If you live in Toronto you are no stranger to Frankenstein’s signature mixture of pizza and sushi dishes. It was just a matter of time before this monster would rear its ugly head. This abomination has been around since the early 1990s and is gaining popularity outside Canada. According to the adventuresome who ate the sushi pizza swears by it as the next best thing.
According to the Toronto Star, the sushi pizza was invented by a Japanese-born, French-trained chef Kaoru Ohsada in the early 1990s. At the time, Ohsada was working at Nami, an upscale sushi restaurant in Toronto’s Financial District. The dish was such a hit with patrons that it spread across the city and beyond; as the restaurant’s website proudly proclaims, it was “invented by Nami many years ago and now copied by Japanese restaurants around the globe.” Although I can’t validate its international allure, I’ve seen versions of the sushi pizza pop up as far afield as Los Angeles and Atlanta.
Due to the popularity and wide availability of the dish in Toronto, it has quickly become one of the city’s signature dishes, along with the peameal bacon sandwich.
Fun Fact: Sushi was once highly prized and people were allowed to use it to pay taxes in AD 8th century Japan.