My feelings, of course, are based on my own memory of what pizzas used to be and should be. Landing in New York as a child from India in the early 1970s, the industrial eats available there dazzled me: McDonald’s burgers and fries, Hostess Twinkies, Wonder Bread, TV dinners… I gorged on all these terribly toothsome foods for the first six months. And then, coming back from school one day, a small pizzeria caught my six-year-old eye.
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Maybe I was drawn to the portly Italian behind the counter who had a wide smile. Or maybe it was the signboard advertising ‘Italian ice’, a version of tangy Sicilian granita adapted to American palates by canny immigrants. Whatever the initial draw, it led to my first taste of the square, thick, pillowy Sicilian pizza, so distinctly different from the ‘New York slice’ which were wedges cut from giant, flattened pies topped with mozzarella and pepperoni.
The personal touch of the couple who ran that pizzeria had a lot to do with it too. They were clearly flattered and perhaps even touched by this little Indian kid’s dogged devotion to their plain tomato-and-cheese pizzas. And they responded in kind: a fresh pizza with the cheese bubbling in its rectangular tray would emerge from the oven just as that little girl stopped by on her way back from school. Every weekday for the rest of her sojourn in New York.
That little pizzeria must have gone out of business in the next few years as did so many thousands across the US during the 1970s as industrial pizzas cornered the market. Even smaller local chains were crushed by these juggernauts. And those mass-produced pizzas conquered the world, setting the ‘standard’ for at least the rest of the 20th century. The fight-back began in the 21st century. Places serving individual takes on pizzas popped up, even in India.
Today, the big chains rarely figure anymore in lists of young, upwardly mobile, urban Indians who regularly order pizzas. Knowing my lifelong, somewhat slavish devotion to pizzas (and burgers), my son and daughter-in-law make it a point to seek out artisanal ones from different places every time. At least in India, industrial and artisanal have reached an equilibrium, each catering to a distinct customer profile, perhaps even complementarily.It may be premature to imagine that industrial eats – including mass-produced pizzas – are in decline, but the ubiquity of food delivery services is certainly helping the cause of small restaurants. Just a decade ago it would have been impossible for, say, the tiny place serving Sicilian pizzas in a narrow lane in north-eastern Kolkata to survive. But the Croatian chef and her Bengali husband who bravely opened it a year ago are doing quite well.
Indeed, the fact a Croatian as well as another Sicilian have opened restaurants in separate parts of Kolkata recently to serve their very different takes on pizzas – her’s are square, his aren’t! – indicate that the artisanal movement is really gaining ground across India, even if mass-produced ones still dominate. That they are both serving Sicilian pizzas rather than the usual Neapolitan, of course, is particularly heartening. The little girl in me is smiling.