Japanese Pizza

Since my comment on the Japanese Sushi Police entry at East Windup Chronicle triggered this post about Korean Pizza, I thought I’d write something about Japanese pizzas.

Yes, yes, there are already plenty of websites and blogs out there tracking the bizarreness of Japanese pizzas, but this can be an endlessly watched topic due to specialty pizzas that are created new for each season (like many other industry in Japan). Tuna, corn, and potatoes on mayonnaise based sauce is probably already familiar to many who have experienced Japan and Asia. But wait, there is more!

Without further ado, here are some recent offerings.

Pizza Hut’s new thing for the winter is the “ebi-mayo crust” which is a sausage roll like crust (that in itself is not unusual, I think) filled with shrimp and mayonnaise instead of sausage. The shrimp-mayonnaise combination is popular here, and is a staple in many pizza delivery chains, and also appears in many other dishes. To top it off, the featured pizza here is the “mochi-pote-mentaiko pizza” which would be pounded sticky rice pieces (it’s actually tteok, the Korean wave continues), potatoes, and spicy fish roe all on the same pizza, along with the shrimp-mayo crust if you like.

There’s a delivery chain called Strawberry Cones Pizza. If that’s not enough, they offer a kalbi pizza, that’s Korean style short ribs. Many chains offered kalbi pizzas last year, but I don’t see it as much this year.

This is eerily verging on “oh look at how weird Japan is” post, so I’ll just conclude that fusion/localized food can be good, some combinations and modifications are better than others. After all American pizza is a bastardization of the Italian original, and so is ramen noodles when compared to Chinese noodle soup.

Woohoo, my first non-sports post (^^