iStockphoto
Ham and pineapple on Hawaiian pizza next to a chef
Pineapple is one of the more divisive toppings you can put on a pizza, and there are plenty of haters who would tell you it has no business being on one. That includes a chef from Italy who maintained that stance to the point where he lost his job after refusing to put the fruit on pies that were ordered at a restaurant in Australia.
Italian cuisine has spawned a wide variety of dishes that are consumed around the world, but it’s hard to think of a single one that’s more universally beloved than pizza, the dish with a history that can be traced back more than a thousand years.
The original pizza (a word that appeared for the first time in a manuscript penned in Italy in 997) was a glorified flatbread, but the combination of dough, sauce, and cheese that most people are familiar with was whipped up in Naples toward the end of the 1800s.
Many people opt to supplement that foundation with additional toppings, and there are certain options that have a tendency to rile up purists. Banana and curry is a popular combo in Sweden on pizzas where ham is usually part of the equation, which is also the case with another option that features fruit that initially popped up in Canada.
A Greek immigrant named Sam Panopoulo is credited with creating the first Hawaiian pizza when he made one topped with ham and pineapple at a restaurant in Ontario in 1962, a creation that was responsible for sparking a long-running debate about the merits of that second option.
Pineapple has many detractors, and its critics have found a new hero thanks to a chef who lost his job after drawing a line in the sand.
A chef was fired from a restaurant in Australia for repeatedly refusing to put pineapple on pizza
La Costa is a now-shuttered restaurant that was located in Brisbane, Australia that boasted a sizable menu filled with Italian staples. It listed five different types of pizza, and while none of them contained pineapple, there were apparently some customers who requested it at private events.
According to the BBC, they were repeatedly rebuked by Davide Tamburella, a chef who originally hails from Italy and lost his job at La Costa in May a couple of weeks after he was summoned to a meeting with management over issues with his behavior.
Tamburella is contested his dismissal with Australia’s Fair Work Commission, and during a hearing, we learned one of the aforementioned grievances was his repeated refusal to cater to customers who request pineapple on pizza, with the chef asserting requests “need not be followed when it is offensive to his culture.”
He reportedly refused three different requests for pizza with pineapple during the four years he worked at the restaurant, responding to them by telling his boss to “check how important it is for Italians not to put pineapple on a pizza.”
Other factors may have come into play, as management also had issues with Tamburella’s “foul language, his communication style, and ‘escalation of frustration in the workplace’”.
He ultimately lost the appeal because he filed it too late, but the outlet notes he has landed another job at a restaurant in Brisbane that does not feature any pineapple on the menu.
