Luca Cesari: Italian chef sacked in Brisbane for refusing pineapple on pizza

A few days ago the Italian chef Davide Tamburella was sacked by a Brisbane restaurant for refusing to put pineapple on a pizza. He would not give way to his customers or his boss: pineapple, he insisted, was an insult to Italian culture. Queensland, as it happens, grows almost all of Australia's pineapples. Luca Cesari, a food historian and author of a history of pizza, uses the dismissal to ask who owns the right to define what counts as authentic.

The historical record is unkind to the purists. A 'Neapolitan pizza' article in the Morning Post of 17 December 1860 describes a dish already varied with anchovies and other substitutions. Pasta was eaten soft for centuries, per old recipe books; overcooked pasta and pasta as a side dish were standard Italian practice that Italians themselves no longer recognise. Cream in carbonara — now the marker of the faithless — was an old habit introduced by Roman cooks in the 1960s and kept up for forty years. Mussels with pecorino is an ultra-traditional dish combining cheese and fish, a pairing modern orthodoxy forbids.

Enforcement runs further back than pineapple. In 2017, Maurizio Landi, a chef from Bologna, was sacked by a bistro near Lyon for resisting pressure to cook his pasta longer and serve spaghetti bolognese — a dish that, Cesari notes, does not exist in Bologna, the one city in the world where ragù is eaten solely with tagliatelle. The employers, not the chefs, prevailed in both cases: the market prices what customers will order, and the guardians of tradition cannot stop it.

Even the tradition's own elite has defected. Gino Sorbillo, among the world's most respected pizzaioli, opened the door to pineapple a few years ago — on a white pizza only, since tomato would make it too acidic. Franco Pepe, whom many consider the best pizza maker alive, created the AnaNascosta, a cone of pizza filled with pineapple, San Daniele ham and Grana Padano fondue. This summer the London chain Berberè launched a pizza with spiced pineapple sauce across its five sites.

Tamburella lost his job defending a pizza whose 1860 ancestor the guardians themselves would not recognise.