Pizza from California’s own kitchen

Hilde G. Lee Daily Progress correspondent
Published: October 7, 2008

While on a short day trip recently Allan and I stopped for a late lunch at California Pizza Kitchen. (The closest one to Charlottesville is in Richmond at 11800 W. Broad in the Short Pump Center.)

We were not very hungry and kept looking at the huge selections of pizzas on the menu.

“I don’t really feel like a pizza,” I said.

The waitress overheard me and suggested we try the California Club Pizza.

“It’s light and refreshing,” she said.

It was a good suggestion and we enjoyed the light meal.

The California Club Pizza at the California Pizza Kitchen consists of applewood-smoked bacon, grilled chicken and mozzarella cheese on a hearth-baked pizza crust. This combination is topped with sliced tomatoes, chilled chopped lettuce tossed with mayonnaise and fresh sliced avocado. It was eye appealing and probably one of the most innovative pizzas we have ever eaten.

33 choices

California Pizza Kitchen features 33 pizzas on their menu. One that really caught my taste buds is the first one the menu — the original BBQ Chicken. This pizza was introduced in California Pizza Kitchen’s first restaurant in Beverly Hills in 1985. It consists of BBQ chicken with barbecue sauce, smoked gouda and mozzarella cheeses, sliced red onions and cilantro.

The Greek pizza on the menu has Mediterranean spiced grilled chicken and mozzarella cheese topped with a chilled Greek salad, olives and Feta cheese. Some of the other pizzas are Shrimp Scampi, Vegetarian with Japanese Eggplant, Hawaiian, Goat Cheese with Roasted Peppers plus many more innovations.

Rosenfield and Flax

In 1985 Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax, two California attorneys, pooled $200,000 in bank loans and savings along with $350,000 from friends to open the first California Pizza Kitchen on Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills. The restaurant was a success and by 1992 there were 26 California Pizza Kitchens (CPK) in Southern California.

Rosenfield and Flax often have said that they regard a pizza as a canvas and that the art is in their innovative toppings. Their goal was to translate America’s favorite tastes into a pizza topping.

In 1992 the Pepsi Co. paid almost $100 million

for 67 percent of CPK. This was followed by rapid expansion with the opening of 43 more restaurants. Pepsi, with other financial difficulties, started cutting corners and replacing fresh ingredients with frozen ones.

In 1997 a private equity firm bought out Pepsi’s share of CPK and pushed rapid expansion with 68 new restaurants by 2004. Although Rosenfield and Flax remained on the board of the corporation, they initially exercised no day-to-day control. However, with perseverance Rosenfield and Flax resumed control of CPK.

Today there are more than 230 locations of California Pizza Kitchens with 14,000 employees in 31 states and six foreign countries. There are 20 CPK kiosks in airports and shopping malls to serve people on the go.

The company also has licensed their name to Kraft Foods to distribute a line of premium frozen pizzas. These are available in many of our supermarkets. With revenue of more than $500 million, CPK continues to be an innovator in the pizza field.

Although pizza is a fairly recent culinary addition to the American diet, the origin of pizza can be traced back to Roman times. The Romans often enhanced rounds of dough by adding olive oil, herbs and honey and then baking these rounds on hot stones.

Pizza as we know it today, however, was the creation of the citizens of Naples, Italy. They gave a new dimension to the traditional pizza by adding tomatoes to the topping.

At first pizza was sold in market stalls and eaten on the streets. Soon pizzerias appeared in Naples, and the popularity of pizza even spread to the nobility. When Italy’s Queen Margherita arrived in Naples in 1889 with King Umberto I, she immediately wanted to sample this famous Neapolitan dish.

Since a woman of her rank could hardly go to a pizzeria, a famous pizza maker and his wife visited the queen. They prepared three kinds of pizza for her — one topped with pork fat, cheese and garlic; another with tomatoes, garlic and oil; and the third with tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. The latter contained the colors of the Italian flag and became the Queen’s favorite. Ever since, it has been called Pizza Margherita.

Pizza on a commercial scale first became popular in the Italian neighborhoods of our Eastern cities. Italian immigrants opened small storefront restaurants and offered the traditional thin crust pizzas of their homeland. It was not long before fast food restaurants, owned by large corporations, started serving pizza

Deep-dish pizzas were created in Chicago in 1947 by two restaurateurs, Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo in the pizzeria called Uno. The duo wanted something different than the thin-crusted pizzas common in Italy and decided to invent their own style — something hearty, yet with gourmet ingredients. By the late 1970s Sewell, the surviving partner, was operating two pizzerias where 2,000 deep-dish pizzas were baked daily.

Now the trend is back to thin and ultra-thin pizza crusts to blend with lighter eating lifestyles. The crusts may be thin, but the toppings can easily push up the calories. But every once in a while, we enjoy a splurge.