Gino Sorbillo, a scion of Naples, Italy pizza nobility, has earned the right to be a culinary snob. But to heck with that. Snobbery, he knows, turns potential new customers away. 

As the owner of famous Italian eateries like Pizzeria Gino Sorbillo, Livieto Madre al Mare and Pizzeria Presepe Napoletano Ostaria, Sorbillo keeps bucking his country’s hallowed traditions with pies topped with forbidden fruits like pineapple and bananas.

Now he’s up to more shenanigans with a new pizza featuring watermelon slices. Once again, some purists are appalled, and the international news media has been quick to zero in on the controversy. The net effect: headline-grabbing publicity for Sorbillo and his restaurants every few months.

As Vice put it in a 2015 profile on the celebrated chef, “In Naples, everyone knows Gino Sorbillo. And if they don’t love him, they love to hate him.”

Sorbillo has already elicited outrage with a pineapple-topped pizza introduced in January of this year. He followed up with bananas just two months later. “But watermelon, on a base of white provola cheese, seems even more of a provocation, perhaps because of its use of red and white, two colors in the Italian flag,” The UK’s Sunday Times noted.

Sorbillo’s response? “It’s tasty, fresh and healthy.” What more could you ask for?

Neverthless, one customer said he’d skip the new special, as it looked “like a nightmare.” Another commented, “I think we are in a world where we need to stop…and not make pizza with things like Nutella.”

Meanwhile, Massimo Di Porzio, vice-president of the AVPN, flatly declared, “Fruit needs to be eliminated from pizzas,” adding, “If [Sorbillo] manages to sell watermelon pizza, I’ll take my hat off to him. But it is a different product. It is not to be confused with a pizza.”

Fortunately, Sorbillo has the pizza cred to get away with just about anything, and experimenting with toppings like watermelon, pineapple and bananas is his way of breaking away from what he perceives as a stifling culinary constraint. “I must give all I can to make the pizza even better, even more famous and even more global,” he told the Sunday Times.

Moreover, he added, “I was tired of seeing the pizzaiolo as a messy, often dirty person who didn’t speak and only threw his pizza in the air. I wanted the pizzaiolo to be a professional chef.”