About Pizza
Americans eat around 350 slices of pizza per second and pizza appetites are fed by approximately 62,000 pizzerias in the United States. Pizza is the original fun food and it only makes sense that a food associated with having a good time would have some interesting and fun facts in its history:
A Brief History & Trivia About Pizza
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1) The first recorded pizzeria, Port'Alba, opened in 1830 in Naples, Italy. Pizzas were cooked in an oven lined with lava from Mount Vesuvius.
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2) Until the 1800s pizza was a meal for Italian peasants. That changed when Raffaele Esposito created a Margherita pizza for visiting royalty. The king and queen were impressed by the colors of the Italian flag represented by the pizza’s white mozzarella cheese, red tomato sauce, and green basil and Queen Margherita gave the pizza her name. After that, the pizza became an Italian staple.
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3) The first official pizzeria opened in the United States in New York City in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi.
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4) According to a Gallup Poll, kids up to 11 years old prefer pizza to other food for lunch and dinner. Regular pizza crust is still the most popular crust, preferred by 61-percent of the population. Thick crust and deep dish tied for second, at 14-percent. Only 11-percent of the population prefers extra thin crust pizza.
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5) Every pizza chef has a secret recipe for the best crust and so does Marv’s Pizza Delivery in Paso Robles where the dough is made fresh daily and topped with the finest sauce, whole-milk mozzarella, and fresh ingredients.
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6) The ham and pineapple topped Hawaiian Pizza was first introduced in 1962 by restaurateur Sam Panopoulis in Ontario, Canada, and marked the beginning of pizza topping innovations.
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7) The International Pizza Expo is an annual event held in Las Vegas Nevada. Pizza restaurant owners, distributors, food brokers, and other businesses that support the pizza industry attend. Sorry! The expo is not open to the general public!
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8) Pizza museums? Oh yes. The U.S. Pizza Museum opened in August 2018 in Chicago. New York’s Museum of Pizza claims to be the “world’s first and only immersive art experience celebration pizza.”
9) Can you eat pizza and still lose weight? A New York man named Brian Northrup claims that he did, and he documented the yearlong project on Instagram. In his recently released book, “The Pizza Diet: How I Lost 100 Pounds Eating My Favorite Food—and You Can, Too! ” Chef Pasquale Cozzolino’s reveals how he included pizza in a healthier diet. It all seems to come down to what weight loss specialists have been saying for years: moderation, more vegetables, and less fat and refined carbohydrates.
