Curry Up Pizza

A willingness to borrow popular recipes from other cultures enabled California pizza innovators from Berkeley’s Chez Panisse, Beverly Hills’ Spago, and California Pizza Kitchen to move past American debates over “what is authentic pizza?” and “does pineapple belong on pizza?” – the results were “California fusion pizza” recipes with internationally inspired toppings. But after CPK stopped experimenting and growing, multiple Asian restaurants stepped up to riff on its formula, including Indian-American Curry Pizza House franchises, Long Beach/LA-based Thai Curry Pizza, groundbreaking Vietnamese/Japanese/Italian chain Pizza 4P’s, and its closest Orange County equivalent, Japanese/Italian hotspot Ini Ristorante. In 2025, Orange County gained another option.

Operating as Curry Up Pizza in Yorba Linda (and as of 2026, Curry On Pie in Artesia), these sister restaurants offer nearly identical menus of Indian/American pizzas, chicken wings, appetizers, and salads. Curry Up Pizza’s comparatively under-designed menu offers a few extra Indian appetizers and desserts, while Curry On Pie’s nicer-looking menu omits Pani Puri, masala mushrooms, and cheese pakoda fritter appetizers, and has a smaller dessert menu with entirely American sweets. 

At both places, most of the menu choices are pizzas, divided into mostly American-style “classics,” Indian pizzas, Indian vegetarian pizzas, separate gluten free and halal pies with options drawn from the classic and Indian choices, and a “craft your own” section with nearly 30 toppings to choose from. Five pizza sizes (10-18″) range in price from $20 to $42 as all-inclusive, flat-rate pricing, letting you choose from various crust thicknesses, shapes, and recipes (standard/gluten free/vegan). Better yet, $32 large and $42 extra large pizzas offer a “half-n-half” option, enabling sampling of two different recipes on a single crust for no additional charge.

Several basic salads ($3.50 to $10), roughly a dozen mostly fried appetizers ($5 to $21) including samosas, mozzarella sticks, and fries, and a wide collection of chicken wings ($10 to $33) round out the menu, the latter offered in Indian achari, dry curry, and tandoori versions as well as lemon pepper, BBQ, Buffalo hot, and other versions. We ordered a dozen wings ($18), half achari and half curry, and were surprised when they arrived dry-spiced rather than wet, and far more similar to one another than different in flavor. They were plump, half drums and half flats, and only lightly spiced – not particularly worth ordering again.

We also wanted to try some exclusives at Curry Up Pizza’s location, starting with the Pani Puri ($9): Six crunchy puris are served with shot glasses of a tangy cilantro-mint-chili water, which gets poured into each orb-shaped cracker and eaten quickly as a liquid-solid mix. Curry Up Pizza’s version was a little saltier than many other versions we’ve enjoyed elsewhere – like pickle juice, with no sweetness – but otherwise a fun item for a group to share. A newer item, Matcha Mango Lassi, adds matcha powder to a traditional mango lassi for a really nice combination of fruity and herbal flavors; the version we tested could have used more matcha flavor, but was a very cool idea.