Beijing has American, Italian and Japanese pizza sitting side by side. Has any of it become Chinese?
Not on the evidence found, and Beijing is thinner than Bangkok in a way worth being precise about. The four records are brand transplants standing next to one another: Bottega's Neapolitan room at Nali Patio; Pie Squared making Detroit-style under named founder Asher Gillespie; Joe's Pizza on Jinhui Lu, the Greenwich Village institution's Beijing outpost, run by Adrian Wall, a New Yorker who started at the original; and The Pizza Show, filed as other because it claims no named tradition at all. Four imported lineages, very little ingredient localisation between them. Beijing is also the city where this guide's reach is most obviously limited, and that belongs in the record rather than in a footnote. Three sources that would likely have covered several more leads were unreachable — a tourism board that timed out repeatedly, a university page the proxy refused, and an encyclopedia entry behind a CAPTCHA. Three further candidates were found and not built because no named chef or oven could be confirmed for them, including Bottega's own Roman-style sister brand with two confirmed addresses. So Beijing publishes as four records and an acknowledgement: what is here is real, and it is less than what is there. A city this size is not finished at four, and the Index should not treat the number as settled.
Bottega is run by brothers Paolo and Daniele Salvo, third-generation members of Naples' Salvo pizza-making family. The dough is contemporary Neapolitan, hand-kneaded rather than machine-worked, and baked in a large wood-burning oven visible from the open kitchen.
Verified 2026-09-18
Pie Squared is Beijing's Detroit-style specialist, founded in 2013 by Michigan native Asher Gillespie, who built the concept by merging his hometown's pan-pizza tradition with a Beijing market he had watched shift toward eating pizza and dairy. It applies the technique-level details that define the style: cheese laid before sauce so the crust does not go soggy, and the pan's edge caramelising the cheese into a crunchy border.
Verified 2026-09-18
The Pizza Show is a DIY-build pizzeria in Parkview Green mall, founded by two Beijing restaurant veterans — Nemanja of You-Li and Fabio, formerly head chef at the tapas restaurant Sorí — whose dough is made in-house, fermented under controlled temperature and humidity, hand-stretched, and baked in a wood oven at roughly 450°C for under two minutes. It is a useful counterweight to Beijing's Italian-lineage pizzerias: a locally founded, customisable format, three base sauces and up to 35 toppings, built by chefs with no claimed Italian training.
Verified 2026-09-18
Joe's Pizza is the Beijing outpost of the Greenwich Village New York slice institution, opened in September 2022 under China partner Adrian Wall, a New York native who worked at the original location for several years before bringing the brand to Beijing. It sells by the slice: cheese, pepperoni and Hawaiian.
Verified 2026-09-18
