I went out last night for a pizza ...

Nothing, you may say, unusual in that – and you would be right. I had (in case you are interested) a Quattro Formaggi in a small restaurant not far from Corso Sempione.  And it was excellent.  I was assured by the waiter as I order that it was a genuine Neapolitan pizza, cooked by a pizza chef from Naples in the precise kind of wooden oven that you would find in a restaurant in Naples. All of which set me thinking about pizza.

Just a month ago, I was back in the UK and I took my younger son to start his university course in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In one sense, it was a nostalgic journey because I started at the same university over thirty-five years ago. And of the things I remember, living in my student flat in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the mid-1970s, is that just down the road a new restaurant opened. Not just a new restaurant but a new kind of restaurant – a pizzeria. There were pizzerias in London – in Soho which, in those days, was the heart of London’s Italian community – but none in Newcastle and none, as far as anyone knew in northern England. It was fantastic – a new kind of restaurant, selling a food that only very few people in England had ever eaten, and a food that students could afford.

Thirty something years later, wandering around Newcastle-upon-Tyne with my son, I was struck by just how many pizzerias (I deliberately use the English plural!) there were. There were up-market pizzerias, fast food pizzerias, take-away pizzerias. Walking through the town and down to the River Tyne, almost every other doorway seemed to be a pizzeria.

In fact, pizza has now become a completely international dish. Living in Norway a few years ago, everyone seemed to live on something called Pizza Grandiosa. I never quite discovered what it was. It certainly wasn’t a pizza topping that anyone in Italy would recognise, but it was immensely popular. And then look at the United States. Of course, there is a large Italian community in the US – and an even larger community claiming Italian descent. But the pizzas you get in the US are not Italian pizzas. Indeed, they are very often called not “pizza” but “pizza pie”. And pizza is so popular and so widespread that there are accepted regional variations – a New York pizzas are very different from a Detroit pizzas. And in California, as you might have guessed, you can get some of the strangest and outlandish pizzas in the world – with pineapple, sweet potato, guacamole or even bean sprouts.

Pizza is taking over – but it has come a very long way from Naples.

Dr. Laurence Bristow-Smith
H M British Consul General
& Director General for Trade