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WHO WAS THE FIRST CHEF TO TOP A PIZZA WITH CHICKEN? No one knows for sure, but the late Ed Ladou gets credit for popularizing the BBQ Chicken Pizza by putting it on the original menu for California Pizza Kitchen in 1985. At that time, chicken on a pizza was considered wildly original, along with other “exotic” toppings that LaDou introduced, such as duck breast and marinated shrimp.

Today, any pizzeria that doesn’t offer poultry on a pie is an outlier. Of course, the wing is still the king of appetizers—Americans wolfed down a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings over Super Bowl weekend this past February, according to the National Chicken Council. But chicken’s flying higher than ever as a pizza topping, too. A September 2023 survey by Casinos.com, which examined Google trends data on the 15 most popular pizza toppings in each state, ranked chicken at No. 5, locked in a dead heat with mushrooms and pineapple.

“California Pizza Kitchen made [gourmet toppings] available to the masses,” LaDou once said. “And the greatest proof of that is BBQ Chicken Pizza. Putting it on a pizza told everyone that this is volkspizza, pizza for the masses.”

Since the mid-1980s, chefs have taken this populist favorite to new heights in the pizza kitchen. Here’s a closer look at how independent pizzerias and chains alike made chicken pizza unforgettable in 2023.

Chicken and Cheatin’ Boyfriends

Like chicken as a pizza topping, we’re also not sure who invented Nashville hot chicken. But Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, founded in the 1930s by Thornton Prince, has the best origin story ever told about a chicken dish. According to family legend, Prince, a notorious philanderer, stepped out on his girlfriend one Saturday night. To punish him, she doused his fried chicken with red pepper the next day; to her dismay, Prince liked it so much, he opened a late-night eatery—initially called BBQ Chicken Shack—that went on to become a Nashville hot spot, so to speak.

Today, hot chicken is as easy to find in Nashville as a country music singer in a cowboy hat. But what’s the secret to making it right? “There’s no secret,” Timothy Davis, author of The Hot Chicken Cookbook, has said, beyond just heaping on “a ton of cayenne.”

So it’s hardly surprising that someone got the idea to put Nashville hot chicken on a pizza—often paired with pickles. Dare we call it a regional pizza style? Probably not, but it has exploded in popularity.

For its annual collaboration with local mainstay Hot Chicken Takeover (HCT), Mikey’s Late Night Slice, which has six locations in Columbus, Ohio, and one in Cincinnati, uses Nashville hot chicken pizza to raise money for the Columbus Diaper Bank every February. In addition to the original pie, topped with HCT’s hot