In 2021, Avish Naran had an epiphany. After graduating from culinary school, in Napa, he’d been cycling through the kitchens of high-end Indian restaurants in San Francisco and New York—Rooh, August 1 Five, Indian Accent—with an eye toward opening his own someday. “And then I realized, like, dude, there’s no fucking way that I’m going to be able to do this shit as good as, like, any of these people,” he told me, referring to his former bosses. “All these guys are from India!” Naran was sitting at the bar of Pijja Palace, the restaurant that he opened in 2022 in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, on the ground floor of a Comfort Inn. He is thirty-three, tall and slightly gangly, with an open, goofy face that belies a deadpan sense of humor. The motel, which is owned by his father and his uncle, emigrants from London, is not far from where Naran grew up, in Echo Park. Before he took over the lease, the storefront was occupied by a podiatrist.
Naran, an avid Lakers fan, likes to call Pijja Palace a sports bar—every seat in the dining room has a clear view of at least one big-screen TV. But it has also become one of the city’s most coveted reservations: even three years in, getting a prime-time table requires some foresight. What keeps the place so busy is its namesake. Pijja is Hinglish for “pizza”; the restaurant’s chef de cuisine, Miles Shorey, trained at the Los Angeles outpost of Roberta’s, the generation-defining Brooklyn pizzeria. Pijja Palace’s thin-crust, tavern-style pies come layered with milky marinated paneer; with smoky tandoori onions and spicy bell-pepper jalfrezi; or with tart green-tomato tikka masala and craggy orbs of turkey kofta. A samosa-inspired iteration features korma sauce, tender coins of heirloom potatoes, and a spiral of bright-green mint chutney. The glass shakers on every table are filled with a heady mixture of Parmesan, oregano, dried chile peppers, and fenugreek.
The menu is rounded out by thrilling spins on sports-bar standards. At dinner a few weeks ago, my date gazed over at the table next to ours, where a server had just set down a platter of onion rings. Made with a batter of urad dal, also known as black gram, a legume typically used for dosas, they were so deeply bronzed that they seemed almost to sparkle. My companion sighed and said dreamily, “They’re so beautiful.” The question of whether he had recently partaken of cannabis (he had) was not immaterial: one of Naran’s inspirations is Munchies, the Vice video series. Everything on offer at Pijja Palace could easily be categorized as stoner food, dishes that taste as though the volume has been cranked up: a juicy lamb burger, blanketed in Amul cheese (a highly meltable canned product from India, made from buffalo milk); zesty piri piri fries, served with lime-pickle raita; malai rigatoni, tossed in a luscious tomato masala.
In a previous era, the food at Pijja Palace might have been classified as fusion, which Khushbu Shah, the Los Angeles-based author of a cookbook called “Amrikan: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora,” jokingly refers to as “the other F-word.” The term has fallen out of fashion, in part because it came to connote something gimmicky and forced, the slapping together of two or more cuisines purely for novelty’s sake. In devising the menu at Pijja Palace, Naran said, “I thought about the food that I ate growing up and how my parents would make American things with Indian flavors, like pizza, lasagna, meatballs. Samosas, they’d do the reverse, and fill them with cheese and jalapeños.” Among the restaurants his family frequented was a place called Julio’s, in Artesia, south of L.A., which offered pizza with Indian toppings, and appetizers such as desi poppers and masala wings.
Shah told me that pizza was a big part of her upbringing in Michigan. “But my dad would add a lot of stuff to make it more to his palate,” she said. “Little Caesars for a long time had these Zap Paks, and I swear the Indian population of Lansing just took too many of these seasoning packets. They started hiding it behind the counter. If we’re at home, my dad will always go to the pantry and get out the tub of achar masala and sprinkle it all over his pizza.” The food that Naran serves and the recipes that Shah features in her book—along with masala devilled eggs and makhani mac and cheese, she has a whole chapter dedicated to Indian-inflected pizzas—reflect an inevitable meeting of traditions. “Where cuisines intersect is where cuisine evolves,” Shah added. “That is just history.”
The first restaurant to become known for Indian pizza is Zante, in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. One day, a few months ago, I made a pilgrimage there, arriving midafternoon to meet the longtime owner, Dalvinder Multani. In the large, empty dining room, quiet but for a Punjabi radio station, I sat at a table by the window and sampled two of the restaurant’s most popular pies, served with mint and tamarind chutneys. One slice was vegetarian, thickly layered with masala sauce, paneer, spinach, and eggplant, plus garlic, ginger, green onions, and a sprinkling of fresh cilantro. The other featured a trio of lamb, chicken, and prawns, the last dyed a near-neon pink with paprika.
When I’d finished eating, I sipped from a warm mug of chai. Multani, dressed smartly in black, and, fiddling with a thick gold pinkie ring, joined me at the table. He’d learned to cook from his mother as a child in India, he told me, and in the early eighties, after he moved from Punjab to New York, he worked briefly at a pizzeria called Gloria’s, on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Multani moved to San Francisco, in the mid-eighties, and came across Zante, an Italian restaurant that was for sale. He quit his job and bought the place. He kept the old name and continued to offer pizza, but also started serving Indian food, including chicken tikka masala made according to his mother’s recipe.
One day, someone suggested that Multani mash up the two cuisines, and so he did, topping a pizza with spinach, cauliflower, ginger, and mozzarella, and leaving off the tomato sauce. Eventually, he developed a special dough, too, incorporating cumin, chile flakes, and turmeric, which gives it a distinctly golden hue. “Everybody liked it!” he recalled. “We put it on the menu, and since that I never stopped. Off the hook, it was going. Everybody says, You made history,” he told me, laughing with an almost stunned delight. “I’m the godfather.” Over the years, his customers began to call him Tony.
The copycats, including a former Zante employee, got to work immediately. Multani has never minded the imitators. “Very good response, you know?” he said. “When you open more Indian pizza, it’s more popular.” Until the pandemic, business was great; now he gets by mostly on takeout orders. In the decades since Multani took over Zante, Indian pizza has become a national phenomenon, though until recently it was relegated to the realm of casual, pubby convenience food. Three years ago, Soleil Ho, then the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic, made the case that the form still hadn’t been perfected. “Despite being the offspring of two all-time culinary greats, Indian pizza is more of a Chet Hanks than a Zoë Kravitz,” Ho wrote, remarking that, “in most cases, the crust is both low-quality and unoptimized for the ingredient load.”
“It can feel like crust with leftovers on it,” Shah, the cookbook author, said. She’d found rare exceptions at Pijja Palace, where she hosted a Diwali party, and at a new restaurant in New York’s East Village called the Onion Tree Pizza Co., which uses a bubbly Neapolitan dough for its pies, including a masala margherita and one inspired by saag paneer.
Naran tries not to be too precious, or proprietary, about his craft. He frequented Zante when he lived in San Francisco. “I’m not gonna be over here standing like some stupid-ass hero,” he said. “I copied other people and I have the culinary-school background, so I’m able to chef it up a little bit. I think that that’s why Pijja Palace has been so successful.” He’s planning to switch from tavern-style to a more focaccia-like pan pizza inspired by Pizza Hut. On a recent trip to India, he told me, he’d been awed by the chain-pizza offerings. “They’re stuffing their crust with kebab, bro, they’re playing chess!”
Construction has begun on Naran’s next venture, Schezwan Club, in the storefront directly next door to Pijja Palace, which is also owned by his family. It was last home to the mysteriously named April 90’s Something, which described itself as a Thai-fusion restaurant. The new place, which Naran hopes to open later this year, will showcase his interpretation of Indo-Chinese food, with what he called a “heavy sambal program.” “Fifteen chile sauces, and we’re not even gonna name them,” he told me. “They’re going to be numbered, with no ingredients, and you fuckers have to figure out what’s in them.” The sambals will be used as condiments, but might also be served “like chips and salsa,” with fried wonton wrappers. “That’s my style of restaurant,” Naran said. “Like, not ethnic, but do what the fuck you want!” ♦
