewed it as a way of accessing Western culture. Today you can find truly wild pizza varieties in India. Pizza Hut sells classics like tandoori paneer pizza as well as one with momos in the crust and another called “Awesome American Cheesy,” which intriguingly mixes a “Peruvian-flavored cheesy sauce” with “Texas garlic sauce,” sweet corn, green peppers, and mozzarella.
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In 2018, food writer and cookbook author Khushbu Shah wrote a piece in Thrillist detailing how chefs were becoming more intentional with the ingredients they used on Indian pizzas, as opposed to viewing the Indian toppings as a way to make Italian pies more interesting. She predicted then that Indian pizza was on the verge of mainstream popularity. Seven years later, she tells me that the boom she anticipated has largely materialized. In the last five years or so, there’s been an influx of chains like Pizza Twist alongside mom-and-pop shops like Omar’s Indian Fine Cuisine in Brooklyn and the Onion Tree in Manhattan. Publications like the Juggernaut have declared that Indian pizza is finally having its moment. Shah herself included a whole chapter about it in her cookbook Amrikan, published last June, which tells the story of South Asian American culinary innovation.
An integral part of this recent success is the internet. Pizza Twist joins an array of restaurants, many of which sell ethnic food, that use sketch comedy as marketing. Singh tells me that they’ve tried promoting their restaurant via methods like more straightforward ads on social media, flyering, and Google Ads, but that the videos on TikTok and Instagram Reels have been by far the most successful means of bringing people into the store. The content, which includes music by popular Indian singers like Navv Inder as well as rappers like Drake and which features names like “Olivia” next to “Harpreet,” mirrors the hybridization happening in the food.
It’s this synergy that makes it particularly compelling and effective. “We wanted to emphasize that it’s not just a normal pizza,” Singh says. “At first we made content in Hindi and Punjabi, but we quickly learned that over 50% of the people coming in weren’t South Asian. Now we see our videos as a way to introduce people to South Asian culture. In that video where we listed people’s names, some people commented, ‘Who knows a Harpreet?’ and other people responded saying, ‘I know five.’”
Shah adds that the visual aspect of social media can help introduce new foods to American diners who might otherwise be unfamiliar with the flavors. “Between Anthony Bourdain, TikTok, and YouTube, people are becoming much more adventurous eaters,” she says. “They’re embracing more things, including Indian food, even if that familiarity is still not where it should be. The internet allows restaurants that aren’t covered by the local press to build awareness of what they’re doing in a way that’s playful and fun. There’s a simple visual appeal to it too: People like watching chefs make pizza. And now businesses have control over what they highlight. They can make a beautiful, perfect version of a pizza to draw you in, or they can add extra cheese for a dramatic cheese pull. You can read about something, but until you really see it, you don’t necessarily understand it. There’s a reason why they say the camera eats first.”
“We wanted to emphasize that it’s not just a normal pizza.”
Jay Jadeja, the owner of the Onion Tree Pizza Co., says he is more focused on crafting excellent food than on cultivating a brand online. Still, being featured in a TikTok by food blogger @HungryArtistNY really boosted his restaurant’s profile, so much so that he’s considering getting a tattoo of a doodle of a chicken tikka pizza made by the blogger. “The first three months we were open, I was scratching my head, asking, ‘Where is everybody?’” he says. “My wife was saging the restaurant. I was doing pujas. We even got someone to come in to assess the energy of the space. Then Justin [who runs @HungryArtistNY] came in and featured us. All of a sudden, my own social media posts were getting 700,000 views. It totally changed the complexion of what we’re doing.”
Jadeja also feels that general expectations of South Asian food in America have been changing for the last few decades in a way that allows him the opportunity to make the kinds of pizza he wants to eat and sell. Thanks to chefs like Floyd Cardoz, who helped pioneer Indian fine dining through restaurants like Tabla and the Bombay Bread Bar, Indian food is no longer expected to be cheap and fast, he says. It’s an assertion Shah made too. (This isn’t to say that the more inexpensive versions of South Asian diasporic foods can’t be delicious and spaces for innovation in their own right, but rather that an expectation from the average American diner that South Asian food always be fast food limits their ability to appreciate or seek out restaurants that use hard-to-find ingredients and slower cooking processes.)
Jadeja makes his pizza by researching the history of Indian foods such as Pondicherry mutton, Kadaknath chicken from Chhattisgarh, and kebabs made in the Mughal Empire. He often turns to books and shows like Raja, Rasoi Aur Anya Kahaniyaan, which tells the history of various Indian states through the foods made there. He then considers the way the Italian crusts he makes engage with those Indian flavors. A Roman crust is crisp and firm and can therefore hold saucier toppings like chicken tikka masala or saag paneer, he tells me. A fluffy Neapolitan crust, meanwhile, is perfect for a comparatively drier seekh kebab. And there’s never any added cheese on his pizza. When I ask him why, he simply responds, “Does it need any?”
He’s right. The seekh kebab calzone I tried when I visited the Manhattan location in late December balanced a tangy and chewy crust with a tender and sharply spicy medley of lamb, red onion, and chutney. The chicken tikka masala pizza featured a tomato sauce spiced with coriander, cumin, garlic, and turmeric, sprinkled with delicately crunchy yet flavorful fried curry leaves. The flavors would have been dampened by a blanket of cheese.
Jadeja’s approach of carefully considering how all the parts of the dish interact comes at a time when food critics are reconsidering concepts like “fusion” and “New American,” which for decades have been used to exoticize European food for a white audience without fundamentally changing the original European dish. Navneet Alang writes in Bon Appétit that cheap ploys at fusion have historically used “so-called ‘foreign’ food…as cheap marketing, something international thrown in to make the familiar seem exotic.” The implication is that the “American” in “New American” is the historically white food, whereas the “new” is the ethnic food, which is assumed to be alien.
A fluffy Neapolitan crust, meanwhile, is perfect for a comparatively drier seekh kebab.
The Onion Tree’s approach, conversely, is not solely rooted in one tradition. Instead, it comes from a place of familiarity with and passion for Indian as well as Italian food and curiosity about how they can intermingle on equal footing. The pizza Jadeja makes is closer to what journalist and former San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Soleil Ho describes as “a dish that seemed like two cuisines having a two-way conversation” in a piece lamenting the scarcity of truly good Indian pizza in the United States.
Shah feels there’s room for Indian pizza to evolve and further define itself following this approach of thoughtfully pairing aspects of two cuisines together. “There’s a real range of what counts as Indian pizza here right now, and restaurants are trying to define what it looks like,” she says. “Pizza styles are often defined by their crust. Chicago has a deep-dish crust. Detroit has a thicker crust, but the cheese is baked to the edge. Neapolitan is the puffy wood-fired crust. Indian pizza doesn’t actually have a defined crust style, so it’s often more about the toppings.”
Admittedly, an artisanal, intentionally deconstructed pie is not exactly what you find at Pizza Twist. Though I thoroughly enjoyed the achari pizza and shahi paneer pasta I tried there, they felt a bit more like classic Italian foods with Indian toppings thrown on. The crust of the pizza, while made fresh in the store, was a quick-fermented dough that was dense and mellow in flavor, akin to one you would find at Domino’s. The pie was coated in a velvety garlic sauce, cheese, and tangy, spicy bits of chicken. It felt like more attention was being given to the toppings than to the dough.
What unites both Pizza Twist and the Onion Tree’s offerings, to me, is less the way the foods taste and more a specific kind of authenticity the restaurants pursue. Though their pizzas are very different, both restaurants understand their products, whether that be the food they make or their accompanying social media content as an expression of their creators’ lives, which are influenced by many disparate global influences. I’m wary of overly romanticizing Pizza Twist’s videos or claiming they exist outside a Western gaze. Singh told me that he and his coworkers are keenly aware of the hate comments they get and sometimes lean into making cringey content or content that will bait racist commenters for the sake of boosting engagement. Still, their videos resonated with me as a terminally online South Asian American person—enough that I drove three hours one way in the rain to go try their food—because of how familiar yet innovative they felt. The videos were made by people who consume the same mixture of American and Indian music, videos, and memes as I do, but who are transforming these previously unrelated bits of media into something weird, funny, and totally new.
Jadeja thinks of his food similarly, as a potential balm for diners who pull comfort from multiple places. “I think of pizza as American soul food, and this is Indian American soul food,” he says. “It’s comforting and nourishing. You can gravitate toward it when you feel low. It’s like ma ki daal [your mother’s daal]. I’ve found that I’ve become more successful as I’ve become more authentic. This food is who I am.”