A restaurant in Budapest says it has recreated the original Roman-era pizza, minus the tomato sauce and mozzarella

In the capital of Hungary, a city best known for its goulash, a pizzeria invites customers to travel back two millennia, to an era before tomatoes, mozzarella or even the word “pizza” were known in Europe, the Associated Press reports.

At Pizzeria Neverland in central Budapest founder Josep Zara and his team created a limited edition pizza using only ingredients that would have been available in ancient Rome, long before what we call pizza today existed.

“Curiosity made us wonder what pizza might have looked like a long time ago. We went back to the time of the Roman Empire and wondered if pizza was even eaten at that time,” Zara told the AP.

The answer, strictly speaking, is no. Tomatoes arrived in Europe only centuries later, from the Americas, and mozzarella was still unknown. Some historical accounts claim that the discovery of mozzarella led directly to the invention of pizza in Naples in the 1700s.

The Romans, however, ate oven-baked loaves topped with herbs, cheeses and sauces – the direct ancestors of modern pizza – which were often sold in ancient Roman snack bars called “thermopolia”.

In 2023, archaeologists discovered a fresco in Pompeii depicting a focaccia-like stick covered with what appear to be pomegranate seeds, dates, spices, and a pesto-like paste. The image went around the world and ignited Zara's imagination.

The pizzeria from Budapest did months of experiments with ingredients available to Romanians

“That made me very curious about what this food could have tasted like,” says Zara. “That's where we got the idea to create a pizza that people could have eaten in the Roman Empire, using only ingredients that were widely used at the time,” he explains.

Zara began researching Roman culinary history, consulting a historian in Germany as well as the ancient cookbook De re coquinaria, believed to have been written around the 5th century. Following the documentation, he compiled a list of historically attested ingredients, which he presented to the head chef of the pizzeria.

“We sat down to imagine what we could make using these ingredients and not using things like tomatoes and mozzarella,” Zara recounts, noting that “we had to exclude all the ingredients that come from America.”

Head chef Gergely Bárdossy said these constraints forced the team to experiment for months and discard some initial ideas.

“The fact that, in Roman times, there was no infrastructure like a water supply system put us in a difficult position, because more than 80% of pizza dough is water. We had to find a solution that would have worked before the advent of running water,” emphasizes Bárdossy.

The end result is a “niche” pizza today

The solution was leavening the dough with fermented spinach juice. Ancient grains such as spelt and spelt, widely cultivated in Roman times, formed the basis of the dough, which came out slightly denser than that of most modern pizzas.

The final pizza is topped with ingredients associated with aristocratic Roman cuisine, including epityrum (an olive paste), garum (a fermented fish sauce ubiquitous in Roman gastronomy), candied duck leg, toasted pine buds, ricotta and a grape reduction.

“There is a small niche that thinks it's delicious and is curious to try it, while most people prefer more conventional pizza, so it's not for everyday consumption,” admits the head chef of Neverland Pizzeria. “It's something special,” he points out

For owner Josep Zara, the project reflects the wider philosophy of his pizzeria. “We've always liked coming up with new and exciting things, but tradition is also very important to us, and we think these two things together suit us,” he says.

Zara adds, however, that there is a modern line that the restaurant will not cross.

“We experiment a lot with our pizzas. But of course, we definitely don't use pineapple,” he says.