I ❤️ barbecue chicken pizza. I said what I said.

Sometimes I crave barbecue chicken pizza. I realize this is heresy to many pizza lovers. Like its more famous heretical cousin, the Hawaiian pizza, barbecue chicken pizza is a regional take on pizza that draws the ire of pizza traditionalists across the internet. The most vocal pizza traditionalists come from New York, where pizza innovation is against the law, and pizza innovators are mocked without mercy and told to “go back to California,” as if that’s an insult, which it is not.

Ode to Pizza

I celebrate all pizzas—from delivery to DiGiorno,

deep dish or topped with fish,

Hawaiian to hillbilly,

breakfast pizza or cold pizza for breakfast,

a vegan pie or Taco Bell’s Mexican pizza—oh my!

I love a pizza topped with clams, I once ate a pizza made with yams,

I’ll stick with crust through thick and thin, I’ll order pizza again and again,

Veggie lover, or meat supreme, eating all the pizzas is my dream.

Barbecue chicken pizza backstory

The credit for inventing barbecue chicken pizza belongs to a man hero named Ed LaDou. A 2007 LA Times obituary of LaDou described him as a pizza “pioneer.”¹

In the early 1980s, the story goes, Wolfgang Puck discovered LaDou working at a restaurant called Prego in San Francisco. There, Puck ate a pizza topped with ricotta cheese, red peppers, pate, and mustard. He loved it! So Puck offered LaDou a job as head pizza chef at a restaurant he planned to open in Los Angeles called Spago.

At Spago, LaDou made pizza topped with smoked salmon and pizza topped with duck sausage. He also helped Wolfgang Puck make “California cuisine” famous. “It was like being an artist who’d worked with 10 colors all of his life and then got to use 300,” LaDou once said of his time at Spago.

Eventually, LaDou left Spago for a job as the first executive chef for a casual dining chain called California Pizza Kitchen. That’s where LaDou invented barbecue chicken pizza. A more plebeian pie than the ones LaDou made at Spago, barbecue chicken pizza features chicken (obvi), barbecue sauce (duh), cilantro (yum), red onions, mozzarella (naturally), and gouda (oh soooo gouda).

Barbecue chicken pizza and the story that wasn’t

Recently, Christina and I went to the California Pizza Kitchen for dinner. Our waiter was Frank. He looked like a normal guy, but Frank had one of those voices like the men—it’s always a man, for some reason—who narrate movie trailers. Right away, I knew this barbecue chicken pizza would be a cinematic experience.

In a world, where pizza traditionalist reign (meat and veggie) supreme, one man dared to be different.

When the powers that be said he couldn’t put chicken on a pizza, he called them chicken.

When they said the only acceptable herbs were basil and oregano, he made it rain cilantro.

And when they said barbecue sauce on a pizza was a sin, he led them straight to the gates of hell.

This summer, Ed LaDou, in association with California Pizza Kitchen, presents:

Barbecue Chicken Pizza

Starring Michael and Christina from the hit newsletter Situation Normal, and Frank the Waiter from I’ll Be Your Server This Evening.

After we put in our order and Frank came back with our drinks, I asked him if he did anyone voice over work.

“How’d you guess?” he asked.

“Your voice,” I said. “It’s fantastic.”

“Thanks. I am a voice over actor, but with the strike, I took this job for extra cash.”

“Have you done any movie trailers?” Christina asked.

“No, just commercials,” Frank said. “Low, low prices… act now, while supplies last… that kind of stuff. But I’ve been getting into audiobooks recently. There’s a lot of work there.”

“I love audiobooks,” I said.

“It’s true,” Christina said. “He goes through two a week, sometimes three.”

“I’m just starting out, so I’m not exactly getting the pick of the litter. Honestly, I think a lot of the books I’ve narrated were written by ChatGPT. At first, they almost sound like they make sense, but then you realize that they’re totally useless. Like, I narrated a book on six-figure side hustles, and at first I was like, cool, I do side hustles, I want to make six-figures. But the advice was stuff like, many side hustles can be lucrative, but you have to hustle. No kidding, right? Or, I did self-help book that was only, like, forty pages, and the advice was one level above fortune cookie. One piece of advice was to do something you love. Not exactly new material, you know?”

I was riveted. Listening to people talk about themselves is my kink. Plus, Frank’s story was topical. There were references to Hollywood’s ongoing labor dispute, a behind-the-scenes look at audiobooks, and the bleak prospect of a future overrun with AI-generated content. I saw Frank’s story as Norma Rae meets Terminator. Or maybe Newsies meets Her? We could talk details, I thought, over barbecue chicken pizza. But before I could ask why someone who “wrote” a book with ChatGPT would hire a human instead of using an AI voice, Frank’s manager put the kibosh on a good situation.

“I’m sorry guys,” Frank said in a hushed tone. “My manager is watching me. I’m supposed to keep it brief.”

I looked around. The restaurant wasn’t busy. It looked like Frank had time to chat and serve, but that wasn’t up to me, or Frank. I wasn’t even sure if Frank’s manager was the true shot caller.

Had Frank already said too much? Maybe the people at corporate had grown tired of chatty servers like Frank. Maybe they had already set in motion a program to replace Frank with a robot waiter that took orders, never missed an opportunity to upsell, and didn’t come with a story. Maybe a robot manager, complete with a passive-aggressive spy mode, was in the works too.

I enjoyed our barbecue chicken pizza. But as we ate and tried not to talk to Frank, I got a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. An actor waiting tables to make ends meet is a very LA story. But this story felt like it had taken a dark turn. At his day job, the company seemed to be squeezing the humanity out of Frank. At Frank’s other job—narrating books written by machines—felt just as dehumanizing.

Tech is coming for your pizza

When we got home, I couldn’t stop thinking about Frank. Like many people, I’ve spent too much time drowning in headlines about the threats AI poses to actors and writers. But, I wondered, what about Frank’s day job? Was there a future there, or was this one of those No Country for Old Pizza Humans stories?

Naturally, I fired up the ye olde Google machine.

One of the first things I found was a Wired article about the very first time a computer was used to order a pizza. Turns out, humans have been working to take humans out of the pizza loop since 1974.²

But what started as a neat experiment in a university computer lab mushroomed into something much bigger and way more disruptive. Today, it’s normal to order our pizzas without talking to a human being. But soon enough, our pizzas might not be made by people either. Here’s a YouTube video I found of an autonomous pizza machine.

At first, I thought the autonomous pizza machine looked cool. But then I wondered what would happen if/when the autonomous pizza machine links up with one of those robot delivery vehicles I’ve started seeing around town? The idea of eating pizza that was made and delivered entirely without humans felt like science fiction to me, except it might not be fiction much longer.

None of this sits right with me. I worry about Frank, the cooks in the kitchen, and their micro-manager. I also worry that the money it takes to disrupt pizza is an absurd misallocation of resources that’ll lead to pizza bubble.

But the thing that really worries me is that all this innovation in the pizza space will stifle innovation in the pizza space. Remember, the machine’s purpose is to make a perfect pie—every time. It is a relentless optimizer, but the machine can only optimize what already exists.

Which brings me back to Mr. Barbecue Chicken Pizza, aka Ed LaDou. He didn’t ask an AI to invent a new kind of pizza. He didn’t analyze the data from an autonomous pizza machine and come up with a new pie. He put his human hands in the dough, day after day, for decades. LaDou’s experience, taste, and creativity disrupted pizza. And while it is awesome that we can use machines to get our pizzas faster, better, and without the hassles that humans sometimes create, we ought to remember that androids don’t dream of barbecue chicken pizza.

Or, maybe I’m wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time, and besides, I’m a comedy writer, not a computer scientist. Maybe androids do dream of barbecue chicken marshmallow and shrimp pesto pizza, and maybe that’s the pizza I really crave. But if androids do dream of pizza, I’m just not sure I want to eat the Tyrell Corporation pizza. Or, to paraphrase Roy Batty, I want more human-made pizza, fucker.

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Extra large shout outs!

Extra large pizza pie shout outs to the newest paid subscribers at Situation Normal! Thank you, Deb Smith! Thank you, Gary! And a very special thank you to my friends Josh and Paige!

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Stick around and chat

You know the drill. I’ve got questions, maybe you’ve got answers.

1. Are you a barbecue chicken pizza lover? Hater? Neophyte? Dish!

2. Best pizza chain? Worst pizza chain?

3. New Yorkers say they have the best pizza, which is cool, but they’re kinda agro about it, which makes me think all that pizza-rage is masking some deep dish insecurity. Thoughts?

4. I’ve traveled to more than 30 countries, all of them pizza-loving nations. The most unusual pizza I had was in Korea. It had cheese and marinara sauce, but it was topped with a cornucopia of seafood, kimchi, and thousand island dressing. What’s the most unusual pizza you’ve ever had?

5. Would you eat robot pizza, or are you team Luddite pizza?

6. Before she kicked the Terminator’s ass and gave birth to humanity’s savior, Sarah Connor was a waitress. Was there more to Frank than met the eye? Are restaurant servers the canaries in the coal mine? Are you worried about humanity? Explain.

7. Cold pizza? Give us your hot take!

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1. See “California chef pioneered gourmet pizza revolution” https://archive.ph/20130127145557/http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-ladou4jan04,1,7501171.story#selection-1387.0-1387.50

2. See “Tech Time Warp of the Week: Return to 1974, When a Computer Ordered a Pizza for the First Time” https://www.wired.com/2015/01/tech-time-warp-pizza/