Beijing’s Reigning Pizza Cup Champ Dishes on More Than Slices
Ahead of the 2018 Beijing Pizza Festival,
on Oct 13-14, 11am-8pm, we take a look at the giants, the classics and
the movers and shakers of the pizza scene right here in the capital.
To say that Pie Squared is a product born out of love is closer to the truth than you might expect. Or rather, it’s a product born out of a high school crush. Asher Gillespie (pictured above), founder and owner of Shunyi’s deep dish pizza mecca, cheerfully recalls how his interest in cooking was merely a byproduct of his pursuit of a girl in his sophomore year, an adolescent drive that meant that when his conquest began working in the kitchen of a local Italian restaurant in his hometown of Michigan, he did too. Before he knew it, Gillespie had found a new infatuation with food, and during the remainder of high school worked his way up the ranks from humble dishwater to deft sauté cook.
I got my unofficial start when the 70 other people I came here with were homesick for food, so I would cook at house parties because people wanted something other than McDonald's or KFC.
Despite honing his craft early on, cooking professionally was put on the back burner to make way for Gillespie’s developing curiosity in China, which saw him land in Beijing in 2000 as a study abroad student in college. However, the change of scenery, and a collective call for the epicurean pleasures of home, only fueled his need to cook. “I got my unofficial start when the 70 other people I came here with were homesick for food, so I would cook at house parties because people wanted something other than McDonald’s or KFC,” Gillespie says. Soon fellow students were telling him that he should open a restaurant, an endeavor that nearly materialized in 2006, though it stalled for various reasons.
To sink your teeth into a Pie Squared's Detroit-style pizza is to go on a journey through chewy, gooey, and slightly crisp dough
It wasn’t until 2012, when Gillespie was quizzed once again by a loyal devotee of his taste-of-home fare, that he finally decided what he would do. Gillespie had already witnessed a change in local eating habits, recollecting how the diners at Kro’s Nest, one of the city’s first major challengers to Pizza Hut’s hegemony in China, had “originally started out at 95 percent expat and 5 percent local because at first Chinese weren’t eating dairy or drinking beer, but then in 2008 it flipped.” Seeing his opportunity, and now feeling confident enough that he had the skills and relationships needed to open a place of his own, Gillespie said to himself, “Wait, if they’re now eating pizza, I’ve got something from my hometown, and so I just kind of merged the two.”
The result was the opening of Pie Squared in 2013. Although housed in a modest strip mall-like development in the Beijing boonies of Shunyi, the two-story restaurant has slowly built a loyal following; in no small part due to the fact that Gillespie seems to feed half of the city’s expat sports teams and international school community, often catering for post-match parties and events. That’s not, however, to belittle Pie Squared’s unassailable popularity elsewhere, a fact that culminated in Gillespie and his team winning the Beijinger’s 2017 Pizza Cup. Tucking into a slice of the restaurant’s signature square pizza, it’s easy to see why so many turned out to have their voices heard.
Detroit-style pizza as a variation arose during Motown’s rule as the automobile manufacturing capital of the world in the 1940s. Specifically, it was the result of one enterprising chef who decided to use industrial trays, originally made to hold small parts in factories, to add a twist on classic Sicilian-style pizza. The result was a hit, the pans having the unintended benefit of working just as well with cooking grease as they had for the more viscous, engine kind, frying the dough around the base and making for a sumptuous and buttery crust whose initial crunch gives way to caramelized cheese and gooey insides. To say the combination is addictive would be an understatement, something for which Gillespie has proof: “My favorite thing about [the Pizza Festival] is that we always get people who say ‘we heard your pizza’s good but I don’t like deep dish, but I’m going to try one slice.’ So they get one and as they take a bite as they walk away they’ll do a 180 and they say, ‘OK, I’ll take two more slices.’”
My favorite thing about [the Pizza Festival] is that we always get people who say 'we heard your pizza's good but I don't like deep dish, but I'm going to try one slice.' So they get one and as they take a bite as they walk away they'll do a 180 and they say, 'OK, I'll take two more slices.'
And what of Pie Squared’s chances of winning again this year? “We’ll see what happens,” Gillespie says, adding, “I loved winning [last year] – it made a lot of old hours and past overtime finally totally feel worth it.” No matter what happens, the love that has gone into these hearty squares is undeniable, and all the result of a bygone high school crush.
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Tickets are now on sale for the 2018 Beijing Pizza Festival and early bird ticket buyers will receive a complimentary vintage bandana, while group ticket buyers (three tickets and up) will receive a free picnic blanket. Tickets are RMB 20 for early birds or RMB 30 on the door and can be purchased by scanning/extracting the QR below:
Photos: Uni You
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