A pizzeria in Budapest, Hungary, is offering a special “time-travel” meal by serving a pie inspired by food from ancient Rome. The restaurant, Neverland Pizzeria, created the limited-edition dish without using tomatoes or mozzarella, because those ingredients were not yet known in Europe. Founder Josep Zara said the idea began with a simple question: what would a pizza-like food have tasted like during the Roman Empire?
Zara and his team discovered that Romans did not eat pizza as we know it today, but they did enjoy baked flatbreads topped with herbs, cheeses and sauces. These early snacks were often sold in ancient Roman snack bars called thermopolia. Zara’s imagination grew even stronger after a famous fresco was uncovered in Pompeii in 2023, showing a flatbread with toppings that looked like pomegranate seeds, dates, spices and a pesto-like spread.
To make their Roman-inspired pie, Zara researched Roman cooking and even consulted an ancient cookbook called De re coquinaria, thought to have been written around the 5th century. He also spoke with a historian in Germany to double-check which ingredients were truly used in Roman times. The team then removed anything that originally came from the Americas, since those foods had not yet reached Europe.
Head chef Gergely Bárdossy said the rules made the project difficult and required months of testing. One big challenge was the pizza dough, because modern dough uses a lot of water, and the Romans did not have running water systems like we do. The team solved this by helping the dough rise with fermented spinach juice. They also used ancient grains such as einkorn and spelt, which made the base a bit denser than modern pizza.
The finished pie is topped with strong, unusual flavours linked to wealthy Roman cooking. It includes epityrum (an olive paste), garum (a fermented fish sauce), confit duck leg, toasted pine nuts, ricotta and a grape reduction.
For Zara, the experiment matches the restaurant’s style of mixing tradition with new ideas. Still, he joked there is one modern topping they will never use. No matter what century they are inspired by, Neverland Pizzeria refuses to put pineapple on pizza.
