Paper short abstract:

Pizza was introduced in Swedish restaurants in the late 1960's as a novelty item on menus creating many standout memories. Based on interviews on restaurant experiences, the purpose of this paper is to discuss how pizza has gone from exiting and modern to ordinary and forgettable.

Paper long abstract:

In my research, based on interviews about food and eating in restaurants, it is noticeable how the experience of certain dishes and tastes change over time. Theoretically, I want to analyze this change in terms of routinization and socialization, but also in terms of taste distinctions. Some dishes become all too familiar and every day to be spontaneously mentioned in my ethnographical material about food memories. When the pizza became well established at the Swedish restaurant scene in the 1970’s it also became too common to be worth talking about. When pizza became routine, the taste faded. Interview answers about restaurant experiences today do not contain pizza dishes, but other more exciting dishes. By no means does this make the pizza less important or less interesting from a cultural analytical perspective. On the contrary, the routinization can highlight the ordinary doings during a meal that is beyond the more sensational. Swedish pizza has been standardized; there exist a strong consensus about what different pizzas should contain and how they should taste. This opens up for the invention and experience of other and new forms of pizzas made by innovative chefs. These ‘new pizzas’ surprise and amaze and cause pizza meals to again be interesting for informants to recount in interviews. My paper aims at discussing the balance between the everyday and extraordinary in the establishment of pizza as the most common Swedish restaurant dish.