When I traveled to the Norwegian capital of Oslo last year, I had no idea I’d find a distant relative—of Pepe’s Pizzeria.
I was strolling down a main drag called Stortingsgata when I stumbled onto it: Peppes Pizza. At first simply amused by the similar naming, I took a photo of the exterior.
That would’ve been it, but then I looked at the time. It was 11:30 a.m. A little early for lunch, I thought, but I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and something told me I needed to check this place out.
So I went inside and got a table for one. Opening the menu, I found the story of Peppes Pizza explained on the first page—and felt a little like Michael Corleone in The Godfather after he’s been “hit by the thunderbolt” of seeing Appollonia for the first time. In this case, I was shocked to learn that the Pepe’s-Peppes coincidence was no coincidence at all.
In the late 1960s, a married couple named Louis and Anne Jordan decided they were going to move from Connecticut to Norway, Anne’s ancestral homeland. Before making plans though, Louis, an insurance agent, expressed concern about how he would earn a living in their new country. Anne responded, “Honey, don’t you think Norwegians would love pizza?” Louis thought they would. So he got a job at Pepe’s in New Haven to learn everything he could about the pizza business.
When they were ready, the Jordans, with their three kids in tow and $10,000 to their names, made the move. A pizza oven soon followed. And in May 1970 in Oslo, the Jordans opened the first Peppes Pizza, an homage to the New Haven original.
It’s hard to imagine, but when they opened that first shop, pizza was new in Norway. Naturally, it was a huge hit. The Jordans opened two more Peppes outposts the following year, and today it’s an international chain with more than 70 restaurants in Norway alone—an empire inspired by our very own Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana, which was founded in 1925 and didn’t expand to a second location until 2006.
(A side note: Frozen pizza is now considered Norway’s unofficial favorite food. By some estimates, the country’s 5.5 million inhabitants annually consume upwards of 50 million frozen pies. The leading brand is Grandiosa, which launched in 1980—and is now confidently described as the country’s “national dish.”)
Had I known that morning in Oslo that Peppes is a popular chain, I don’t think I would have entered. I can be a terrible pizza snob. From memory, I can only say that the “American”-style pepperoni pizza I ordered was… not bad, while bearing little resemblance to the Pepe’s we know. But as for the luck of stumbling onto a local history lesson from 3,600 miles away, the New Haven pizza gods were clearly with me.
Written and photographed by Daniel Fleschner. Image features the Peppes Pizza location on Oslo’s Stortingsgata.
