8 Old-School Pizza Toppings You Rarely See Anymore

It's a common enough saying that there's no such thing as bad pizza. The spectrum for pizza ranges from "fine" to "fantastic." It's a wonderful food. A big part of where a slice ends up on that continuum is the pizza toppings. Trends in pizza toppings come and go. People in the 2010s loved their bacon. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles either love or hate anchovies, depending on which TMNT content you're engaging with. It makes sense, then, that the pizzas we're eating in the 2020s look different from those that our grandparents ate. Hey, stuffed crust pizza was introduced at Pizza Hut after the turtles made their film debut in the '90s.

The times, as the poet said, are a-changing. Generations will debate the perfect sauce-to-topping ratio until the great oven in the sky burns out. As culinary conventions evolve, so, too, do pizza toppings. You're just living out your life, and then one day, you wake up wondering if kids these days have ever had pizza tonno. If they haven't, then they should. Here are some pizza toppings we don't see around much anymore.

Have you ever wondered how you could fit more veggies into your pizza consumption? Have you considered zucchini? Putting the summer vegetable on a pizza pie isn't a bad idea, but it's definitely eyebrow-raising. Maybe your local Domino's isn't doing it, but YouTuber Grandma Feral claimed to have been making Grandma-style pizza with zucchini since the 1970s. "I forgot how good it was," Grandma Feral says at the end of that video. Well, so did the American public. The choice of a thicker, Grandma pie-style crust is a good call, too.

Zucchini is a difficult ingredient to use on pizza. Sure, the squash can be sliced similarly to pepperoni, but it doesn't behave the same. There's a lot of moisture hiding in zucchini, and you'll have to take a few steps to ensure the final product isn't a soggy mess. You want to get rid of excess moisture before the vegetable even touches the pie. You can do this by chopping the zucchini into matchsticks, then tossing it with salt and granulated garlic. So, sure — maybe it's an odd pizza topping. Nail the zucchini preparation, though, and you've got a really tasty veggie pie.

Yes, as in tuna out of a can. Hey, don't skip ahead — there's a lot you should know about tinned fish. Pizza topping is one use. This ingredient is old-school in the sense that Europeans have been putting it on pizza since the '80s. In Italy, it's known as pizza tonno, but in the U.S.? It's greeted with cautious interest. It's certainly not something you'd find on any pizza chain's menu in 2025.

Still, have you thought about how a delicious tuna melt also includes bread, cheese, and tomato? Maybe it's time for tuna on pizza to make its way stateside. In the r/Pizza subreddit, one home cook included black olives and basil but cautioned that the tuna should be drained thoroughly before adding it to the pizza. Leaving even a little bit of water or oil from the tuna can risk turning your crust soggy. Maybe that's why tuna is often seen on top of pizza with Neapolitan-style crusts. That bit of extra thickness in the crust helps the whole pie stand up to any moisture from the fish.

If you grew up in the '90s, chances are you heard a TV character complain about anchovies on pizza. Or maybe that character loved anchovies, but all of their friends clowned them for it. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles change their opinion about anchovies, depending on if it's the animated version or the movie version of the characters. Regardless, the ingredient is contentious enough to have been a TV trope, and one downstream effect of that phenomenon seems to be restaurants eliminating the option. One Facebook commenter who claimed to own a pizzeria said people don't ask for anchovies often. Similarly, a Redditor in the r/pizzahut subreddit noted that their local Pizza Hut discontinued the topping years ago.

Of course, anchovies can still lift a pizza without being a topping. Adding the tiny fish when cooking tomato sauce is like dropping an umami bomb on your pizza base. Whether you use oil-packed anchovies or anchovy paste is up to you — either way, you won't believe the difference it makes. That's right, anchovy paste is the flavor-enhancing ingredient you're sleeping on if you want to take that sauce to the next level. If those Saturday morning cartoons had only been a little more open-minded, maybe society as a whole would've already known the deliciousness of anchovy paste.

Not as popular a choice as pepperoni, sausage, or U.S.-style bacon. Often associated with pineapple, itself a controversial topping. Perhaps we should look at Canadian bacon's time as a menu standby as a miraculous outlier, its fall from grace inevitable. No matter what you think of pineapple on pizza, it's a menu mainstay in 2025. The rise of Hawaiian pizza in recent years might make you think Canadian bacon is still a common option. Hawaiian pizza, though, uses ham. One of the facts you need to know about Canadian bacon is that it is not the same as ham. The former comes from the loin, or the back of the pig; the latter comes from the leg. If you were running a pizza place, would you keep both on the menu?

Pizza Hut changed its offering from Canadian bacon to ham years ago, and Domino's currently only offers ham. California Pizza Kitchen doesn't have Canadian bacon on the menu. Papa John's is the lone holdout, still offering Canadian bacon over ham. Those two meats are similar enough that it'd be surprising to see Canadian bacon make a comeback, since ham is much easier to spread over the surface area of the pie.

New Yorkers might be scratching their heads at this one. When trying to determine if meatball pizza was, in fact, a disappearing item, we found a Reddit post in the r/Pizza subreddit that claimed diners in the Big Apple still enjoyed the topping. So, yes, meatballs are delicious on pizza, but they seem to be leaving menus. We even found a Facebook post for a novel-reading group where someone thought a meatball pizza was an unrealistic detail.

Domino's offers sausage, beef, and Philly steak — but not meatballs. Pizza Hut will let you choose between Italian or chicken sausage, but won't serve you meatballs on a pizza. Papa John's has beef and Philly steak, but no meatballs. California Pizza Kitchen doesn't have meatballs listed anywhere on the menu. If you've never tried a meatball pizza, seek one out. A meatball has a different flavor than plain beef or standard Italian sausage, and it's great on pizza. It's like spaghetti and noodles and pizza night all rolled into one. What's not to love?

Invented by an Iowa pizza chain in the 1970s, taco pizza is not topped with, say, al pastor and cilantro. No, this pie has American taco ingredients like lettuce, tomato, onions, ground beef, and crumpled hard taco shells on top. That pizza chain, Happy Joe's, has since expanded to seven states, plus Egypt. Happy Joe's still has taco pizza on its menu, but you'd be hard-pressed to find the unique delicacy at major chains.

An item like this has been available at Pizza Hut in the past, but the question of whether Pizza Hut's Fiesta Taco Pizza was discontinued is not as definitive as you might like. A Facebook page dedicated to getting the Hut to bring back the Fiesta was active in the mid-2010s. One poster in the r/pizzahut subreddit claimed to have gotten this as an off-menu item at their local Pizza Hut. However, other commenters indicated that taco pizza is not available in many locations. YouTuber Jason Mazurek claimed to be able to get this item via online ordering. Still, despite passionate and nostalgic fans, the taco pizza's popularity has waned.

Putting a cold Caesar salad on top of a pizza when it's fresh out of the oven might seem like an odd move. Caesar salad as a side for a pizza dinner, sure, but as a topping? Well, we noticed a Redditor fondly in r/olivegarden reminiscing about having the pie at Olive Garden in the past. In r/Cooking, another commenter claimed that Caesar salad was a standby topping at a pizzeria near where they grew up in New Jersey. Looking further, it seems like plenty of home cooks with blogs have enjoyed this style of pie. So, why isn't it on restaurant menus? 

It's hard to know when Caesar salad pizza was first introduced. Caesar salad itself was invented in Mexico in 1924, meaning Caesar salad pizza is at least about 100 years old. Home cook Everyday Annie got the idea from the 2004 book "The Pastry Queen." Bottom line, the pie is not currently on Olive Garden's menu in 2025. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Caesar salad pizza on Pizza Hut or Domino's menus, either. It doesn't seem like the kind of pie that would hold up well when ordered for delivery, but who knows? Maybe the big chains should try it.

In the 19th century, pizza was not well-received by food writers. Samuel Morse, inventor of that code you've heard of, said that pizza looked like it had come out of a sewer. He also described the pie as a cake, and said it came with little fish and black pepper. Now, to our 21st-century minds, that sounds like a pretty decent pizza. To Morse, it was bilge waste. 

Black pepper would not have been a new spice to the European palate at this point, but it wouldn't have been quite as common in its ground form as it is today. Once a luxury reserved for the richest of the rich, by the 19th century, black pepper was in most middle-class kitchens. Some texts in the 1800s describe black pepper as having medicinal uses, especially as a digestive aid. As a pizza topping, though, black pepper seems to have been common. Looked down upon, but common.

Here in the 21st century, black pepper is almost certainly mixed with red sauce, but not thought of as a topping. Some applications give black pepper a forward-facing role, though. California Pizza Kitchen offers a cacio e pepe pizza, a menu favorite that prominently features freshly cracked black pepper. It's the kind of black pepper that can get stuck between your teeth. All due respect to the inventor of the telegraph, but we think it sounds delicious.