Pizza Delivery in Victoria: Five Pizzas Canada Made Its Own

The Hawaiian pizza is Canadian. Sam Panopoulos put pineapple and ham on a pie in 1962, at the Satellite, the restaurant he ran with his brothers in Chatham, Ontario (CBC).

He told an interviewer that pizza back then was "dough, sauce, cheese, and mushroom, bacon, or pepperoni. That was it." Sixty-four years later, people are still arguing about what he did next.

The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star.

— Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)

Pineapple divides humanity more than most stars do. Q Pizza keeps the Aloha to Panopoulos's three toppings. Il Greco makes its Hawaiian (Non Traditional) with double pineapple and double salami, which settles nothing.

The donair is Halifax's answer to the gyro. Peter Gamoulakos swapped the lamb for beef and created a sweet sauce in the 1970s, and in 2015 Halifax council named the donair the city's official food (CBC). It was a short hop from the pita to the pizza, sweet sauce included.

Royality Pizza and Chicken makes a Halifax Donair Pizza with donair sauce, donair meat, feta, olives, tomatoes and, pleasingly, pineapple, so two Canadian inventions share one crust. Palagio Pizza does a donair pizza with the sweet sauce and green peppers.

Butter chicken pizza is what happens when a curry house and a pizzeria share a street. At some Victoria pizzerias they share a kitchen: Q Pizza's menu runs from pepperoni to paneer. The sauce goes on where the tomato would, with chicken, onion and peppers on top.

Q Pizza builds its butter chicken pizza with ginger, garlic, mushrooms and cilantro, and makes a vegetarian twin with paneer, the Paneer Makhni Pizza. Royality lists a halal butter chicken pizza alongside the regular one.

Some nights the argument is Indian or pizza, and the answer is both. Q Pizza's samosa pizza is topped with chopped samosas, onion and green pepper, then drizzled with samosa sauces.

It's heavier than it sounds, and it sounds heavy. Order it for a table of four rather than a quiet night in.

Potato, cheddar, bacon and green onion is a plate of perogies without the dough, and on a pizza the tomato sauce gives way to Alfredo. Palagio's perogie-style pizza sticks to exactly that. Il Greco's pierogi pizza adds feta and crumbled sausage.

It is starch on starch, and it knows it. Save it for the first cold, wet night of November, when a salad would be an insult.

Most pizza nights end up as two pizzas, because nobody agrees. Q Pizza's two large pizzas come with three toppings each and two cans of pop. Royality's half-and-half pizza puts two classic pizzas on one crust, which is how a family of four avoids a vote.

For a group with mixed diets, check the tags on each listing: several of these menus mark vegetarian pizzas, and Royality marks its halal ones by name. One pizza per diet is cheaper than one argument per pizza.