Melon cream soda pizza? Shakey’s Japan goes back in time, outside the box with kissaten pizzas

Brand-new pizza ideas spring from retro inspirations.

Like a lot of restaurants that originated overseas, Shakey’s Pizza Japan’s menu is a mix of the chain’s original home-country standards and new dishes developed to appeal to Japanese people’s palates. In keeping with that, Shakey’s has announced that it’s adding new items that take their inspiration from the fare at kissaten.

The word “kissaten” translates as “cafe,” but nowadays it has a bit of on old-school vibe, bringing to mind the casual neighborhood coffeehouses of Japan during the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Something just about every kissaten from this era served was Napolitan, a ketchup-sauce spaghetti dish that was one of the first Western-style pasta dishes to become popular in Japan, and which Shakey’s is now offering.

Another popular kissaten meal? Omuraisu, a.k.a. omrice, a.k.a. rice omelets, fluffy wrapped eggs with chicken rice inside. Instead of omuraisu itself, though, Shakey’s now has an Omuraisu Pizza, which uses an entire rice omelet, now disc-shaped, as the pizza’s topping.

Kissaten were as popular for their desserts as their main meals, though, and especially their ice cream floats. The quintessential kissaten dessert drink is melon soda with vanilla cream, and Shakey’s, shockingly, has turned that concept into a pizza too!

The Cream Soda-style Pizza is topped with melon cream crisscrossed with vanilla cream, and instead of a single cherry on top, there’s one at the end of each slice. To replicate the fizzy fun of soda carbonation, the Cream Soda-style Pizza also has “popping” sugar candies, similar to the ones that give Baskin-Robbins’ Japan’s Pikachu ice cream its tantalizing tingle.

On the other hand, if you want a pizza-fied version of a classic chocolate banana parfait, Shakey’s has figured out how to make that food-based fever dream come true too with the Apollo Chocolate Banana Sunday-style Pizza.

Apollo here refers not to the Roman sun god, but to Apollo Chocolate. Created by Japanese confectionary company Meiji, Apollo Chocolate went on sale in August of 1969, just one month after NASA’s Apollo 11 mission landed astronauts on the moon for the first time, and the conical chocolates’ similarity in shape to the Apollo spacecraft is what gave them their name. The Apollo Chocolate Banana Sunday-style Pizza also has chocolate sauce, corn flakes (a common crunchy element in Japanese parfaits), sliced banana, and vanilla cream.

The lineup is available now as part of Shakey’s Japan’s in-restaurant buffet service, and will be sticking around until March 31.

Related: Shakey’s Japan location list
Source, images: Press release
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