Pizza Toast

With toasted slices of thick shokupan—Japanese milk bread—slathered in a sweet, tangy tomato sauce and stacked high with pizza fixings, pizza toast is crunchy, cheesy, savory, and fantastically comforting. It's a dish that ticks all the boxes, and like a meal from a child's fever dream, is unrestrained and over the top in all the right ways. The toppings typically consist of thinly sliced sweet onions, mushrooms, green bell peppers, and the occasional cherry tomato, with tiny bites of cured meat tucked under a blanket of golden-brown mozzarella cheese. Like hambagu and omurice, pizza toast is a yoshoku (Western-Japanese) food that has become deeply embedded within Japanese culture.

This dish is a key menu item at retro Japanese cafés called kissaten, which reportedly date back to the Meiji era (1868-1912) and gained popularity after World War II. Like American diners, kissaten have their Rolodexes of famous dishes, including neon green melon-flavored sodas topped with scoops of vanilla ice cream, spaghetti Napolitan, and, of course, pizza toast. Kissaten are nostalgic places for many Japanese diners, and the dishes served often provide comfort and satisfy a longing for bygone times. 

Located along the bustling Yamanote train line in the heart of Tokyo’s Yurakucho neighborhood, Café Benisica has been serving pizza toast since 1964, making it the first known place in Japan to do so. At the time, pizza was expensive and considered a luxury item, available only to the wealthy. While looking for a more affordable alternative, café owners used shokupan in place of traditional dough. The fluffy bread garnished with cheese and various toppings reminded many of pizza, but it was available at a fraction of the cost. Diners flocked to Café Benisica for their pizza toast, and over time, the dish became the café's best-selling item. It wasn't long before pizza toast spread to cafés and home kitchens throughout Japan.

In an attempt to try the original pizza toast for myself, I recently visited Café Benisica. I arrived to see people chatting over swirled soft-serve ice cream sundaes dripping with chocolate syrup and salarymen sipping on siphon-brewed coffee—but no pizza toast in sight. Although the words “pizza toast” were emblazoned on the menu, a little “sold out” sticker was next to it. I asked the staff when it would be available again, thinking I could return on another day. But they said they hadn’t sold it in months because their cheese vendor’s mozzarella hadn't met their standard of quality, so they were waiting until it improved. In other words, the thought of selling subpar pizza toast—especially at the birthplace of the dish—was unthinkable. Luckily for me, there are lots of other kissaten pizza toasts available in Japan to fill the void while I patiently wait for the original to return.

Though many Japanese pizza toasts are made with a ketchup-based sauce—this is also common for other kissaten dishes, including spaghetti Napolitan—some places prepare marinara sauce with tomatoes instead of ketchup. Ketchup is likely popular because it provides a sweet, rich tomato flavor without the extra liquid typically found in canned and fresh tomatoes, resulting in a concentrated sauce. When paired with dried oregano, basil, and garlic, its flavor is reminiscent of Italian-American pizza sauce. 

Pizza toasts also vary widely from café to café: Some places use ultra-thick shokupan slices to prepare luxuriously chunky slices of pizza toast, while others make knife-and-fork egg salad sandwiches with it, using a single piece of pizza toast as the top, so when you cut in, you get a bite that's half egg salad and half pizza. The most common toppings in Japan are onions, green bell peppers, mushrooms, and smoked meat. But don’t let that stop you from dreaming up your flavor combinations—the only limit is your pizza toast imagination.