Tujia pizza proves that Chinese invented pizza

Shanghaiist was taking a look at some of 2dog's photos when we noticed a picture of a strange confection that's been nicknamed the "Chinese pizza". Some of you have probably already seen stores and street vendors selling these things for about 3 yuan apiece. Apparently it's caught on big in Beijing and other big cities. The provenance of this "pizza" is supposedly from one of China's ethnic minorities, known as the Tujia (土家族) minority, who mostly hail from Hubei province. According to this article, in May of the last year the first Tujia pizza (土家烧饼/掉渣饼) franchise opened up in Hubei's provincial capital, Wuhan. In the next eight months franchises spread all over China -- costs of franchising vary from 3,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan, though this article claimed that you could open one up in Shanghai for a 30,000 franchising fee. We won't tell you much about the taste -- we haven't had one yet -- but evidently it's popular with people looking for a quick kebab type meal on the go, which means it might also be good for the post-shitfaced munchies, if they're open that late. It costs a mere .62 yuan to make one of these, and yet they are sold to the unsuspecting public at a huge markup -- 3 yuan!

How many can you sell a day? Some folks that set up shop in Beijing said that working from 8 am to 8 pm, they could easily break a a thousand. In the first article (from Shanghai), an interviewee claimed they could sell 2,000 on a good day, and even 700 on a rainy day. According to that article, Wujiang Lu has some of the better pies around town, and that fits in quite nicely with the whole spirit of Wujiang Lu as one of the anti-corporate quasi-hipster foodie meccas of Shanghai. This random person's blog claims that they fell in love with these delicacies around People's Square, so there's another lead for you. That said, we think that if you stumble out of a bar at 3 in the morning with an empty wallet and some loose change jangling in your pockets, you will manage to find one of these places, if it's the last thing you do (that night).

Photo from 2Dogs' Flickr Site.