Indian Pizza Just Entered Its Detroit-Style Era in San Francisco

Indian Pizza Just Entered Its Detroit-Style Era in San Francisco

What do NBA player Jeremy Lin, chef Melissa King, and cookbook author Samin Nosrat have in common? They’ve all collaborated with Bay Area-based Detroit-style pizzeria Square Pie Guys to create limited-run pizzas. The restaurant will debut its latest on Thursday, April 25, an Indian-inspired collaboration between cookbook author and recipe developer Hetal Vasavada and Square Pie Guys’s director of marketing and innovation, Priya Kane.

Together, the duo created pies that speak to their shared Indian American backgrounds: two “tikka-ish” pizzas, one that features tandoori chicken, and another that highlights tandoori-marinated paneer. These flavors culminate in a pie that feels distinctly Bay Area, they say, acknowledging recognized Indian pizza pioneers including San Francisco’s Zante Pizza and Indian Cuisine. “I’m giving the crown to Zante’s,” Kane says. “Honestly, I think Indian pizza is an inherently Bay Area thing. I think that is spreading.”

Vasavada and Kane are putting their spin on the genre, working with Square Pie Guys’s Detroit-style crust and base, rather than the thin slice Zante makes. Kane was experimenting with Sach Foods paneer and pizza, and she wanted to work with someone who develops recipes and could “really speak to the fusion conversation.” She reached out to Vasavada, who helped structure how the pair decided on their style of pizza. “In my head, I’m like, ‘How can I Indian-ify this and add a little bit more flavor?’” Vasavada says of her recipe writing process. They landed on a pizza informed by family, for example, through a cilantro-mint chutney recipe from Kane’s mother and a tandoor curry spice inspired by Kane’s uncle’s restaurant recipe. Both the tandoor-marinated paneer pie and the chicken version start with a tikka-style sauce as a base, paired with masala pickled onions, a cilantro-mint chutney-like drizzle (made using Kane’s mother’s recipe, but thinned with heavy cream), and green onions.

The project brought up conversations about fusion cuisine and authenticity for Kane and Vasavada, especially when pairing their Indian American identities and food backgrounds with another cuisine, namely Italian. For both, this type of “fusion” food rings true. Vasavada grew up in North Jersey — “It’s the town where they filmed Sopranos,” she says, laughing — where her mother would exchange homegrown tomatoes and eggplants with Italian nonnas. “Italian-Indian has been what I grew up in,” Vasavada says. In Jersey, her mother would make deep-dish pizzas with “masala-fied” pasta sauce and vegetables on top. Kane, meanwhile, says she grew up experiencing something similar. “Through our conversations, we’ve been discovering [fusion] is more a cuisine that is being developed in real-time,” Kane says, “and it’s one that represents first-gen Indian Americans. I did grow up eating masala pasta — my mom would add turmeric and bloom spices, and then toss in [pasta] shells. I think in that vein, it’s like, yes, Indian flavors make sense on pizza.”

This line of thinking also led Vasavada and Kane to add “-ish” to the pizza names — Paneer Tikka-ish and Chicken Tikka-ish — which let them feel less beholden to ideas of traditional Indian food. “I think it’s tandoori meets tikka meets malai because there’s elements of all those different things,” Vasavada says. “You have warm cozy spices that come through in the marinade, but you also get the tart tomato. I don’t know what to call it. It’s kind of tikka, but tikka-ish.” And while Indian pizza might feel trendy thanks to breakout restaurant hits like Pijja Palace in Los Angeles, a recent spread in Food & Wine magazine, and even a viral TikTok trend, in the long run, they want the more traditional spots to be celebrated and hope their pie will intrigue people into visiting other Indian pizza restaurants.

“We’re asking, what is authentic and why?” Kane says. “Is this authentic Bay Area cuisine? I think so. I think tikka masala is Bay Area, I think Indian pizza is Bay Area, and I think in Square Pie Guys’s pursuit to represent the Bay on Detroit-style pizza — this does exactly that.”

From left, Priya Kane, Jasleen Kaur, co-founder of Sach Foods, and Hetal Vasavada.

Square Pie Guys debuts the Paneer Tikka-ish and Chicken Tikka-ish pizzas at its Oakland and San Francisco locations starting Thursday, April 25 through the end of July, and 3% of sales will go toward nonprofit Food Wise.