[Argyris]

I'm not a huge fan of shiitakes. This happened suddenly, since I recall liking them quite a bit when I was younger. I made the mistake of putting them on a pizza once, apparently after my unseen, unknown shift in taste, and I spent most of my meal rooting through the toppings to get them out.
 
That reminds me. Does anybody have a relative date for when the explosion of unusual pizza toppings started? I suspect this date might correlate with the time when pizza unfamiliarity really started to wane. After all, you'd have to know what pizza is if you suddenly want one covered in coconut shavings and jelly beans. I want to say the beginning of the widespread proliferation of creative pizzas had to be a 90s thing, since I can vaguely remember food documentaries that contrasted modern pizza with what the people living in the 80s understood it to be. They're still living with cassette tapes and are stuck before the era of headphones actually becoming good (outliers like the Sextett notwithstanding), so I won't begrudge them having boring pizza in their time.

 

[TwinQY]

While more recent stories typically cover strange pizza toppings from Korea, I remember seeing stuff in the news about strange Japanese pizzas sometime around the early 2000s.
 
Whenever it was, it would have been some time after the rise in popularity of cream puffs over in Japan, which felt very similar. We had a resurgence in cream puff popularity a few years back, with a couple of Beard Papa's opening up, and they would play commercials from the 90s showing people lining up for these things. My mother noted that she had been one of those very people. I got the feeling that it would have played out like that episode of the Boondocks.