Curry Pizza House

After 11 years of building Curry Pizza House from its Fremont roots to locations in five states, the chain opened its first Orange County locations in Lake Forest (2023) and Tustin (2024), leveraging marketing and great recipes to guarantee success. Curry Pizza House claims it’s offering “the original Indian pizza,” and even if it’s literally decades behind California Pizza Kitchen’s long-gone Tandoori Chicken Pizza, the younger chain is doing a better job now with Indian pizzas than its predecessor.

Rather than loading up pieces of naan with pepperoni, this chain tops conventional pizza dough and cheese with your choice of well-known Indian dishes, typically either focusing on chicken, cheese (paneer), or vegetables. A singular exception is the new Lamb Kabob Pizza, which introduces sausage-like hunks of halal lamb into a curry, onion, and garlic pizza that tastes much better than it looks.

By contrast, chicken is used generously and sometimes beautifully to garnish tikka, curry masala, tandoori, achari, butter, malai, or BBQ pizzas, while veggie potato (aloo) chaat and gobhi, curry veggie and gourmet veggie pizzas offer non-meat alternatives with a variety of sauces. Across three separate visits, we’ve tried six recipes, and still can’t pick a favorite; we’d return for any of them.